We’re back with the second part of our Q&A where we delve into deeper detail about what it takes to plan and execute a successful ABM strategy. Read Part 1: ABM Basics
Q&A — ADVANCED ABM
What are you measuring and why?
Because ABM is a long play, we need measures, or indicators, to understand if we’re headed in the right direction or to determine if adjustments are needed. After much research and analysis, below are the measures we landed on to evaluate the success of our own program:
- Coverage – Who do we know at our target accounts?
- Awareness – Are the accounts aware of us and our solutions?
- Engagement – Are the right people interacting with us?
- Program Impact – Are our marketing/sales programs reaching our target accounts?
- Influence – Are our ABM activities improving our sales outcomes?
We’ve created reports to support each of these five measures. Our recent ABM webinar highlights a handful of these reports.
Outside of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), what else do you consider when choosing your ABM Accounts?
We often look at our rep coverage and territories. If we have a particularly strong rep in a certain area, we might cluster ABM accounts there. We also consider accounts that have engaged with us in the past. If they are in our Total Addressable Marketing (TAM), we might weight them higher than an account that hasn’t previously engaged with us.
What percent of your marketing is ABM vs. traditional methods (like outbound or events)?
We like to think of ABM as an addition to our demand generation efforts, not a complete replacement. We have three revenue teams: small business, enterprise, and OEM. For enterprise, about 75% of our efforts are ABM. The other 25% are more “traditional efforts” that also support our other revenue teams.
It’s important to think about what we call “marketing muscle” when getting ready to launch your ABM effort. Many ABM tactics are people-intensive, so you really need to think that through in the planning stages.
How long do you run ABM before you decide if it’s working or not?
Since ABM is a long play, it can be hard to not rely on those pipeline metrics to help you define success. This is why it’s even more important to determine indicators/measures early on and then watch them closely.
At InsideView, we made the decision to “lock” our Tiers for the first six months to really give ourselves time to understand what was working and what wasn’t. At the same time, we needed to be sure we were trending in a positive direction, so keeping an open line of communication with our SDR team was essential. For instance understanding if we were achieving traction within an account (e.g., quality conversations within the first month, returned calls, answered emails) helped us understand if we were breaking in. And SDRs needed those wins to stay motivated to execute the many steps of their ABM efforts. If they had traction, it kept them going, even if it took longer for their activity to tie directly to an opportunity. In fact, once those interactions matured into opportunity discussions, those meetings typically included two-to-three times as many stakeholders.
How does compensation change with ABM?
We’ve always believed that the variable compensation for marketing should be tied to pipeline goals. This is still true with ABM. We look at many different dimensions of pipeline: new, or “sourced” pipeline; influenced pipeline (opportunities already in play that marketing touched); pipeline distribution across sales people (some may feast while others are starving); and pipeline “health” (e.g., is it pipeline for ICP accounts?).
We are in the process of determining if we will change comp for our SDRs.
How do you handle the CAN-SPAM rules in Canada and EMEA and other email privacy issues?
All the same email rules and database hygiene practices apply to ABM as they do for traditional marketing campaigns. We think it’s even more important to get it right, since ABM focuses on a very few key accounts. You can’t risk breaking the rules or sending unwanted email to complete strangers. That’s why it’s critical to leverage techniques other than email (paid advertising, social selling, etc.) to generate awareness and get people to engage before sending them emails.
What are some of the most successful channels/campaigns you have run on ABM?
We are testing many channels and campaign types and have found that there are cumulative positive effects from campaigns with multiple and varying touch points. One of our favorites was when our SDRs took a photo of a Starbucks cup with the customer’s name and emailed the photo with a message offering a Starbucks gift card of nominal value in exchange for their answers to a short survey ranking where their company fell on our go-to-market maturity model. We got a great response from this campaign which led to warm leads and high responses when SDRs reached out to follow up. It also energized our SDRs who could see the results of their efforts immediately.
On the planning side, we spent a significant amount of time identifying the composition of personas that make up buying groups. For instance, instead of only going after the marketing people in an account, we’re going after marketing, plus sales, and operations. This has been an effective approach for creating multiple influencers within an account, and broadening the conversation around our solutions.
Should AEs prospect? If so, should they use records within their CRM? Should we rely on imported records from third-party data sources?
ABM does not replace prospecting. Effective and highly productive salespeople should always be building relationships with prospects. It’s important for them to look at both their contacts and leads carefully within their CRM to determine if they are categorized correctly, especially with an ABM effort where the outreach methods and frequency (Tiers) may vary from persona to persona.
You should definitely rely on third-party data sources to augment what is already in your CRM. In fact, that is our core business at InsideView, and we used our own products to build out our accounts and the people in them.
How do you scale the learning curve of an ABM strategy across a team for the quickest implementation?
- Industry research
Firms like SiriusDecisions and Forrester have excellent research that we read and circulated when we started down this path. We also did several analyst inquiries to review our plans. In addition, many vendors have very good content (often they license reports from the analyst firms). You can follow many ABM thought leaders on social channels as well.
- Internal education
We facilitated multiple discussions with groups and individuals on our executive staff and sales team, to educate them as well as field questions/generate ideas on ABM. We also met with other internal teams, including finance and HR because our ABM strategy was getting a lot of attention within the company and we wanted to be sure everyone understood what we were doing and why. This was time consuming, but worth it.
- Momentum
Because it takes time to see the fruits of your ABM effort, it’s important to quantify progress along the way, especially for SDRs and account teams so they stay motivated to keep executing against the plan.
Since you focused on some key industries, have you had to customize all your content for each one? How do you scale that?
In a perfect world, we would have customized content for each industry, but we just don’t have the time, resources, or expertise to do so. Instead, we’re focused on the common buyer personas that work horizontally across industries (e.g. marketing, sales, operations). When we can, we will send relatable content, for instance, a case study from the same industry as an account we are targeting.
What will you experiment with in your ABM 2.0 efforts?
Other parts of our business are getting interested in ABM; they’ve seen the enthusiasm and success of our enterprise business and they want to get on board as well. ABM 2.0 will explore how to incorporate other business units into the program.
We’re also developing a process for rotating a portion of our current ABM accounts. For example, if a Tier 1 account is in an opportunity stage we may not need as much up-front momentum surrounding that account, and it might make sense to move it to Tier 3. We’ll make adjustments to roughly 25% of our accounts. To quickly replace the accounts that move out of ABM, we want to have a pool of accounts ready to pull from. These are what we call our “bench accounts.” Bench accounts fit our ICP and are part of our TAM.
As you can see, the more we dive into this exciting ABM journey, the more we learn, and the more questions we have as we take it to the next stage. We’ll continue to share our journey with you, and if you have an ABM success story you’d like to share, let us know! We’d love to help you tell that story in a webinar or guest blog. Reach out to Alex Taylor to get the ball rolling.
HELPFUL DEFINITIONS
Engaged: Engagement helps us determine whether or not someone has “raised their hand” or responded to an offer we’ve sent. In ABM, we see accounts with highly engaged people who consistently click on emails, download ebooks, visit our websites, and then we have those who are either quiet or strangers. Those individuals may not be aware of our company or offering, or have yet to respond to an offer. It’s important to segment and communicate differently with those different audiences in your ABM approach.
ICP: Ideal Customer Profile is a set of firmographic, environmental, and behavioral attributes of accounts that are proven to become a company’s most valuable customers.
TAM: Total Addressable Market is the size of the market that fits your ICP.
Tier: A Tier helps determine what level of prioritization that account gets from sales and marketing.
Marketing Muscle: Both the program dollars and the people effort required to execute a successful, multi-dimensional approach.
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