ABM foundations: How to select the right accounts
The right account selection can make or break your ABM program.
No matter how well thought out your strategy and plans are, if you’re targeting the wrong accounts in the first place, your ABM campaigns will struggle to make real business impact.
But here’s the thing… and the reason why selecting the right accounts is difficult. Because the question “Who should we target?” is so subjective. Everyone wants to have a say.
And without a well-defined framework and clear parameters for account selection, you risk ending up with a vanity-driven wish list that prioritizes flashy logos over genuine business growth and success.
So, how do you set your ABM program up for success with your account selection?
Before you do anything, you need to have alignment between Sales and Marketing on two key foundations.
What are the objectives for the ABM campaign?
Understanding whether your program is aimed at net-new acquisition, existing account growth and expansion, or maybe even retention, means you have clarity on whether you are working with existing customers or new target accounts.
Having this understanding and alignment on what you’re trying to achieve for the business will allow you to set clear guardrails for your account selection process and prevent a mish-mash of new and existing customer accounts being put forward.
If you don’t have clarity on your overall objective then it’s vital that you start a conversation with the right stakeholders to agree and align on this.
The next step is to make sure you have your ideal customer profile (ICP) nailed down.
Look back at your existing customers with the Sales team, and review which ones have brought the most success to the business and delivered the best customer lifetime value, generally defined through profitability and longevity.
Once you have a few examples of your ‘best’ customers, take time to highlight the relevant firmographic, technographic and contextual information that makes them a good fit.
Try to identify similarities between accounts, and find the key attributes that made those accounts attractive to you – and the reason(s) why your product / solution has worked for them. Armed with this information, you can begin to build the parameters for your account selection framework.
Firmographic Criteria: Firmographics refer to the set of characteristics that describe a business organization, and would usually include factors such as company size, industry / sector and geographical location.
Technographic Criteria:Technographics focus on understanding the technology stack and software solutions that a company currently uses, and already has in place – which will be of use in the ABM campaign.
Contextual Criteria:This contextual information is dynamic and relates to developments within an account, or trigger events such as new funding rounds, increases in hiring patterns, or company announcements relating to expansion etc.
The whole concept of account selection and prioritization is built around creating an ABM campaign and a value proposition which speaks to your best-fit accounts; those that are most attractive to you, which you are best positioned to serve, and have the highest propensity to purchase from you.
However, before you can identify those accounts you have to start more broadly, and understand the account landscape.
The first step in getting started with your account selection framework is to generate a list of accounts making up your total addressable market (TAM). This is a list of all of the accounts which your product / solution could serve within a set market, e.g. Financial services companies in EMEA.
This list will probably be quite long, and seem pretty overwhelming for an ABM program. So, the next step is to refine and prioritize.
Use the relevant criteria from your ICP as filters against your TAM, and you will be able to create a shortlist of accounts that match your ICP. This becomes your potential ABM target account list for the program, or your total relevant market (TRM).
At this stage, If you were running a One-to-many campaign, you could build a value proposition and ABM strategy that speaks to this whole TRM, using intent data to prioritize focused outbound campaigns where accounts are responding positively.
However, to create a more personalized experience – particularly for One-to-few ABM – you will need to assess accounts at a deeper level and tier them. This is so that you can be confident you are working with accounts that justify more time and effort in a more resource-intensive campaign like a One-to-Few.
Account tiers will allow you to segment your total relevant market and start to build pockets of accounts that justify additional investment and resource.
To ensure your account list is manageable, try to create no more than three tiers. These tiers should be based on how well these accounts match your ICP, scoring them based on how attractive they are to you, and how you can service them.
This approach requires you to review your full ICP criteria with Sales, and identify and agree 3-5 factors that stand out – not just as making the account a good fit, but making them most attractive to you – and then assigning a score to certain characteristics.
Digitally transforming business – Companies that are in the process of, or planning for, digital transformation
Complexity of current IT landscape – Companies with a diverse technology stack, indicating a greater need for technology-agnostic solutions with strong integrations
Recent hiring patterns that indicate a significant investment in a specific department, and a focus on building out the function
Once you have established these are your strongest three-five factors, you can review and assess your target account lists against them to assign an overall score for the account.
Now, you should have a list of accounts that fit your ICP and have been scored based on the most relevant criteria that makes them attractive to you as an organization.
Geographic footprint alignment
Sales priority – Has the account been targeted previously, or is is a must-win account?
The strength of existing reputation or relationships with the account
Existing case studies and content assets that align with the accounts
Receptiveness to ABM of the Sales owner of the account
Going through this process will give you an overall score for your ability to service an account. This reveals which accounts are most aligned with you today, and where there are gaps which would require additional work to be able to build a strong relationship with an account.
The closest match against your ICP, with the highest attractiveness and business strength scores making them the best-fit for the program. We would usually recommend these accounts for inclusion in a One-to-few campaign.
A good match, but maybe missing one or two key criteria. There is still value in targeting, but less confidence in their potential fit as a key customer; these could be included in a One-to-few, based on intent data (which we will come onto), but they’re more likely suited for a One-to-many.
