“How do I operationalize ABM?” This is a common question that comes up – this step goes beyond the ‘selling in the concept of ABM’ approach.
Operationalizing an account based strategy can vary significantly from company to company based on their go to market strategy, their culture, their sales capabilities,their size, and their technology stack to support their strategy.
That said, we’ve seen 8 broad themes when operationaling an ABM (or ABX) strategy which I’ll describe below in a checklist framework, many of which are related to data.
- First, define your reporting “north star”.
- Begin with the end in mind.
- Define – What does success look like at varying stages, what do you want the measurable outcome to look like? This is where example dashboards can be helpful. Know where you are headed to rather than guess.
- Define your business process. What is your go to market motion?
- Agree on an ideal customer profile that is data driven. This agreement should be across all functions – Sales, Marketing, and Executive Leadership.
- Choose the right go to market motion to support your strategy – this is tricky, especially if there is an executive or board mandate of ‘move up market.’
- Meet with your SDRs and selling teams to understand their workflow. You want to be mindful of introducing new technology or new business processes that are going to require them to operate differently. The operating philosophy is to be accretive and add value, not distract.
- Ensure your system strategy supports your go-to-market strategy. Take tech stack inventory.
- Identify any gaps that might need to be filled but do so thoughtfully – can you use what you already have more efficiently?
- Identify and integrate existing intent data sources like 6sense, third-party intent, and first-party engagement data to help your sellers prioritize and segment target accounts. Use this data for:
- Tiering accounts into groups for focused plays/campaigns depending on stage
- Alerting sales reps on target accounts showing buying signals
- Personalizing outreach cadences based on intent topics or topics of interest to the prospective account
Keep in mind that each of the bullets above require enablement and cross functional conversation (that we could write another blog on).
- Ensure your system strategy supports your go-to-market strategy – Ideally implement a unified data model to track accounts through the entire customer lifecycle across marketing, sales, and customer success. This involves:
- Creating custom objects/fields in your CRM to capture account engagement data beyond just leads
- Defining clear “account stages” that align marketing and sales processes
- Tracking metrics like account activation, engagement velocity, conversion rates etc.
- Establish clear lead types and qualification processes beyond just MQLs . Examples:
- 6sense Qualified Account (6QA) or MQAs
- Partner-sourced leads
- Threshold/engaged leads based on specific criteria
- Once system configuration is completed, implement change management to align marketing and sales teams on the new ABM processes and metrics.
- This step requires training and Sales Enablement – if you aren’t prepared to do this in house, find a good agency externally that can help you go faster. (Full disclosure, this is an area we consult in).
- Develop integrated account-based plays combining marketing campaigns and sales outreach tailored to each account tier and buyer persona.
- These plays should be a function of your account stages, persona, and intent
- These integrated plays will require conversations with Sales and Marketing to make sure each understands their role in the outreach strategy. Customer success may need to be involved.
- Provide sales with detailed playbooks and next-best-action guidance based on account engagement data.
This is a comprehensive topic but hopefully should be directionally correct when establishing your Account Based strategy. What are you finding successful when you’ve implemented your ABM strategy?