**Your checklist to succeed with ABM**
Executive sponsorship
ABM goes beyond Sales and Marketing. It is a strategic business pivot that impacts (and involves) your entire organization. As such, it is vital to secure senior-level sponsorship for this program in order for it to be successful.
This sponsorship will ensure budgets are secured (and expanded post-pilot to full rollout), C-suite engagement for all relevant departments to align, and greater visibility of the success for more business units to benefit from this initiative.
Sales and Marketing alignment
Aligned Sales and Marketing teams achieve 24% faster growth rates and 27% faster profit growth.* Two very compelling reasons to align. ABM is a unifier and unites Sales and Marketing to focus on Accounts and revenue.
Involve Sales from the outset and work together to agree on your ICP, build your Target Account List, weave their industry, customer, and competitor knowledge into your insights and value proposition. Share messaging and content ideas early with them and craft an ABM journey that seamlessly integrates Sales and Marketing initiatives, tactics, and cadences to deliver the best possible experience to your target accounts. *Sirius Decisions
Mathew Kent | Senior Marketing Manager | Pegasystems discussing Sales and Marketing alignment
Target Account List
Without solid foundations, your ABM strategy will falter and ultimately not deliver the desired result. Developing your Ideal Customer Profile and target account list are absolutely crucial to achieving ABM success.
Insights and data
Insights and data form the core of Account-based Marketing. Without them, you will have significant knowledge gaps of both the market and the accounts you are targeting.
Objectives
Fail to plan, plan to fail. The same is true of objectives. It is important that you define very clear and timed objectives for each ABM program (One-to-many, One-to-few, etc.) and then align these with your commercial and strategic goals, focusing on what key stakeholders are interested in. We’d also recommend building a shared dashboard with Sales so they have complete visibility.
Pilot
This is particularly the relevant for One-to-few and One-to-one programs. We recommend starting with one cluster (in the case of One-to-few) or one to three accounts in the case of One-to-one. ABM is a new strategy for many organizations and as such will require many new skills, working practices, reporting metrics, etc.
