ABM in the 'Dotlight'

The Hardest Part of ABM Part 4: Execution at scale

The Hardest Part of ABM

Part 4: Execution at scale

So we asked Hillary Lupo Carpio, Director of ABM at Snowflake the question: “What is the hardest part of ABM?”

Her answer? Execution.

You can have the best strategy in the world but without an effective execution plan, it could all be for nothing.

This is why it’s so important when planning your approach to Account-based Marketing, you have to think about the level of resource that is needed to execute effectively.

ABM is resource intensive, that’s just a fact.

Whether you are doing One-to-many, One-to-few or One-to-one ABM, you have to build a dedicated team that is able to focus their time and energy on the success of the program and executing the plan.

With One-to-one ABM, it involves a significant amount of resources to get the planning right. You need to spend time researching, and getting to know your single target account deeply.

You have to build a clear understanding of what drives the account and what matters to the decision-making unit so you can really tailor and personalize your messaging.

Then you can go and execute your plan with your team.

However, as you move closer to One-to-many ABM you’re now talking about 100s to 1,000s of accounts. It’s not just about being able to understand the accounts and personalize the message, it’s about how you actually reach them.

You need a contact strategy that is scalable so you are reaching the right people in your target account, at the right time and in a personalized way.

When you’re just one person leading the charge there’s only so much time in a day and only so much information you can process.

This is why it’s such a challenge to execute at scale and why it’s so important you build your team.

In the words of Hillary Lupo Carpio, Director of ABM at Snowflake:

[Execution is the hardest part, right?] We can think of strategies. We can go to a conference and say, hey, this ABM platform does everything. But when you get back, you've got to have the people on the ground all executing against the same vision.

So whilst execution and being able to do it at scale may be one of the hardest parts of an ABM program, without it, do you really have an ABM program?

Here are some of our thoughts on how you can execute at scale.

Let's review your ABM strategy together

Think of the customer journey first.

Think about all the different touch-points they will go through as they explore the problem, learn more about you, and your potential fit to meet their needs.

Make sure the message is consistent throughout the journey. Don’t look at it from your own perspective but always put yourselves in their shoes and understand how it might appear to them.

Check out our piece on Empathy Mapping on how to do this.

Do research to understand what stage each customer (current or future) is at and what they are looking to learn more about.

Explore how they interact with your digital assets - your website, landing pages, resources, paid and organic social, etc.

Test the journeys. Segment and customize your customer groups as much as possible to personalize this message consistently. And then make sure everyone that is controlling each part of the journey are aligned and on board with the message.

We might be talking about a customer here but we know that B2B isn’t one single person, it’s many people, it’s all the decision makers, it’s all the influencers, it’s the blockers, and the much wider user group.

Think of each one of the journeys that each person in this group might take and make sure it tells them the story of your brand and your service/product from the angle that they’re interested in. This will help you understand where you can group them too.

When it comes to executing an at-scale ABM strategy it’s important that everyone involved is aligned and knows exactly what is happening, to who, when, and importantly, why.

Sirius Decisions found that companies that align Sales and Marketing teams achieve 24% faster growth rates and 27% faster profit growth over a year period.

Without this alignment, you could be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising and media to generate first-party engagement with your target accounts.

But if Sales don’t have a clear understanding of their rules of engagement then that could mean accounts don’t get a consistent message, a lack of personalization in their engagement or even worse, simply get left untouched.

Alignment was a topic which Danny Nail, Director, Global ABM COE Leader at Salesforce, touched on in a recent Let’s Talk ABM episode:

One of the things that's hugely important when setting up an ABM program is making sure that the Executives from Marketing and Sales, at a minimum, understand what you're going to focus on, what your planned outcomes are going to be and what the KPIs are going to be.

This is extremely important when delivering at scale as naturally there’s just more data and information to coordinate and more people involved. So it’s really key to put the work in up-front.

ABM execution is labor-intensive and you’ll need to find a way to automate as many things as possible. Technology is the key to scale any ABM strategy.

It can either make or break the whole scaling attempt. It might force you to revisit your program tactics. But the most important thing is that it should make your life easier, not harder. Remember, this is a solution to your problem.

Very often you might be in a hurry to scale your winning strategy but it’s really important to not cut corners here.

Start with defining your requirements, understanding your challenges, and reviewing all possible solutions in the market and in-house.

So what can you do to work on alignment:

1. Involve Sales right from the beginning of the program

Invite them to help with the contact engagement plan and make sure they’re bought in. Remember, it’s collaboration - not telling them what to do.

Remember: ‘ABM helps reduce up to 50% of sales time that can so easily be wasted on unproductive prospecting, which historically has caused sales to ignore 50% of marketing leads.’ Similar web

2. Define the rules of engagement.

Make sure that everyone is clear and aligned on when to trigger an outbound sales motion to an account.

