🕵🏻♂️ Lean ABM [new ABM case study]
How we transformed a struggling outbound motion into 40% account progression and 3 qualified enterprise opportunities with national associations in 90 days with a 3-person team.
In this case study we'll share:
The 6-pillar ABM framework we used to move 40% of accounts from vendor unaware to vendor aware and 12% to active focus status
How a lean 3-person team improved pipeline coverage by focusing on 60 strategic accounts instead of spray-and-pray to hundreds
The exact weekly sprint methodology and content repurposing strategy that made ABM sustainable with limited resources
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.
About BenchPrep
BenchPrep is a B2B SaaS organization in the education space, offering an LMS( (learning management system) to professional membership associations and credentialing bodies deliver engaging and impactful learning programs: exam preparation for professional certifications and licenses an continuing education programs.
The target audience: directors of education, product managers, CEOs and Presidents of the associations.
BenchPrep was experiencing challenges that many B2B companies face today: a significant slowdown in their outbound motion combined with long sales cycles inherent to their market.
The marketing team contributed about 80% of their pipeline, but those inbound deals tended to be smaller. Their larger deals historically came from outbound motion and referrals, but this channel was declining.
We just haven't really seen the type of engagement that we maybe used to see with our outbound motion and have also been struggling to get larger deals in our pipeline. Our larger deals have always historically come from that outbound motion, referrals, whether that be customer or CEO or whoever it might be. But we've seen just a little bit of slow down there”.- Briana Manrique, Sr. Director of Marketing.
Pilot Program Results
Here are the results of a 3-month pilot ABM program.
Pipeline Impact:
60 accounts in the campaign (strategic focus vs. spray-and-pray)
40% of accounts moved from vendor unaware to vendor aware
12% of accounts progressed to "active focus" with expressed buying intent
3 qualified sales opportunities generated
Continued inbound demo requests from ABM accounts post-campaign
Qualitative Improvements:
Significantly sharper content and personalization
Successful buying committee engagement and relationship building playbooks that led to demo requests
Stronger cross-functional alignment between marketing and sales
"I think we successfully moved about 40% of our accounts from being totally vendor unaware to vendor aware, meaning they had some sort of engagement with us. And then about 12% of accounts moved from that stage to what we call the active focus, which was where there was an expressed intent or some sort of expressed buying need”. - Briana Manrique, Sr. Director of Marketing.
What makes the results amazing is that the program was executed by a lean, three-person team:
Brianna Manrique (Sr. Director of Marketing)
Megan Barenie (Marketing Manager)
Jalynn Close (BDR)
Below, I’ll share the structure of our pilot ABM program, team, setup, and responsibilities.
GET ACCESS TO A NEW FULL-FUNNEL ABM 2.0 COURSE
What's included with the course access:
12 modules covering step-by-step ABM strategy development: goal decomposition, ICP, account list building, ABM team, warm-up and activation playbooks, reporting, scaling ABM and building a cohesive ABM & demand gen function.
Short explanation videos and "how to" examples. We believe it's better one time to see a practical example then listen to the theory hundreds of times.
5 orchestrated and ready-to-use ABM playbooks and a detailed explanation
Report dashboard for 4 types of ABM programs: new revenue, pipeline acceleration, expansion and churn prevention
Live case studies and examples of the campaigns we implemented with the clients of Fullfunnel.io in the past few years
17 templates to simplify your ABM strategy launch: ICP, revenue analysis, intent data tracking, account warm-up cadence, customer research, account scoring and prioritization, ABM budget planning and forecasting, account planning, reports, personalized offers, and many more.
Planning & Presenting a Pilot ABM Program to Execs and Sales Framework
Minimal viable stack recommendation and guidelines on how to use it to avoid ramping up budget and being pressured to show ROI for the purchased $50k software
Pilot Program Breakdown
Here are six pillars of our pilot program.
1. Created a Committed Cross-Functional Team That Can Wear Multiple Hats
Here is the breakdown of responsibilities in our lean team setup:
Brianna (Sr. Director of Marketing): ABM program lead, subject-matter expert, and partial RevOps functions, coordinating overall strategy and reporting.
Megan (Marketing Manager): Content creation, design, and technical tasks, working closely with sales on outreach and content development.
Jalynn (BDR): Account research and engagement.
Partial support from leadership: the CEO, Ashish Rangnekar, and VP of Sales, Evan Burton, participated by providing input for account qualification and prioritization, account research, content, posting content from their profiles, and following up with active focus accounts.
