🕵🏻♂️ ABM readiness checklist
How to prepare for a pilot ABM program and avoid screwing it in the first month
In 2024, we’ve received 123 inquiries to help with developing an ABM motion and launching a pilot ABM program. Most of the inquiries we either declined or postponed for one reason - the team wasn’t ready to launch ABM.
There were also teams who were telling us: “I wish I’d known what we needed to have in place before we launched a failed program” (see one of the stories here).
So why do most Account-Based-Marketing programs fail despite it is a logical step to go upmarket and fix siloed marketing and sales teams?
In 99.99% of cases, the reason was simple - ignoring the necessary preparation and missing at least one of the core 8 pillars of an ABM program.
Today we’re going to cover:
6 questions to evaluate your team’s readiness for ABM
8 core pillars of an ABM program
Account-based journeys: how enterprise sales reps create multi-channel journeys to book more calls - live case study with an enterprise sales rep of one of our clients.
Let's dive in.
Scaling ABM: Moving from Pilot Programs to Full-Scale Campaigns - January 23, 2025.
Sign up for our first webinar in 2025, co-hosted with Leanne Chescoe, VP Marketing EMEA at Demandbase.
We’re going to cover:
How to scale ABM from a pilot
How to avoid failures in new markets or with the adoption of your regional teams
How to measure ABM success at scale with metrics that matter to your business.
When: Jan 23rd, 3pm CET - 9am EST.
* For our subscribers from APAC and the East Coast, dm me for the recording.
6 questions to evaluate your team’s readiness for ABM
Let’s start with an ABM readiness. Before committing to any new project, we work with any prospect on these 6 questions.
1. Do we have alignment among marketing, sales, and executives on the purpose of ABM, its requirements, and expected outcomes?
Everybody should be aligned on:
WHY doingABM
How to do it
What resources and team's time are required to execute this program? Are these resources locked?
What do you expect from the pilot ABM program? Are these expectations realistic?
I always recommend having a joint written document confirmed by all key stakeholders (VP Marketing, VP Sales, CEO/CFO).
You also need to avoid the trap of calling and accepting “ABM” what’s not really ABM 😁
ABM ≠ programmatic ads + automated outbound sequences enriched by AI sales tools to a wish list of 1000th accounts. It’s one of the 11 most typical ABM mistakes.
ABM is not a substitution for demand generation and awareness.
Make sure all key stakeholders accept it before moving to the next step.
Useful resources:
2. Do we have clear Ideal Customer Profile and account qualification criteria to build a list of companies that are likely to buy our product?
ICP for ABM must be created separately either for a specific vertical or a cluster, including:
Firmographics
Buying committee
Account qualification and disqualification criteria
Account segmentation
Account enrichment
I’ll skip describing this part in much detail because we published a step-by-step guide. Check it below.
Useful resource:
3. Do we have content for awareness, nurturing and buyer enablement for a specific cluster and buyer personas?
Without content you won’t be able to challenge the existing status quo, create awareness and nurture target accounts.
But to create an account-based content, you must lock a collaboration with your internal subject-matter expert and nail down with the sales account journeys:
Their challenges, and why do they occur?
How do they try to solve them?
How to solve them the right way?
How to make them problem-aware in case they are not looking for a solution?
What is the change management required?
The content will resonate only when it comes from a real expert, not ChatGpt.
Useful resources:
Account-based content with Amy Loesch (our client, review of Charlesgate’s approach and case study)
BECOME A FULL-FUNNEL B2B MARKETER
Full-Funnel Academy is a comprehensive B2B marketing training and Slack community for B2B marketers who care about revenue and want to move the needle.
Academy includes:
All our B2B marketing courses including ABM playbook, LinkedIn Allbound marketing playbook and 11 more courses that aren't available publicly + upcoming courses on B2B demand generation and marketing and sales alignment.
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Behind the scenes sessions. See what’s working and what doesn’t work and why on the “behind the scenes” sessions where we review the campaigns we are running for our clients and us.
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Learn more and join the academy here.
4. Do we have a clear playbook to create awareness inside target accounts, generate demand, and activate them?
ABM success happens when companies do a multichannel, multithreaded engagement with the target accounts. Your marketing and sales teams must:
connect and engage with multiple buying committee members
identify their needs and educate them on different ways to solve their challenges
create personalized account journeys and offers
Below is a guide that will help you to understand what a good ABM playbook entails.
Useful resources:
5. Do we have a committed pilot ABM team that doesn’t have pipeline pressure and has time to build ABM motion?
If you can’t lock a dedicated ABM team, forget about a successful program. Everybody will be busy focusing on their own KPIs and tasks, and will treat ABM as just one more thing on their plate.
The team structure and the time investment from each of the roles is the bare minimum you must confirm before moving to the execution.
6. Do we have an alignment between marketing, sales, and executives on how to measure the campaign’s progress and performance?
ABM is not a silver bullet that can drastically fill in your pipeline with enterprise sales opportunities and shorten your sales cycle. But this is the only motion that can help with it.
To set up right expectations, you must have an internal conversation on how to measure the program progress and define an intermediate success before you’ll start seeing pipeline.
Below are a few resources that will help with measuring ABM.
Useful resources:
Is ABM worth investment considering efforts it takes to prepare and launch?
It’s a fair question.
We’ve been generating with our clients during the pilot 3-months programs results like $2.1mln pipeline, $600k in closed won, and generating opportunities with companies like EasyJet, Oracle, Siemens, etc. (check this post with the ABM case studies). You can only guess the impact on the further revenue trajectory.
But all of the teams worked with us on proper preparation and launch of the program using the checklist I’ve shared to day.
I shared it not to scare you, but on contrary explain what is essential to have in place to drive similar results.
A lot of teams buy-in the ABM hype but never do a proper onboarding of key stakeholders to get their buy-in and resources. They get a green light to start, but then are constrained on the resources, time and the false revenue expectations.
As a consequence, the ABM programs become shut down with lots of unpleasant internal conversations and lack of trust between sales and marketing.
Make sure your company is ready to launch ABM. Then, only launch it.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.
You clearly see that you're already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We'll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.
Listen to Full-Funnel Live - Account-Based Journeys
*If you want to attend the next live episode, sign up here to receive an invite. Usually, we host them every Wednesday at 4 pm CET (Central Europe) - 10 am ET (Eastern Time).
In the episode of Fullfunnel Live we'll share a sales' perspective in a live, step-by-step case study of an ABM program to create enterprise opportunities in a highly competitive corporate learning market:
We invited our client, Magali Finet-Perdu, a sales rep at CrossKnowlege to share:
Examples of how to use different channels and collaboration with marketing to introduce multiple meaningful touchpoints and book more calls with prospects
How can sales reps attract attention and create awareness in the buying committee of target accounts
How to educate stakeholders and time it correctly, within global organizations that don't rethink their processes, tools, and approaches every year— and where it takes time to find the right opportunity
How to scale from a pilot program and involve more salespeople in a new way of working
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