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 broke ...Read More

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 si ...Read More

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, C ...Read More

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 Dir ...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

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 chur ...Read More

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 coupl ...Read More