What is ABM?

Account Based Marketing is a high-impact demand-generation program aimed at our largest and most desirable prospects, as defined by Sales.

What’s the difference between ABM and traditional demand gen?

Because ABM prospects are larger, it takes longer to move them into our funnel. The sales cycle is longer, often 12 to 18 months. The buying committee is larger, with multiple roles for users, managers, corporate, and influencers. Prospecting to a large account requires a perfect collaboration between sales and marketing to make the program run smoothly. ABM is a long-term commitment—it takes time to identify the buying committee, determine their pain points, develop content addressing these pain points, track progress for each target, and plan the ten or more touches it will take to convert each member of the committee to consider your product or service. Keep in mind that some of the touches will be from marketing, others from sales.

Important: Don’t stop your regular efforts. These will be your bread-and-butter leads to keep your salespeople busy while you’re working on ABM to attract the whales.

How do I justify the cost of an ABM program?

Run the numbers for a 2-year pilot, and annually after that. In two years, your ABM investment should return at least a 200 percent revenue ROI, based on converting a small number of these large accounts, or it’s not worth undertaking. Keep in mind that with ABM you are developing a scalable program that (if it works for you) will be a permanent part of your marketing. Build your case around that.

Note: Because the sales cycle is so long, you should not expect a return on investment the first year.

How do I train the sales force to follow up on the ABM leads?

Make sure the sales team you assign to ABM are qualified and eager to pursue the leads from the program. Build compensation incentives to motivate them to follow up and report any contact with any prospect from your target companies. If you have more than one team following up, make them competitive, with a bonus to the winner(s).

Assign the corporate leads to salespeople who are comfortable around the C-suite and understand their needs.

What kind of management reports should I undertake?

Monthly reports (one paragraph should be enough) to management should sum up the month’s accomplishments and progress to date. Make sure to mention the names of the prospects you are targeting. Management will recognize the names, and when you finally land one of these whales, management will associate the win with the program.

What goes into the funding request?

• Program scope (2-year pilot)
• Target audience examples
• 2-year revenue goal
• 2-year budget requirement
• 2-year ROI
• Milestones and KPIs
• Personnel requirements
• Tech stack requirements
• Governance and oversight

What can I do to get ready to begin an ABM program?

Talk to an agency (ahem!) like Verdi, who can help with your planning and has experienced both successful programs and—more importantly—can tell you what can go wrong. And start thinking about the accounts you want in your pilot. It’s never too early to plan your list acquisition strategy.

Now that you’ve read the article, download a one-page Verdi timeline of an ABM pilot, showing milestones. And next: Talk to Verdi about how to plan a successful ABM program for your organization.  Simply reply to this email, or book time with Mary Bonaccio, Verdi’s Director of Client Services.

Fine-tuning your Account Based Marketing (ABM) Program.

You’ve launched your Account Based Marketing program focused on attracting your sales team’s most desirable accounts. You are well past the launch, and you are seeing some results from your analytics platform with respect to your tactics: email, engagement with your website, banner ads, direct mail, and telemarketing. You are aware that these large accounts will take 12 to 18 months to close, and while winning just one of these “whales” will more than pay for the program, senior sales, marketing, and operational management, they need to be told frequently what you are doing, how it is working, how you plan to improve its efficiency, and why they should keep on funding it this year, and beyond.

How to make it all better.

Account Based Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.  As you begin the race, you’ll be using all the tools of marketing, multimedia content creation, marketing automation, and analytics. Your sales team is starting to follow up on the first leads, and with their help you are beginning to flesh out the buying influences in the accounts they have identified.

Universal truth about ABM: Everything (no matter how good) can be improved.

Because you are in this to attract your company’s dream accounts with a focused effort backed by substantial resources, you are always learning what is working, and what is not. Expect to be surprised. Large accounts, with their multiple buying influences and various viewpoints that each influencer/user/manager brings to the purchase decision, may respond differently to your marketing—differently to your emails, your webinars, your telemarketing, your direct mail, your banner ads. And timing plays a big part in their decision to consider a new vendor. This is where your analytics will really pay off. What appears to be working? What seems to be in need of bolstering up? If you’re less than six months into your program, it’s early days, and you should not make any rash decisions—but you should be constructing tests that will give you a clue as to where fine-tuning will be useful.

Universal ABM truth #2: You are in for some surprises! Read More →