PHASE 1:
People

How to achieve the alignment you need to expand your ABM program

Who needs to be won over?

Despite its name, ABM is more than a marketing activity. Without cross-functional support, getting buy-in to scale will be extremely difficult.

Senior Executives

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.

Sales

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

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.

Operations

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.

42%

of companies that miss ABM objectives don't have dedicated leadership supporting them

Source

Orchestration is not a buzz word – it’s table stakes. ABM requires that each function focus on how their activities support and interact with each other in service of the shared outcome.

Patrice Greene, President, Inverta

Roles & responsibilities checklist

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
Document the company wide ABM strategy	Jointly develop sales and marketing playbooks by account. Execute sales plays.	Collect customer testimonials and case studies	Watch support tickets to monitor issues from key customers	Create personalized UX experiences for target accounts
Schedule and lead cross-team meetings on a regular basis	Execute social selling and relationship building with ABM accounts	Encourage customer referrals, broker conversations between accounts	Provide high touch service to certain identified customers	Product roadmap briefings with best/potential customers
Create customer-focused content aligned with strategy	Sales prospecting within ABM accounts	Listen for buy signals, provide feedback to account management teams	Provide feedback on common issues to help the product team resolve before they become an issue for key accounts	Invite best and potential customers to join customer advisory board/voice of the customer meetings
Identify, measure, and communicate key metrics	Share relevant content with target contacts	Help close ICP deals - discuss how they've helped similar accounts

3 ways to align sales and marketing

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:

1. KPIs

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.

2. Compensation

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.

3. Joint Activities

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.

Organizational misalignment is solved by aligning goals and incentives

Dave Rigotti, Head of Enterprise Demand Generation & ABM, Marketo

Your communication timeline

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:

Weekly

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.

Monthly

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.

Quarterly

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.

Like any new business process, it can take time to build adoption. As you get wins, share them in weekly updates and quarterly presentations. It is crucial to stay consistent and drive the momentum of the ABM mindset until it snowballs to full adoption.

Jeff Coveney, Executive Vice President, Digital Pi