Devon McDonald, a Partner at OpenView Venture Capital spoke with me on a recent podcast on Account Based Marketing best practices.  Our conversation covered areas of how to get even more out of your ABM people, process, & technology investments based on our experiences to date.

Here is a helpful checklist summarizing that discussion and assumes the organization has already defined and agreed upon what the term ‘account based marketing’ means to them.   

 

• ABM Roadmap to align Sales, Marketing & Executives

 

• • Strategy:  who is the ideal customer profile (ICP), what does he/she need?
  • Data:  how are leads connected to accounts?
  • Programs:  how customized is the content for the ICP?
  • Technology: what is the right mix of tools to enable your strategy across sales and marketing teams.

 

 

 

• Developing an ABM strategy for long term success
  • Organizational ABM Framework:  are the key stakeholders defined and a roadmap for launching and optimizing ABM over the next 18 months?
  • Defined KPIs:  what are the key metrics essential to track during the early, mid, and late phases of your ABM program?
  • Pilot program:  what is your gameplan around creating a pilot program?

 

• Baseline performance to set organizational expectations

 

• • Systems Health:  are existing systems supporting the right strategy and maximum capacity?   
  • Data Status:  are your account and contact universe complete?
  • Conversion and/or Business Process:  how will you treat accounts across sales and marketing?

 

• Measure for impact & improvement

 

• • Data – what are the metrics around your target account profiles?
  • Data – what is the current state of account and contact data completeness?
  • What account waterfall metrics are applicable to your historical lead based model?

 

• Lead Generation/Prospecting with ABM Accounts

 

• • Frequency:  how have you optimized for frequency?
  • Message:  what value add are you creating in each interaction?
  • Account intelligence:  how are you capturing intelligence around your target accounts?

 

• People

 

• • Internal – are the right team skills in place?
    • Marketing
    • Sales
    • xDR
  • External agencies – agile?  Understand ABM & Systems?

Be sure to check out the full podcast here!