How do you update stakeholders with information that helps them efficiently communicate the importance of your Account Based Marketing strategy to their own teams?

Get the metrics for these following measures so you can share with your internal stakeholder how ABM is impacting the business on 1 page.

• Marketing's contribution to revenue including YoY compares (as a percentage against the business overall revenue & dollar amount)

• Marketing's contribution to pipe generation including YoY compares (as a percentage against the business overall pipe gen & dollar amount)

• Marketing's contribution to pipeline maturation including YoY compares

  • not sure how your organization measures this but typically this is measured between stages 2-closing and marketing's effort in trying to accelerate and speed up the deal cycle

• X number of VP+ responses including YoY compares

• Average deal size

• X number of net new contacts added

Then you can deep dive into 1 account example and show how your ABM program/journey and touchpoints are hitting a specific objective you set out to solve in partnership with sales.

No update should ever come as a "surprise" to leadership or key GTM stakeholders. Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy that is developed in partnership with sales, marketing, customer success, and, in the best cases, product teams. It's not a tactical approach e.g., a webinar or an eBook. It involves in-depth Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) development, content and positioning strategy that supports the ICP, and operational planning including lead scoring, routing and dashboard optimization. It's a program that constantly needs to be evaluated and optimized against core benchmarks that all stakeholders define around success.

The ABM strategy itself should be documented in writing and shared with all end-users, representatives, campaign managers, success managers, and everyone involved, leaving  no room for surprises. Additionally, it should be presented and explained during all-hands meetings.

In my experience, there are two forums of follow up, evergreen comms: 

1. Monthly teardown: This is a cross functional meeting where you review operational and functional KPIs: You start with the team-level dashboard that houses the agreed upon key results and pacing towards those. Most businesses investing in ABM will be reporting on: 

   1. Number of named accounts touched by ABM this quarter (marketing and or sales) gold status will say 100% named accounts touched by both (shows you’re working this strategy in concert and everyone is on the same page) but if you’re ramping 80% could be a good barometer). 

   2. Breakdown of “worked” accounts by pre-customer and customer – this enables the teams to understand the weighting between new revenue and potential expansion revenue.

   3. New S2 and Expansion Ops created this quarter – then I encourage a manager from each region to pick one deal and do a teardown of how it came into pipe. Determine “what’s the story?” 

   4. Lightning rounds of key players – should do MoM comparison of functional KPIs

      1. Digital Team: Impression share, CTR, Qualified Meetings, Qualified Pipeline

      2. Demand Gen: Specific campaigns concluded or upcoming with key content/assets 

      3. PMM/Content: BoFu Content to support CVR and acceleration

      4. Field: What local field events (1st or 3rd party) have helped drive additional engagement/reach, pipeline influenced. 

2. Weekly Pulse shared via Slack and email:

   1. Owned by ABM Owner - Key Wins of the Week

      1. From the top:

         1. % of target personas as a percentage of fundraisers

         2. Pipeline

         3. CW Revenue

         4. Expansion Revenue (should be a dashboard)

      2. Meetings Booked, Qualified Pounces

      3. Untouched 6QA’s if you’re using 6Sense

      4. Key Events

      5. encourage people to share wins! Small wins are important here and helps drive activity across the board!

Activity fizzles when things don’t seem relevant and teams and individuals aren’t held accountable. Strategy fizzles when their executives aren’t working in concert. Using the above framework will help eliminate both fizzle risks while driving awarneess and engagement around the ABM program.

There's some great tips here. Ultimately, you own the story that others are going to tell about your work. You should be communicating it vs letting it go through the echo chamber.

I would institute an email or internal comms strategy that brings people along your journey from start to finish. Excite and entertain people. Make it interesting. Talk about wins and losses. Invite others to get involved and participate.

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 more. This sounds basic, but sometimes basic is best! We don't need to overcomplicate. This deck will allow stakeholders to have all the information needed to share details on the ABM motion with their own leader, directs or wider team.

To update stakeholders with information that helps them efficiently communicate the importance of your account-based marketing (ABM) strategy to their teams, I recommend the following steps:

1. Identify your stakeholders. Who do you need to collaborate with versus who do you need to inform?
2. Understand how your ABM program impacts them. How does your ABM program impact their goals? How can you best support them?
3. Develop a communication plan. Stakeholders should receive a regular cadence of information that matters to them. Set expectations early, define what success looks like, and how you will report on what is working and what isn’t.

Additionally, here are a few related topics I've addressed that may be helpful:

• What is your methodology for identifying the right company targets in an ABM strategy?
• In your experience, who are the most critical internal partners during the course of creating an Account Based Marketing strategy?
• What is the best way to educate internal stakeholders on Account Based Marketing in order to accurately highlight the potential benefits to the organization as a whole and to their individual teams’ functions?