In your experience, who are the most critical internal partners during the course of creating an Account Based Marketing strategy?
1. Sales Leadership
If you're in the B2B SaaS space, you'll know that marketing alone does not generate deals. We engage prospects and customers, bring them to the surface, and rely on AEs and sales development to mature that relationship, converting them to meetings and subsequently, deals. If your target account list is not aligned with Sales, the efforts get largely wasted. ABM works when Sales is ready and excited for each of those accounts to engage. Ultimately all accounts on the ABM list should either be assigned to an AE or on a target list, ensuring strong alignment between teams.
2. Sales Development
Digging deeper on the above, it's imperative that Sales Development is also bought into the ABM strategy. It could have a major impact on their workflow, from lead assignments, qualification thresholds, and follow up SLAs. In my experience, I've found the best partner here to be the outbound SDR team, as they're incentivized to work the same accounts in the ABM list. Also, it's important to consistently surface the efforts being made to warm these accounts, as well as to analyze and prove that a warm account has a higher likelihood of converting than a cold one. If you do run the numbers and don't find that trend, it's likely that something is broken, or your thresholds for account activation are set too low.
3. Business Development / Partners
Partners can make a huge difference when trying to break into major accounts. The BD team can be an excellent partner to provide inputs from partner organizations as to which accounts may be more susceptible to purchase new technology, as well as which ones have strong partners involved already.
Marketing cannot close business without sales. Sales is the most important partner to marketing, ABM or not.
While you can gain the support of the leadership teams, sales ops, etc, if you don't have your sales team onboard with your plans, you will not succeed.
Bring your sales team into the process early and keep them informed ia regular status updates (bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly). Highlight your wins and your losses.
Sales, Sales, Sales. Align with them every step of the way. Right from account identification to account planning to execution and tracking. For the big accounts talk to them everyday. For the other accounts, talk to them every week.
Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Operations.
Marketing - you're leading the charge here. You own the GTM strategy and persona and messaging research (Product Marketing), the content and asset creation (Content/Design), and the targeting and campaign launches to move the accounts down the funnel (Demand Generation).
Operations - you're ensuring the account scoring is working, handling all technical implementation of tools, and making sure everything syncs to the CRM and is visible to sales. You're also building the reporting necessary to track success of the initiative, account funnel progression, and revenue attainment.
Sales/Customer Success - you're highly involved in the strategizing process before anything gets put into place. You're using the tools, providing feedback on successes, and winning some deals!
Quarterbacking with the rest of the marketing team is critical to your success. You can’t create all the marketing CTAs on your own and you need to rely on your marketing counterparts to drive focus for your ABM accounts as well.
Partner with your field marketers to ensure your ABM accounts are getting priority at executive & hospitality events.
Plan with your events team and see if you could carve out VIP experiences for your ABM contacts (i.e priority seating at keynotes, executive summit spaces, special customer meeting, VIP/backstage passes to special events).
Work with product marketers and ensure you have the right sales enablement and product demos that you can include in your journeys.
Collaborate with the campaigns team and leverage content and assets so you can easily customize and make it work for your ABM journeys.
Marketing is a team sport and you cannot scale and win alone.
Sales and operations. I recently talked about this on LinkedIn and here's the strategy I like for aligning GTM teams on ABM.
ask sales "who matches our 𝗜𝗗𝗘𝗔𝗟 𝗖𝗟𝗜𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗙𝗜𝗟𝗘?" to ensure marketing's hypothesis matches the people that sales regularly encounters as leads of contacts
get sales' feedback on your 𝗕𝗨𝗬𝗘𝗥 𝗝𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗡𝗘𝗬 - agree on the way customers actually want to learn about and purchase your product
share your 𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗤𝗨𝗘 𝗩𝗔𝗟𝗨𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗣𝗢𝗦𝗜𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 with sales to determine if this is the way they actually tell our story and make sure all campaigns are written with this message
share marketing's 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗡𝗗𝗔𝗥 with sales, so that they can help promote big events, new content, or important social media posts
co-create 𝗦𝗛𝗔𝗥𝗘𝗗 𝗥𝗘𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗨𝗘 𝗚𝗢𝗔𝗟𝗦 to ensure everyone is guided by the same North Star
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 as a priority for the business and their department. While the ABM motion progresses, if the participation is not at expectations, the leaders can also be pulled in to reset expectations in their team pulling their weight.