Daily Execution Time:
Brianna: "One hour a day is a good amount of time to spend on leading ABM program each week"
Megan: "Four to five hours a week" with recommendation to "block time on the calendar to create account-based content"
Jalynn: "8-10 hours a week is a sufficient time to execute account engagement"
That being said, keep in mind that there is a learning curve. Initial setup required more time for teams new to ABM:
"There was definitely time taken in the learning curve from just the fact that we hadn't run a program like this." - Briana Manrique, Sr. Director of Marketing.
2. Run a Small-Scoped Program Focusing on Strategic Accounts
Instead of spray & pray to hundreds of accounts, we defined strict cluster account qualification criteria, including:
Revenue potential
Level of relationship
Level of awareness
Product need evidence
"We ended up having about 60 accounts in the campaign. I know that kind of dwindled or fluctuated at times, but about 60 accounts."- Briana Manrique, Sr. Director of Marketing.
Next, we developed an account progression framework:
A clear system for moving accounts from vendor unaware → vendor aware → active focus with expressed buying intent.
This framework requires an in-depth account research and full personalization.
"We learned that personalization is more than just using somebody's company name or their industry or some sort of personalized token😁. It's really about being intentional about the accounts that you are working on and understanding everything there is to know about them.” - Briana Manrique, Sr. Director of Marketing.
Learn more about account research in this episode of Full-Funnel Live.
3. Create an ABM Content Strategy Focused on Repurposing and Strategic Creation
Before defining what content to produce, we did an analysis of the buyer journey of the key cluster clients.
Next, we defined:
What should our strategic narrative be, and what assets could be repurposed?
"You don't always have to be coming up with content from scratch. I highly encourage you to use what you already have.We'll take webinar content and repurpose that into blogs, infographics, or whatever it might be. And then we can repurpose that as our LinkedIn posts for our ABM campaign." - Briana Manrique, Sr. Director of Marketing.
What new pieces of content must we create that sales can leverage in conversations?
What types of personalized content can we create?
This content was shared by the CEO, VP of Sales, and SDR 2-3 times a week, including 1-on-1 distribution.
4. Established Daily Engagement KPIs.
With limited resources, every team must prioritize WHAT can move the needle and impact account engagement.
We defined 4 core engagement pillars:
Fully researched accounts w/ buying committee mapped
Personalized connection requests to the buying committee
1-on-1 non-sales touchpoints (comments, content sharing, etc)
Content collaborations with the target accounts
People were very excited when we would reach out asking for them to [answer] a question and we're gonna post it on LinkedIn and I don't know, it was like a form of flattery, I think."- Megan Barenie, Marketing Manager.
Next, we created a simple report to track our input weekly.
"It was really all about building relationships. And we weren't just asking for meetings right away with people that we had never talked to before, which, sad to say, was something we've definitely done in the past. Here is one example that stands out: in February we had just a conversation with a target account. We asked for feedback on a recent piece of content and three short months later, they requested a demo."" - Megan Barenie, Marketing Manager.
5. Set Up Weekly Review and Planning Meetings
During these meetings, we reviewed:
what’s working and why
what’s not working and why
what bottlenecks do we have and how to unblock them
what content do we want to create
what accounts are we going to research and engage
which accounts we'd move to active focus, and what actions can we take to facilitate opportunity generation
The weekly plan was adjusted to the team's capacity and other marketing & sales activities to avoid overwhelming the team during extremely busy schedules.
Here is how Briand and Megan describe these meetings:
"Having weekly meetings with Andrei from Fullfunnel, Brianna, me (Megan), and our sales rep, was a perfect opportunity for us to kind of talk about our wins and celebrate them. Also, encourage us, because we're seeing the more we do, the more action we're taking, the better the results.
Week over week, you would kind of change your tactics based on what you had seen from the previous week. So, you know, someone from one of your accounts engaged with a post. Maybe you would reach out in a one-to-one message with a personalized content hub.
We're talking about the content for the week, the plan for the week, and I thought that our meeting was crucial to keeping everyone aligned, on board, excited, and kind of passionate about what's to come.
It also allowed our team to communicate resource constraints. Everybody was able to say, “Hey, I might be low on capacity this next week,” and we then prioritized weekly activities and KPIs accordingly.
6. Run Fully Personalized Activities for Active Focus Accounts
For each of the highly engaged accounts, we defined what would be the most meaningful touchpoint, both to help the target buyer and help us influence the opportunity creation. Here are two core pillars.
1.Personalized Content Hubs.
"Anyone who had engaged with us, whether they'd be attended a webinar or content collaboration, we would create a content hub for them personalized to that target account with personalized messaging and videos and resources that were relevant and helpful for them. We got to see what resources they wanted to, which ones they clicked on, how much of the recording they had. And that was a very good key activity to kind of share where their interest was, if there was interest." - Briana Manrique, Sr. Director of Marketing.
