How to achieve the alignment you need to expand your ABM program
Despite its name, ABM is more than a marketing activity. Without cross-functional support, getting buy-in to scale will be extremely difficult.
You need to have champions at the executive level. Think C-suite, Directors, and Senior Managers. They'll offer support and guidance at a top-level while backing you in conversations about the future.
The importance of marketing and sales alignment cannot be exaggerated enough. If your sales development reps and account executives don't play ball with your ABM, it's not going anywhere. This relationship is the foundation of ABM. Customer Success (CS) will also likely play a role.
Marketing is the glue that holds an ABM program together. HubSpot recommends an ABM team of one marketer and a maximum of ten salespeople. If that marketer doesn't see the value in ABM, the whole team falls apart.
Depending on the size of your business, there could be varying levels of operations needed to support your activities. Marketing/sales operations, customer support, etc. all play a vital role, especially when you scale to multiple accounts.
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When involving multiple functions in your ABM strategy, especially when those functions are new to ABM, clarity in who does what helps instill an ABM mindset throughout the customer lifecycle. Here's an example checklist:
Marketing
Sales
CS
Support
Product
Friction between sales and marketing exists in a traditional funnel because of the abrupt handover of leads between the two teams. In theory, ABM solves this by bringing in sales earlier while extending marketing involvement. But to put that into practice, there are three things you can try:
With typical demand generation, marketing teams are often given specific KPIs around lead generation rather than revenue. ABM should address this by aligning marketing's KPIs with sales' direct revenue-focused goals - you'll learn more about these in phase 4. This ensures the entire ABM team is single-minded in their objectives.
ABM typically extends marketing's role in the sales cycle. This might cause friction with your sales team who are used to working on their own. By structuring compensation similarly between sales and marketing and tying it to their shared KPIs, you increase sales' trust as marketing then have the same reward at stake.
Traditionally, marketing loses sight of a lead once they enter conversations with sales, losing out on valuable insights. In ABM, you should encourage marketing to attend sales meetings and sit in on sales calls to get both functions on the same page with the health of their accounts. Involving sales in early strategy sessions also helps improve sales' visibility into the marketing activities that have influenced an account.
If you want your ABM to expand, you need to be boosting its profile internally. This means regular, open channels of communication that keep everyone in the loop. How you do that exactly will depend on your business, but here's a good timeline for communication to get you started:
This only needs to happen between your core ABM team of sales and marketing. You should check in on progress and share any early-stage updates.
Bring in the wider team and any available executive sponsors. Discuss progress in target accounts, bring up any issues that have arisen, and look at early data.
This is where you involve the entire stakeholder group to look over successes and overall account strategies. Use this time to broach further investment and ABM expansion.
