Angela Shori

When resources are tight, every decision has to be the optimized and prioritization goes to those activities most likely to get your prospective buyer to find you. 1. Understand who is most likely to buy from you RIGHT now. Focus on that segment. Spreading activity or budget too thin because you COULD serve all verticals will only mean that you will miss out on those most likely to become your customers. Keep your positioning narrow. Win in that segment and then build from there. 2. Listen to recorded sales calls and take note of the questions that come up again and again. These are the blueprints for the content you need to create and the keywords people are using to try to find solutions like yours. (Often the words your prospects use don’t match the terms your team uses internally.) 3. Meet them where they are. Both in terms of distribution channels for your content and in how you talk about the problem. If you have to convince them they have a problem, they are not a buyer. 4. Approximately 60% of the buyer’s journey happens before a prospect talks to sales. Make your website a treasure trove of educational information. This allows people who aren’t really interested in your solution the opportunity to qualify out before involving your sales team. And results in those who do end up on a call being far more educated. 5. Recognize that you have competitors. It may be the status quo, doing nothing, or a completely different solution that is competing for the same budget, but there is always another option. 6. On average, a B2B buying team has 6+ people. Understand who has the problem, who has the budget, and how decisions will be reached. Enable your champions to gain buy-in. Small teams have to be scrappy, but if they stay focused they can generate fantastic results and have the agility to test, learn, and pivot when needed.

Account Based Marketing strategy is a joint endeavor between sales and marketing leadership. In order to be successful, you should ensure: 1. 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. 2. An understanding of which metrics actually matter (account engagement over legacy MQLs). 3. Agreement over which tactics you’ll deploy (1:1, 1: many, etc). 4. 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.

“A camel is a horse that was designed by committee.” - Sir Alec Issigonis Marketoonist Tom Fishburne has a fantastic cartoon on this as well. When determining stakeholder involvement in a project, it’s important to understand who should actually have input if you show a campaign or design to 20 people, chances are that they could all give you some suggestion for improvement, but the question is, how much of that is meaningful? When dealing with timelines and deadlines, clearly communicate with your stakeholder group on the deadline you are trying to meet as well as their level of participation when planning your project timeline, take into account schedules and reasonable review times, but communicate clearly when deadlines to make changes are Revisions can quickly get out of hand, and if you feel your project is in danger falling prey to this suggest an A/B test to get data to back future decisions. Ship. Learn. Iterate.