2.Executive Follow-up.
CEO followed-up suggesting free consultations and strategy sessions to improve learning programs and learner experiences instead of immediate sales pitches.
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Academy includes:
All our B2B marketing courses including ABM playbook, Demand Gen Playbook, LinkedIn Allbound marketing playbook and 11 more courses that aren't available publicly + all upcoming courses.
Private Slack community to answer all your questions
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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.
30% discount for live events and bootcamps
Learn more and join the academy here.
4 keys to ABM success.
The success came from breaking down traditional silos between marketing and sales. Here are four core alignment pillars.
1.Sales Buy-in from the Start with early wins.
"The one thing that really stood out to me just in my past... was not getting sales buy-in. So I was doing a lot of direct mail and creative approaches. But it was really marketing led without that sales support. With Fullfunnel team, we got the realization where you need sales buy in early and you need them all on board and everyone invested.
We had also ran mini ABM campaigns during the first week. Not at all to the degree to which this campaign was run, but we did see a lot of engagement, and that helped to build trust” - Megan Barenie, Marketing Manager.
2.Joint Content Creation.
Marketing and sales collaborated on every piece of content rather than working in isolation, ensuring sales would actually use marketing materials.
3.Shared Account Strategy.
Weekly planning sessions included both teams determining next steps for each engaged account based on their specific engagement patterns.
4.Cross-functional Execution: "It's account-based marketing, but where does sales fall in that name of account-based marketing?" The team recognized that successful ABM requires both functions working together, not marketing handing leads to sales.
Learn more about who owns ABM here:
Main Mistakes B2B Teams Make When Launching ABM
We asked Megan and Briana to highlight main mistakes that lead to ABM failure. Here are 6 insights.
1.Insufficient time to execute the program.
"The first thing that comes to my mind is not committing enough time and energy into executing it, to creating the content, to making your plan, and sticking with the plan. We would make a plan for the next week, and because of other bandwidth issues and kind of limits to timing, we never, we didn't always achieve that goal for the next week. "- Megan Barenie, Marketing Manager.
Skipping personalization.
"There are ways to cut corners and not to say that we never did that, but like that's not gonna show you the results that you hope to see.” - Briana Manrique, Sr. Director of Marketing.
3.Lack of Sales Buy-in and Integration.
Both Briana and Megan mentioned that previous attempts to launch ABM failed because they were "really marketing led without that sales support," leading to siloed execution and poor results.
4.Inadequate Account Research.
"Our BDR Jalynn would take the time to do in-depth account research. When a contact would engage with us, she would do research about that contact. And then we were all working together around like, how, like what's our strategy?" - Briana Manrique, Sr. Director of Marketing.
5.Unrealistic Expectations from a pilot program.
Teams need to understand that ABM "is a long play, so something for folks to keep in mind, you're not gonna see necessarily results right away." - Briana Manrique, Sr. Director of Marketing.
We’ve interviewed Briana and Megan on our podcast. Tune in below to learn more about their ABM program.
Work with us to develop a successful ABM motion.
Our approach enables your team to:
Holistically create brand awareness among key buyer personas of strategic accounts to create a future pipeline.
Achieve revenue alignment between marketing and sales and set up cross-functional collaboration with clear responsibilities, KPIs, and accountability.
Create an account prioritization criteria to define what accounts deserve a 1:1 approach from sales based on relationship, engagement, and buying signals.
Create joint pipeline progression and acceleration playbooks to increase the conversion of engaged contacts and accounts into discovery calls and sales opportunities.
Incorporate ABM in your GTM to make an evolution and increase the efficiency of your existing marketing and sales mix.
Leverage signals, engagement, and intent data, account insights, and research to improve personalization and efficiency of sales outreach.
Customize content to influence the entire buyer journey with industry-specific, account-specific, and buyer persona-specific content.
Create strong documentation to go from random acts of marketing to predictable enterprise pipeline generation.
Creating visibility about ABM progress and results with holistic program and activity dashboards.
Listen to Full-Funnel Live - ABM to professional associations [Live Case Study].
*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) - 11 am ET (Eastern Time).
In this episode of Fullfunnel Live, we are sharing a live ABM case study of our client, BenchPrep, presenting ABM to professional associations playbook.
Tune in to learn:
What can you expect from the pilot program: live results
The key playbooks we've executed, what worked and what didn't
The main mistakes B2B teams make when trying to launch an ABM program?
How to get buy-in from sales and leadership for ABM
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