The Nine Sins of ABM
The Problem with ABM in Enterprise Sales
Account Based Marketing is the mantra of every technology firm ready to expand from its SMB customer focused roots to the Enterprise. In this “upmarket” path, the company hopes to realize long term contracts with a more stable user and cash flow base. The company’s product and sales teams learned a lot from SMB and Midmarket firms who are less risk averse and often able to be early adopters of new technologies.
And this is where nearly every firm makes nine core mistakes—mistakes that get papered over with good short term results, yet hurt operational efficiencies that employees and sometimes customers never feel that success.
Many growth companies attempting the Upmarket climb will need a large investment in people, process, and technologies that support large organizational users and buyers. From acquisition functions to customer support.
And that’s where the challenges begin. Here are the Nine Sins of ABM:
No one cares about the Buying Team
ABM is lead generation for enterprises
ABM is a one-off campaign: field events, ads, etc
No personalization to the account, industry, ICP, or person.
No GTM workflow: Sales goes so fast into Upmarket that operations and marketing become disconnected from Sales
Metrics focused on Lead Generation rather than Accounts and Pipe.
No Scale – throwing salespeople at Accounts and enterprise lead generation instead of automation, and conversely, adding tech before understanding the workflow.
Making BDRs be Email and Marketing Automation specialists instead of Building Buying Teams.
Targeting CXOs to gain attention early in the sales process. They are “decision makers, right?”
How do you avoid these sins and hit your goals for ABM?
Make the Buying Team the foundation of your ABM strategy.
Then operationalize the Buying Team across your GTM People, Process, and Technologies.
Easy, right?
No one cares about the Buying Team
When it’s everyone’s responsibility, it is no one’s. Why does the Buying Team get left behind so easily, when it is the most important part of success in ABM?
Speed. Most companies jump so fast into ABM and Enterprise motions that Sales is out in front. Marketing Operations, Sales Operations, and even Marketing are behind and then get blamed for having poor processes. The impact here can be enormous.
The reality is the business requirements changed so quickly, other teams need time to catch up from their SMB motions or lead generation approach. Then they lean heavily on what they know instead of thinking through the GTM motion before going full speed ahead.
The stalled revenue impact of this misalignment is enormous:
No Buying Team plan by AEs or Marketing Ops
Buying Team concepts focus on CXO instead of the wider organization
Account Hierarchies aren’t in place leading to poor Territory Planning
Lack of Account or Enriched Person data so manual research is needed
Untargeted campaigns
Lead Gen focused customer lifecycle
Messaging still focused on SMBs
Inbound requests get routed to junior staff unfamiliar with Enterprise sales, turning off experienced buyers.
Each team, each department, should focus on how to help Sales build the Buying Team.
ABM Becomes Enterprise Lead Generation
In the SMB world speed to lead is critical and junior SDRs and Account Executives (AEs) close deals quickly as part of a Product Led Sales (PLS) motion that is likely not heavily automated.
Most B2B firms treat ABM as a change of focus for their lead generation and demand generation activities. Ready to go upmarket? Let’s change the settings from 100 to 499 employees to 1,000 to 5,000 employees! ABM complete!
The reason marketers do this? It works. It works until the In Market Accounts run out.
The expectations for Enterprise deals are well known – often 6-to-12-month deal cycles with only a 2,000 to 5,000 Account TAM. More senior AEs are hired alongside a slew of BDRs with the expectation that high volume lead generation will result in deals.
Except that the sales and marketing teams are used to high volume lead generation for SMB and Midmarket organizations. They are measured on that deal flow and those expectations do not change for Enterprise. The conversion metrics at each stage are based on SMB or assumed, with no consideration for the larger buying teams and longer deal cycles.
Naturally the conversation becomes “about the numbers.”
So what happens? Marketing and sales try to get high volume lists of their ICPs from their Target Accounts and need a daily lead and call volume to maintain pipe generation. The pressure to “scale” means more BDRs and AEs are hired who now need more Leads and Accounts for the pipe generation to justify their salaries.
This is a huge investment for any company.
What marketers do in these situations is take the Target Account list, have it setup by Name and Domain and then do three things
Email anyone with those domains
Targeted ads on LinkedIn
Buy Third Party Intent Signals against those accounts
Essentially, this is Lead Generation for Target Accounts.
Sales eventually says ABM doesn’t work because they only get MQLs where those people may not be ready or are unlikely to form the Buying Team. Then they ask for more leads.
Sound familiar?
More savvy Marketing teams will leverage existing freemium product user data to find active users from those domains and then push them to Sales as MQLs. This does work, if the GTM motion is well designed. Frequently, salespeople are the ones to mine this data for In Market Accounts.
There is a different approach that is much more efficient and achieves the same result of Enterprise deals.
ABM is a One Off Program
Many well-meaning “ABM” vendors approach ABM as targeted ads by Industry and Domain Name. Those are great tactics as part of an ABM Surround Sound campaign. In these one-off programs such as Account Ads, Persona Ads, or Territory based field events is they are one offs—random acts of marketing. They provide some results yet don’t work toward the buying team goal.
The solution is ABM Surround Sound campaigns.
No Personalization
Everyone talks about personalization, few do it. Fewer do it well. Most companies add an Enterprise Solutions page to their website along with a Contact Us about special “enterprise pricing.” And that’s it.
To solve this lack of targeted messaging, two things are done:
Talk tracks for sales when they do get a meeting.