Sales is vital in driving a successful ABM motion within all three stages - strategy, execution and results analysis. When it comes to strategy, a foundational aspect of this is identifying the target audience - what account and who within them. I also find their feedback on messaging is very fruitful because they are the feet on the ground having conversations with prospects and customers. When sales and marketing are both pulling equal weight in an ABM motion, it creates one ship cruising in the same direction. When sales is not involved or an equal participant, they are both sailing ships in different directions which ultimately is't going to deliver business results.
Lastly, having key stakeholders within various areas of the organization will set up an ABM motion to get to market smoothly. If this seems overwhelming, create an ABM delegates team where each departmental leader nominates an ABM point person. If a different person from creative, web or marketing ops is assigned to various asks for ABM, the experience can become disjointed and disrupt efficiency. This approach can drive faster speed to market, better organization between teams and a 'one team' mentality.
This is another answer that varies depending on your company, the maturity of your GTM, what kind of sales motions you have (PLG, PLS, Sales led, etc.), who interacts with accounts, and more. Here are some of they key stakeholders I've worked with and why. These are NOT in a particular order.
PMM - One of the primary functions of product marketing is to understand the industry, personas, pain points/needs, jobs to be done, and how your products and services align. They are a key source of information when you're looking to understand how to translate that into ABM. Firmographic details we should consider. Target titles. Etc.
Field Marketing - The field is another key area of information. Geography often plays a key role in how you decide your strategy, what plays you run, where you have more opportunity, etc.
Your executive team - This one is waaaay too often overlooked. In every company I've been in most execs spend a great deal of time around customers, partners, competitor, analysts, press, other industry players, etc. Please include your exec team in developing your thinking. They have so much great information and want you to succeed as much as you want to. Let them share their knowledge and help you fine tune your targets and approach.
Customer success - Another often underleveraged team. I can't tell you the number of times I've come up with something I think is going to land and a CS person says "my customers don't really care about it like that, but if you said it this way it would work" and they've been absolutely right. They hear customers at their most emotional, in times of their biggest frictions, when they have the biggest needs. This is a gift, customers are literally telling them exactly what they want. Why would you waste or ignore this?
Sales - If I have to explain why sales is a critical partner we need to have a much bigger discussion ;-)
I know you said internal, but if you company has advisors, an engaged board, a customer advisory board, customer champions, or anything like that please also take advantage of them.
To create a successful account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, you need buy-in across multiple teams. More importantly, you need to have company alignment for this strategy. The company has to be focused on a specific target account list and be okay with saying no to opportunities that are not part of its target list.
Other teams you’ll need a partnership with include:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Customer Success
- Product
- Analytics
The sales team is going to be one of your critical partners. Without their buy-in, an ABM strategy will not work.
You may also find these other responses are helpful for additional ABM context:
Account Based Marketing strategy is a joint endeavor between sales and marketing leadership. In order to be successful, you should ensure:
Strong alignment between sales and marketing on the strategic accounts to target. Some of this will be done at the AE level and some will be assigned by the VP of Sales.
An understanding of which metrics actually matter (account engagement over legacy MQLs).
Agreement over which tactics you’ll deploy (1:1, 1: many, etc).
Access to historical tracking so that you can evaluate the success of your ABM strategy. Do your ABM accounts have a shorter sales cycle? Higher ACV?
ABM is truly the mechanism for building a go-to-market team that is pulling in the same direction.
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