The level of engagement has to be pitched to the level of awareness. The last thing you want is to engage and pitch to accounts based on low intent (e.g. downloads, etc.) That’s a sure-fire way to turn off the account.

3. Create an ABM strategy playbook

Detail how you’re going to approach the accounts, the content assets, the tactics, and the execution plan.

This should be a centralized document that is simple and easy to follow so anyone no matter how involved they’ve been in the planning can quickly understand the program.

Want to learn more great tips about Sales & Marketing alignment? Our colleague and Director of Sales Fes Askari, wrote a great piece about the importance of Sales and Marketing alignment when it comes to setting your ABM program up for success.

Discuss with non-Marketing colleagues.

There are small details that might make a whole lot of difference that the people in the weeds will know about - which as a leader you might not consider.

Finally, make sure you think ahead.

This is a solution to your problem now that should enable you to scale even further, if needed in the future. You might need to choose a lower grade package for now but it’s important you have the opportunity to upgrade to a better suiting one for your future needs.

That said, it’s a fine balance between what you are gaining now vs. what you can in the future. Don’t subscribe to a service that doesn’t fulfil your current needs.

Over recent years there’s been an explosion of technology vendors who all stake a claim to be the golden bullet for ABM. But the truth is, there is no real golden bullet.

Every vendor has its own merits and some are able to do certain things better than others, But the reality is that before you even get to the technology you need to have your strategy in place - our mantra is ‘strategy first, technology second.’

So whether you have an existing tech stack or are looking to evaluate a new tool, make sure you think about your strategy and how your tech stack will deliver value to the program.

Here are some tips on how to do that:

1. Make sure you analyze your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and prioritize your accounts into tiers.

When setting up your campaigns you want to have different groups of accounts that represent different levels of awareness. This helps to make sure your message and tactics match their status.

2. You need to define your objectives and what you’re looking to achieve within an account at each stage. This is so you can use the right tech at the right time in the account’s journey.

For example, if you’re trying to build early-stage awareness it makes a lot of sense to run an at-scale light-touch personalized video campaign to pique your target audience’s interest.

While a personalized high-cost direct mail campaign would not be suitable at this juncture. This is a better play to accounts where you have built up your reputation and relationships with and are closer to a commercial conversation.

3. Another key point is all about data and inputs. Technology is only as good as what you put in and as the old saying goes ‘crap in, crap out’.

So make sure when you are building your campaign you get into the details and spend time planning out all the data inputs required and building a process to make sure this is as clean as possible.

This is particularly important when thinking about dynamic ads - The last thing you want is for your personalization to be undermined by a broken first name or company field.

4. Make sure you have your dashboards set up so you can quickly interpret the performance of your campaign. The quicker you can analyze your data and understand how an account is responding to your messaging the quicker you can make a decision on what to do next.

5. Lastly, when thinking about your MarTech strategy it’s important to think not only about how all the tools fit together but also, from a resource perspective, who will operate them.

Becks Powell, Marketing Programs Manager, UK & Nordics at Showpad touched on this point in a discussion as part of our Let’s talk ABM series.

I would say the one thing is, you have to have the people and the resource who know how to use MarTech properly. And that could be hiring an ABM or a MarTech person internally, or actually using an agency who really understands how the tools work and how to orchestrate everything. I think that's absolutely fundamental.

Becks Powell | Marketing Programs Manager, UK & Nordics | Showpad

You can’t succeed without testing and failing.

Akriti Gupta, Head of ABM at Google Cloud, echoes this sentiment when she shared that one of the tenets at Google is 'fail early, fail fast, learn fast'.

There are so many variables in any campaign and so many variables you can test.

But very often when testing, we get excited and want to test everything at once. ‘Let’s change colors’, ‘let’s change copy’, ‘let’s personalize this’, ‘let’s change subject line’, ‘let’s change audience targeting’, - you get the point!

But you have to be careful that you are able to correlate the test to the impact (positive or negative).

It all starts with your strategy. You can layer the tests as part of your campaign launch.

Think:

In terms of the overall testing time frame, there are usually two different directions depending on a company’s appetite for risk, budget and importance of time:

1. Fail fast.
Learn quickly.

You invest a high amount in the test, e.g., Instead of spending $1,000 throughout 4 weeks, you spend it in a few days and you quickly learn which variation works and then move on to the next.

2. Fail slow.
Learn slowly.

You try with smaller expenditure per day and learn by the end of the testing period what worked and what didn’t. You might test fewer variations with this approach but you still get there.

Whatever you’re testing, make sure you gather as much data as possible.

According to a LinkedIn ABM guide survey, 43% of ABMers struggle with unreliable data when trying to identify the right personas to target within their prime accounts.

