How to Operationalize ABM Best Practices with a More Collaborative Approach

Account Based Marketing (ABM) has been a big buzzword with marketing and sales leaders for the last ten years, but ABM still fails most of the time.

Why? And what can marketing, sales, and revenue operations leaders do about it?

There are a lot of articles and resources out there already on ABM strategy, so that’s not what this article is going to cover. Instead, I want to provide some practical advice and ideas about how to reframe your ABM strategy and model in a way that I’ve seen produce some great results.

Scoping and Simplifying ABM

For some companies, ABM means targeted selling, and for others, it means targeted and coordinated activities between sales and marketing that promote awareness and opportunities. Regardless of what it means for you when launching an ABM initiative, you must align on a definition before you can get to strategy and approach. Make sure everyone is on the same page with what you’re trying to achieve.

For example, you can’t just do marketing activities for every account because then it’s not ABM. You must consider a tiered approach and what you will do for each account from both a marketing and sales perspective.

At the same time, many companies simplify ABM too much to make it easier to get the process up and running. But in many cases, they simplify too much.

A great example is when creating a marketing-qualified account (MQA) model. I’ve seen companies define an MQA as an account with three or more marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), then they and set up a process where sales reps or SDRs can only work on MQAs. This is flawed for a few reasons:

1. This model ignores your customer journey completely because buyers still come into your funnel at different times

2. This is just forcing an MQL model into an MQA model, not moving to an MQA model, making it bound to fail

3. You’re not aligning sales and marketing with a common language.

In this case, the ABM initiative fails because it doesn’t get operationalized correctly. In this case, simple doesn’t mean easier (or better, or more successful). Make sure to build in some time to unpack and examine the customer journey, current systems and limitations, and the desired end process – before jumping to simplification. There’s a lot to consider before simplification can be successful.

Rethink Your Scoring Model to Operationalize ABM Best Practices

Any time a company wants to move to an ABM model, it’s important to rethink how you will operationalize it. One of the best suggestions I have for this is to rethink your scoring model. Many of the most successful ABM best practices and deployments do this because it reworks how marketing and sales work together.

I recommend that companies align activities from sales and marketing based on minutes or time – so how much time the prospect gives you for various marketing or sales activities. Then you can do scoring based on when those minutes hit a specific threshold within marketing or sales.

Here’s an example of what this might look like, where each pink dot is a prospect account:

The goal is to move accounts to the top right.

Visualizing accounts this way fosters alignment and collaboration between marketing and sales teams as you discover that there are accounts each team may be spending a lot of time with while not necessarily moving them forward through the customer journey.

This visualization also helps teams align on next steps. It makes it easier to discuss things like:

• Is there a specific way for marketing or sales to engage that helps move accounts through the journey?

• Are there some accounts that either marketing or sales are spending a lot of time with when they should move on to other opportunities?

This sparks collaboration and open discussion that unlock the real potential of ABM best practices. With marketing and sales teams more aligned, companies can then start to move to an ABM model based on this alignment, like the one below.

With this model, marketing and sales teams work together to move accounts through the stages of the buyer journey, with the stages defined in minutes.

Tips for Getting Started

So what can you do now to get started? What does the day-to-day look like in practice? How will the marketing and sales teams function collaboratively when using a model like this?

Here are some tips to implement ABM best practices:

1. Appoint a person to own the ABM motion between marketing and sales. It could be someone from the marketing team or the sales team, but give this person the decision-making power to override both sides if needed.

2. Hold weekly and daily meetings with combined marketing and sales teams. These meetings must be focused on coordination and collaboration. Sales teams should present their activities and accounts, so if they are not progressing, marketing can see what they can do to keep things moving through the stages. Marketing teams should present on companies and individuals who are responding to marketing activities, so sales can follow up with contacts that are showing high intent.

3. Understand you cannot boil the ocean. You must define tiers for how you want to do account-based activities for sales and marketing. For example, you can’t go after 5000 accounts with just one person in a heavily customized model. You must agree on the structure, purpose, and process between marketing and sales.

4. Be willing to try new things. What things didn’t work for some accounts and tiers can and will work for others. Just because it didn’t work before doesn’t mean it won’t work in a different instance.

5. Remember that adding more tools do NOT always make things better. Simplify and pick one or two tools to use for marketing and sales, and master those before you add something else. Do not buy a full suite of tools before you know what the ABM process is or what you need to make it successful.

6. You HAVE to break away from a marketing qualified lead (MQL) volume quota. You can’t be successful with ABM if you’re just worried about MQLs and leads. ABM is not an isolated marketing journey or sales journey – Account-Based Marketing is a company journey that you must do together.
   

The Bottom Line

Account-Based Marketing done right can drive tremendous value to your company, but a lot of the companies currently implement ABM are improperly scoped or too simplified, and almost none of them focus on the essential alignment between marketing and sales.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and companies often burn out the marketing or sales team when they don’t start with collaboration as a core part of ABM strategy.

Done right, ABM best practices help sales and marketing teams to speak the same language. Teams work together toward a common goal, aligning their activities to the customer journey and stage in the pipeline.