Secure web rooms for Target Accounts in the sale process.
It is much less expensive to create scalable dynamic ad, email, and page content based on Domain Name-IP Lookup and Intent Signals to drive pipe and build Buying Teams. Wouldn’t you put your dollars into programs rather than technology that is barely used?
No GTM Workflow to Build a Buying Team
B2B firms are plagued by disjointed GTM workflow and customer experiences. It isn’t due to siloes as much as how fast executives press individual teams to go ahead and ignore cross functional alignment and implications. “Hit the number! We’ll deal with problems later.”
Many companies jump so fast into ABM and Enterprise motions that Sales is out in front. Marketing Operations, Sales Operations, and even Marketing are behind and then get blamed for having poor processes. The impact here can be enormous—holding back Sales and revenue.
The reality is the business requirements changed so quickly, other teams need time to catch up.
Metrics Remain Focused on Lead Generation
Lead generation metrics tend to emphasize volume and MQLs vs SQLs and Pipe generation. Those are still helpful metrics for SMBs, User Sign Ups, and even some channels. What happens in ABM, however, is Sales is still looking at volumes instead of Buying Teams and In Market Accounts so they become addicted to MQL volume, pushing Marketing to drive more Lead Gen when Enterprise volumes will always be lower than SMBs.
And that MQL addiction spreads to the entire funnel, infecting forecasts, models, and targets. No one wants to make the necessary adjustment because it “might” create big change management issues as well as a missed quarter or two.
No Scale
Many business leaders confuse Economies of Scale with Scale or simply growing a team from 1 to 100. A “scale up” is not the same as achieving economies of scale.
Economies of Scale is about lowering per unit costs, often achieved with a division of labor, automation, and high volume output. Production can dramatically increase with no or little additional inputs.
Scale Up as many B2B companies practice it means adding 10 new BDRs to take on another 100 MQLs per day at a given conversion rate to achieve a target revenue goal. The company will keep adding more salespeople to cover more and more Accounts to grow revenue.
So how do you achieve ABM economies of scale? You need automation leverage, and repeatable processes.
The other day, several MOPS experts asked if ABM can be done at Scale. Yes, it can. Scale is about leverage, automation, repeatable processes.
Sales leaders almost always make the mistake of hiring a dozen BDRs to do cold calls and cold email. Then they are given a target to double revenue, so they hire 12 more BDRs and Marketing must double lead flow or more.
Within a year or less, most email and call lists are exhausted for this round, requiring a new attempt to find In Market accounts at a higher rate because now there are 24 BDRs to feed.
There is a better way to achieve scale.
BDRs become Email and Marketing Automation specialists
The advent of Sales Email Automation tools since 2013 swung the pendulum of Email Nurture from Demand Gen and Marketing Automation Platforms back to Sales. These tools offer better experiences for Sales Reps to manage territory communications, call tasks, etc. than regular CRMs, while Sales Managers get better insight into activity levels.
There are three challenges with this approach.
First, companies get burned because these tools are used as high volume email spam machines. Salespeople aren’t equipped—and shouldn’t be—to be email list managers, email delivery experts, and marketing automation specialists.
Salespeople are relationship builders and the purpose of the BDR is to build the Buying Team with the AE.
Second, it implies the CRM isn’t built to manage call tasks and email tasks (even though it does) and reps don’t want to use it that way.
Third, it means that Sales Managers monitor BDR and SDR output as tactical KPIs such as People Sequenced, Called, Responded, etc, instead of Meetings Booked and Revenue Booked. This creates a lot of monitoring for tactical lead generation micromanagement rather than how to build up buying teams and build up the value of the solution.
CXOs are the only target
Most sales reps are still told to target C level executives because they can “make decisions” or “hold the budget.” Yet, when you think about how you buy something in Sales, SOPS, MOPS, or Marketing, is that true?
No.
Research is first done by an intern or manager who brings a few vendors and ideas to a Manager or Director. Small decisions can be made at this level which is usually defined by financial approval bands. Larger spend decisions or larger impact decisions – software changes that may impact multiple sub teams or departments—need more input from departmental leaders and potentially C suite approvers.
And the way this works most of the time, the Director and VPs bring a 1-3 slide or slack statement to the approver or CXO to say “Please approve this $500k spend to drive $10M pipe or reduce costs $2M…”
The CXO approves.
The more sophisticated internal approval processes may intervene to bring that case upwards.
When a rep reaches out to a large company CXO, usually the CXO forwards the email to their direct report VP who forwards it to someone to take a call. The call happens because it looks like a CXO wanted it to. Then the Director who runs the demo call sees low ROI and defers further conversation. Or it isn’t obvious how it helps the current priorities, and the middle managers feel threatened by upending current plans to take the vendor seriously.
The managers and Directors who are most likely to want a change in vendors, want the respect from a vendor that they were approached first. They are the ones best positioned to
Understand the change
Understand the implications of the change
Build that business case upwards (with help)
Get help from the vendor to crystalize the need and get CXO attention at the right moment.
What’s the Solution?
If there are Nine Sins of ABM, then what are the Nine Solutions to supercharge growth?
Each Sin has a Solution, requiring dedication, discipline, and clear plans. In the next few articles, I will discuss each one.
Here’s a big hint on how to take action today: the GTM Workflow Get Aligned Workshop. And you can take a deeper look at ABM Surround Sound campaigns in my TechTarget ebook.