A partial match against your ICP and attractiveness, but maybe not the best fit in terms of being able to service the account. There is still value in targeting them, but these are more opportunistic accounts, which are not likely to result in the biggest deals and should be targeted in a One-to-many campaign.
Although there is no rule that says how many accounts can be in each tier, for a One-to-few program it's essential to think about the amount of resources you have available, and what makes sense for your business. Typically for an ABM pilot, we would recommend no more than 15-20 accounts in your Tier one.
You now have a list of accounts which have been tiered and assessed as a good-fit for your ABM program, but there is still a little more work to be done.
The account tiers give an objective data-driven view of an account’s fit for an ABM program. However, it doesn’t give a view of whether now is the right time to put these accounts into a campaign. For that you need to go one step further and overlay intent data to prioritize those accounts showing positive intent signals, and so build your final account selection
How you do this will depend on what data you have access to, but as a minimum you should be using first-party intent signals and, if you have them available, combining that with second- and third-party intent.
The aim here, if you have access to first-, second- and third-party signals, is to find the intersection between all of that intent. If you can see that your accounts are showing active engagement with your brand, and they’re engaging and researching for relevant topics in other places, too, then this would suggest they are actively searching for a solution and are a good fit for your campaign.
ABM platforms and tools such as 6Sense, Demandbase and Terminus have intent models built in, and will help to automate and scale account selection based on intent data.
First-party Intent Data Signals:This refers to the data collected directly from interactions with your own brand. This could include behaviors and actions taken on your website, engagement with your content, or direct interactions with your Sales and Marketing teams.
Second-party Intent Data Signals:This is essentially another company's first-party data that they share or sell to you. It can be data from a non-competitive company that shares a similar audience, giving you insights into behaviors on their platforms or sites.
Third-party Intent Data Signals:Collected from various external platforms and publishers that track user behavior across multiple sites, this is data that gives insights into potential prospects' activities outside of your direct interactions – helping to identify broader interests and purchase intent.
However, if you only have first-party intent data to work with, start with your Tier one accounts and look at all of your available data points, to assess how much engagement there is for each account. We would usually recommend a 30- to 90-day look-back, to keep the data as relevant as possible – but if you need to then you could go back 180 days.
Once you can see these data points, you should mark the account as having low, medium or high first-party intent.
How you determine the thresholds for low, medium and high will be subjective and relevant to the volume and frequency of Marketing / Sales touchpoints, based on your activity and other Marketing campaigns.
This will give you a view of how active an account is in terms of engagement, and whether they know your company and brand or not.
If you only have access to first-party data, then use this as your prioritization tool. If you can see in the 15 accounts that you have as your Tier ones that there is no first-party intent at all, you may consider demoting them from the One-to-few account selection in favor of running a One-to-many play into the accounts, until they ‘come to life’. And on the other hand, if you can see in your Tier two accounts that there are a few accounts where the first-party intent is off the charts, you may want to consider promoting these accounts into your One-to-few selection. This is because they justify the additional resource and investment, as they’re showing signs of being more aware and engaged with your business, and more ‘ready’ to buy.
Once you have been through this analysis, you will be left with a list of accounts that has been tiered and prioritized based on intent, which would align them to a relevant ABM campaign.
So, you’ve been through the process, you’ve identified your TRM, analyzed and tiered your accounts based on fit, and prioritized them based on intent.
You may think you’re now ready to go and start building your ABM campaigns – but there is one final check that needs to happen before you get started!
It’s important to remember that the account selection framework is a tool, and although it adds a data-driven approach to the overall selection, it is not able to account for everything. There will be times, in fact, when an account is just not a good fit based on an event that is happening in real-time which you can’t have accounted for.
For example, you may receive some intel from the frontline of Sales suggesting that an account is about to shut down a strategic program, or restructure an entire department. Which could mean your product or solution is suddenly no longer relevant.
So, before you commit and start building your ABM campaigns, it's important to share the list with your Sales counterparts and align on the selection.
The best way to do this is to have a meeting with the relevant Sales leaders and owners, and run through your methodology; explain how the framework was built and show why these accounts have been selected.
This will not only help them to understand the process and foster greater Sales and Marketing alignment, but it also acts as one last checkpoint. It's usually at this point where a Sales owner will be able to share that intel which may mean it’s not the right time, and so suggest replacing an account.
On the whole, though, you should be able to align and agree on the account selection at this stage. And if Sales do want to replace an account, thanks to your robust framework, it will require a pretty good reason.
It certainly beats an argument over wanting to target an account solely based on the logo!
The beauty of this approach is that it is repeatable.
So, you can apply the same framework to a different ABM campaign using the same methodology, but tweaking the relevant scoring measures and criteria to align with your campaign objectives.
Once you have your account selection framework and have aligned with Sales to agree on the final account selection, you can get to work on building out your ABM value proposition. And thereafter, of course, the campaign itself – safe in the knowledge that it has been built on solid, data-driven foundations.