Let’s start with why you need data to execute at scale - to optimize your delivery and efficiency.

As you’re scaling, spending time on things that matter and automating or eliminating things that don’t is key.

At the same time, we all know that Marketing and ABM are a game of constant fine-tuning.

So monitoring performance will be vital for optimization.

But be mindful that traditional attribution models won’t work here. There isn’t one recipe for success, you’ll need to find the one for your business.

41% of ABMers struggle to prove impact on sales pipeline according to the same LinkedIn ABM guide survey. But fear not, if you follow our steps, you’ll be well positioned to break the sales vs marketing generated/influenced silos in your business and be able to smash your common objectives.

What kind of data do you need?

1 Benchmark data

The starting point is accounts targeted or existing Sales data (think here, when was the last time someone spoke to us from this account? And which person was that?). Add to this Marketing performance and Channel benchmarks.

2 Data from testing

All the data that helped you identify your success. Tracking data.

3 Industry
data

Think industry drivers as a whole. Think changes coming on the horizon. Think about marketing standards and channels in this market.

4 Account level data

Which industry drivers do they care about? What are they monitoring? What kind of intent are they showing?

5 Persona profile data

Profile of each one of your decision makers, influencers and end users. What keeps them up at night? What motivates them? What are their KPIs? Where do they consume information?

6 Channel-specific data

Data you are getting from each Marketing channel. Challenges you have in each Marketing channel. Opportunities and restrictions.

7 Resource-specific data

How many people does it take to do something? How much time does it take? This will help understand whether investment in certain tools is really worth it or not.

Why should you care about all these data points?

You’re not to be constantly tangled in this data but all of these different data points will be helping you understand when there’s something going wrong, why something is working well, enable you to take the right decisions, flag information at the right moment and fix things at the right time.

Scaling the execution of a program will be a bumpy road and analyzing the right data at the right points will help you ensure you scale it successfully.

What is an ABM campaign without personalization? Well, it’s probably not ABM.

It’s essential in your ABM program that you are personalizing but at the same time it’s ok to match that level of personalization to what the account needs.

As Hillary Lupo Carpio, Director of ABM at Snowflake explains.

You've got to prescribe the amount of personalization to what the account needs. So our layer where the AEs are nominating very boutique one-off accounts, that's all hand-curated. So the content is hand-curated one by one based on the conversations that reps are having within the accounts.

Hillary Lupo Carpio | Director of ABM | Snowflake

So that is at the One-to-one level but when you are talking to hundreds or thousands of accounts it’s not really possible to go to that level of personalization.

This is because when you’re looking at such a large number of accounts it would be pretty much impossible to know the different needs, desires, challenges and goals of every account. And even if you did, the level of resource needed to create custom content for this would be astronomical.

Despite this, personalization is still important to be able to make an impact with these accounts and build your reputation and relationships with them. So how do you personalize at scale:

Focus on one vertical at a time

Don’t go too broad too soon. Although One-to-many typically targets a larger number of accounts, they still need to be relevant. And you have to be confident that your solution meets the needs of that group of accounts with product-market fit. So the easiest way of doing that is to focus on a single vertical at a time.

Build your value proposition

When thinking about the vertical you are trying to reach it’s important that you build a value proposition that clearly defines the unique challenges and pain points of that industry.

By doing this you are able to position your solution in the best way to meet the needs of that industry, giving you key messaging pillars that can shape your content and will resonate with your target accounts.

Harness technology

We know we discussed this in point four but technology really has come a long way since the early days of ABM. Particularly with advancements in automation and dynamic advertising, it is now possible to create ad campaigns that do feel more like personalized outreach.

Equally, new web tools mean you can personalize your website to the company (and the individual) who lands on that - dynamic offers, dynamic product/service pages, dynamic case studies, etc. all relevant to the company and industry of the visitor.

But as noted, it’s really important that this isn’t just a blunt-hammer approach and that there is a genuine strategy behind it.

Going back to the original question we asked Hillary Lupo Carpio, Director of ABM at Snowflake: “What is the hardest part of ABM?”

You can see why she answered ‘Execution’.

To execute well - particularly an ABM strategy at scale, where you are blending all three ABM programs (One-to-many, One-to-few, and One-to-one) you need to be able to coordinate and orchestrate a lot of moving parts.

What sets Account-based Marketing apart from many other Marketing strategies is this high level of coordination - not only with your ABM team but with the wider Marketing function as well as Sales and beyond.

Any large organization has hundreds of Sales professionals - from SDRs and BDRs to Account Directors and more. Each one of these has a role to play in your ABM strategy and the success of it.

As an ABM leader your role is very much one of a general organizing your troops, strategizing, scenario planning, and setting them on a winning path.