AMA: Calendly Head of Demand Generation, Mindy Servello on Account Based Marketing

The most critical internal partners to include for an account based marketing strategy are departmental leaders, sales and, depending on the organization, various areas of the organization - ex: design, web, marketing operations. ABM is a true orchestration between many areas of the organization. Departmental leaders (ex: CMO, CRO) are a key factor in the success of an ABM strategy because they set the expectations of their team's participation. This allows for faster buy in because ABM is seen ...Read More

Intent data is vital to leverage within an ABM strategy because it can help marketers identify in-market accounts. 6Sense recently shared that 78% of high-intent accounts they surface to clients weren’t even in their CRM. That means without leveraging intent data, we are missing out of SO many potential target accounts (and ultimately revenue left on the table for competitors). This data needs to be brought into the foundational step of crafting the target account list with sales. They bring the ...Read More

A marketing organization that is set on a traditional waterfall for KPIs (ex: AQL, MQL, etc.) will need to adjust metrics for an ABM approach. This does not mean the entire org needs to rip and replace their current success metrics, but when it comes to the specific ABM motion, it should be held to a different funnel than a traditional demand generation motion. The funnel structure I like to start with is as follows - Identify: This is the holding pen for accounts that are identified to go to ma ...Read More

If this is asking how to identify the right target accounts, that is a collaboration between marketing and sales. This is a critical, foundational step when crafting a GTM ABM strategy. The two biggest ABM missteps I see are - marketing working in a silo on their own target account list marketing just taking sales target account list and running with it There should be a collaborative conversation between marketing and sales where sales brings their target account list and marketing brings inten ...Read More

Since ABM extends beyond marketing, it is very important that stakeholders are equipped to share information about the motion to their own teams. How you approach this can depend on the communication preferences/tools within the organization. That said, one way impactful way that anyone reading this can take with them is to create a deck that has all strategy (STP - segmentation, targeting and positioning), key messaging, target account list links, creatives, channel mix, results to date and mor ...Read More

When it comes to net-new logos and expanding within current customers, the key differences are within two areas - brand awareness and a key point-of-contact (POC). When expanding within current customers, the brand awareness is there whereas it is not for net-new logos. Net-new logo target accounts required greater brand awareness efforts compared to expansion plays. With expansion, rather than needing to educate the audience on your brand, you may be able to start further funnel with generating ...Read More

I have built and scaled ABM strategies at start ups with no SDR function to larger $250M+ ARR organizations with a very robust, global sales team. Although I can go many directions with this question, I will leave it at this - no matter the sales structure when first building an ABM strategy, find a sales person that you have built a great relationship with that is open minded and 'marketing friendly'. Run an ABM pilot together. You'll be able to show the lift in results from ABM and non-ABM acc ...Read More