What is your methodology for identifying the right company targets in an ABM strategy?

Work with your sales team! 

You can use a lot of different tech and methods to identify target accounts, but if your sales team isn't bought in, you won't be successful.

I suggest using tools or conducting a TAM analysis to narrow down the list of potential accounts a tad small. Have the sales team participate in the account selection process. One of the most common mistakes I see people make is allowing their sales teams to pick companies like Verizon, ATT, Amazon etc. These companies are broken out into several lines of business and divisions. Sales should understand the account and where they'll break in.

If you are going to use digital channels, ensure you have a list large enough to meet audience size requirements on your preferred media partners.

Everything begins with “What are your business goals?” And I cannot emphasize this enough. If you have a marketing problem and don’t know where to start, ask yourself this question “What are the business objectives?” and go from there. You won’t go wrong.

Depending on whether the business wants to acquire new logos or expand into existing accounts, or focusing on competitive wins, you know where your ABM accounts are coming from.

Once the focus is clear, you can identify accounts based on size, vertical focus, existing tech stack (e.g. if already using a competitive product and your current focus is not on competitive wins, then drop) ICP, and even geo focus if your sales teams are aligned that way, to identify the right set of accounts.

There are so many ways to answer this question, depending on your GTM strategy and organization! The key, no matter the differences, it to be selective and targeted. There are likely many people you WANT to sell to, but who is most likely to actually become a Closed Won deal? That is where you need to focus. Focus is the key to success in ABM.

The best place to start is to have a clear understanding of your target market and its size. Are you a horizontal SaaS company that can sell to any IT Director at any company over $100M in revenue? Are you a vertical company with a finite market of only 20,000 accounts? Are you selling to developers at any size company for a very small dollar value? First, you have to understand your target market and use this as your total addressable market.

Once you have a TAM, you need to tier the accounts somehow. Are certain accounts, based on size, location, or other factors, more likely to have success with your product? Do you have data you can look at from past sales efforts that shows companies in a particular segment are closing at a higher rate than others? Focus here.

Then, build your scoring model. This is easiest to do with an ABM tool. Identify which accounts are showing intent, which have been on your website, which have engaged with marketing. Work with sales to build a model that makes sense to both of you, and tiers down. The biggest bucket should be at the top, and the smallest bucket of accounts should be at the bottom. Again, working with sales, identify at what point the accounts move from marketing to sales and should be targeted by different types of outreach and messaging.

Leveraging intent data, like what companies such as 6Sense, Qualified, and Demandbase offer, provides several key advantages to identifying the right company targets and more.

• It allows your marketing and sales teams to proactively reach out to accounts showing purchase intent or exploring competitors, giving you a competitive edge. This is a no-brainer for today’s landscape. If you’re running paid ads without intent data, if you’re doing outbound without intent data, stop. Now. Call your CFO, CRO. Get the budget to get intent. It’s worth the pause to get it right. You’ll go faster in the end.

• You can pinpoint your most effective activities and invest more in them to boost engagement. No more guesswork; you'll have concrete insights that drive action, especially with the help of AI.

• It enables you to create highly personalized campaigns tailored to your buyers' specific needs and experiences, adding that extra personal touch to your marketing efforts.

I like to build target accounts lists WITH sales. It's a shared activity. I've used this framework often as a starting point.

1. Figure out your data sources

2. Develop your ICP

3. Scrub the data

4. Segment the list

5. Launch it

Depending on the size of your TAM, you may want to establish a hierarchy of accounts. Something like this:

1. Account universe: every account in your TAM

2. Target account list: every account in your SAM

3. Segmented account lists (usually many): the accounts that receive your marketing

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 -

1. marketing working in a silo on their own target account list

2. 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 intent data. While there will always be target accounts sales must breakthrough with to to make or break their quarter, marketing can bring other accounts to the table based off intent data. 6Sense recently shared that 78% of high-intent accounts they surface aren't in their client's CRM. Not even on their radar! That shows just how much potential revenue is missed if we go solely on sale's target accounts.

Intent data brought from marketing will also inform how we decide to prioritize the accounts within ABM tiers - 1:1, 1:Few and 1:Many.

Hopefully I'm understanding this question right in thinking you want to know what companies to target, not the target goals of my company... I'm going to answer the former but if I've totally misunderstood your question please forgive me.

What companies I ask my teams to target is decided based on a number of factors and these factors do fluctuate between companies and sometimes between time periods (e.g. you may be experiencing a period of great new customer acquisition but need to address churn or expansion, which would shift your targets). Here are some things I like to consider.

• Positioning alignment. If we've done our job well we know the audience for our products, their pain points / needs, jobs to be done, and how our products help meet those. We build campaigns in AMB around a narrower scope of those. For example lets say a new enterprise feature at your SaaS company is specifically for customers who have government contracts. You'd narrow your targeting for this campaign to SaaS vendors with FedRamp approval and likely to their gov focused AEs or partners.

• Intent. There are so many ways to infer intent at an account level. From what they do on your own website to analysis from third parties like 6Sense or HG Insights. Some marketing teams consume and combine intent data from multiple sources to maximize their chances of getting accounts the right marketing.

• TAM and PMF balance. Your new product might be amazing for SMB and Mid-Market companies but when accounts start getting bigger than 1k users it stops making sense. You wouldn't want to target large enterprises because the product isn't right for them, you wouldn't want to target super small companies because the cost of acquisition might mean years to recover your investment if the price point is low or the initial contract sizes are too small (this might be a good PLG target though).

• RAD (or RADO). Retain, Acquire, Develop, Optimize. Your own customers are also targets. Do you have a retention problem and need some support to keep them here? Do you have large customers with small contracts and lots of opportunities to expand/develop? Do you have an opportunity to build better long term contracts by ensuring your customers are right sized? There's definitely time to consider these.

• Pure firmographic targeting. Sometimes it is real simple, we need to sell this product to companies above 1000k employees who are headquartered in major cities and sell managed services.

I'm certain there's lots more to consider but if I keep writing I'll spend all night on just this answer. Infinite possibilities here. The goal is; be thoughtful, maximize your potential ROI, and make sure you can actually target those companies. Test, prove your targeting and campaigns. Expand from there.

I'm sure this can look different for a lot of teams, so here are some examples we're starting with.

• Highest level: The target accounts list and if key outcomes are hit - initial meeting, pipeline created, won deal

• Mapping what sales and marketing activities happen between each major milestone to understand influence on progression

• Our ABM tool offers a progression report built off of their intent model, so similar to bullet two but using their platform's version.

Defining target accounts is a collaborative effort, especially with your sales and RevOps teams. This needs to be approached from the perspective that you are there to support the sales team. It isn’t an “us against them” scenario. Getting buy-in early is critical for a successful partnership and long-term success.

Know your total addressable market (TAM). It’s also critical that you give your ABM strategy enough time before evaluating results. This isn’t a strategy that you can test for a couple of weeks and come to a conclusion. You need to give this strategy enough time to run which at a minimum is one quarter.

Leverage intelligence tools such as Clearbit or 6sense to better identify target accounts who are visiting your website. This will allow you to further personalize the experience and speak to customers in a way that is meaningful to them.