Role of SDRs in the Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
We share 5 SDR functions and KPIs to run a great account-based marketing (ABM) program and how they should collaborate with marketing to create awareness among target accounts and generate sales opps.
Here is the typical ABM planning between SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) and marketing:
SDRs to marketing → Here is our sales list. Create awareness among these accounts.
Marketing to SDRs → We’ll run ads and promote our PDF market research. Everybody who clicks the ads or shows up in our intent analytics will be forwarded to you as an MQL (marketing-qualified lead). Follow up with them and generate sales opportunities.
The alignment ends here.
SDRs then continue running their obsolete playbook.
Building a large list of accounts that fit filmographies and are on the territory of SDR
Receiving MQLs from marketing
Uploading all contacts to the automated outbound cadence
Following-up with cold calling
Rinsing and repeating every quarter
I’ve worked with 22 B2B scale-ups and enterprise companies last year who ran that playbook. Their account-to-pipeline ratio was rarely above 1%.
In this newsletter I want to share:
5 SDR functions to run a great account-based marketing (ABM) program
How SDRs can create awareness among the buying committee members
How SDRs should collaborate with marketing
KPIs for SDRs in the account-based marketing program + a report example
Let’s dive in.
Become a better B2B marketer
If you are a B2B marketer, your core KPIs are really simple: sales-qualified opportunities and revenue. Period.
To generate sales-qualified opportunities and influence revenue metrics such as ACV, deal close-rate and sales cycle length, you need to run demand generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, deal expansion and sales enablement campaigns.
It might be frustrating, especially, if you don’t have a prior background or experience of selling to mid-size/enterprise accounts.
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5 SDR functions to run a great account-based marketing (ABM) program.
Here are the core functions SDRs should execute to run a successful ABM program.
1. ACCOUNT QUALIFICATION.
Before adding an account to a specific playbook, SDRs must:
Check if account hits all qualification and disqualification criteria
Assign a tier based on revenue potential
We covered it in the previous post.
Selecting accounts for the ABM program
I just came back from a fantastic Sales Tech Day conference in Vilnius with 400 attendees, where I presented a framework for developing a cluster-based ABM program. The most popular question though was: How can we select the right accounts? Accounts that are likely to become sales opportunities?
2. ACCOUNT RESEARCH AND BUYING COMMITTEE MAPPING.
Define potential account challenges based on the intent, market signals and key initiatives.
Segment to a right cluster based on the known or assumed account challenge.
Define the right buyers inside the buying committee: Champions, Decision-makers, Influencers, Technical buyers.
3. BUYING COMMITTEE ENGAGEMENT & PROFILING.
ABM success heavily depends on the relationship with the buying committee members SDRs will be able to establish. Sales often blame marketing for not creating awareness among the target accounts.
Instead of calling or bombarding everybody with cold emails, SDRs should:
1. Start value-added commenting in the places where the buying committee members hang out.
This could be LinkedIn or for more technical audiences, niche Discord or Slack communities.
2. Use engagement as a reason to connect, and start a relevant conversation.
3. Ask profiling questions to understand where the buyers are in the buying process, and to validate their challenges and product needs.
4. Keep buyers engaged by tagging or sharing with them relevant news or content.
Account "love letters" and content curation are an easy way to create engagement when you lack subject-matter expertise.
We show a few examples here.
5. Invite to the virtual or field events to strengthen relationships and use it as an opportunity for more in-depth account research.
Connect with attendees pre- and post-event.
6. Connect them with their peers (your SMEs, solution architects, or your reference customers) to help with change management and specific problem-solving.
7. Invite them for content collaborations with your marketing team: interviews, quotes for the blog, etc.
It can be as easy as sourcing a LinkedIn post from several chats.
8. Together with marketing, plan nurturing and activation steps for highly engaged accounts with product-need evidence that we cover below.
All these activities should be maintained in a close collaboration with marketing
Check out our LinkedIn thought leadership and social selling course where we show how to run these activities.
4. ACCOUNT NURTURING.
To generate an enterprise sales opportunity, a lot of change management should be done. SDRs should:
Leverage a relevant cluster content (based on account challenge) to initiate or help with a change management
Start a thought leadership to raise account awareness and stay in touch by repurposing existing cluster content
Invite to the relevant events
5. ACTIVATION.
Accounts that are not in market quite often need a bridge between the ABM program and sales opportunities. SDRs should:
Collecting feedback about cluster content and events
Create personalized business cases based on account research and profiling
Connect target buyers with internal SMEs (subject-matter experts) or peers working for your clients to help with a specific challenge
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with a 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.
Mistakes when setting up KPIs for SDRs
A lot of B2B companies don’t change KPIs for SDRs that are involved in the ABM program. Here are the most common mistakes:
Lead generation KPIs (cold dials, cold emails).
Meetings booked. It's easy to book meetings. It's hard to book meetings that are converted into 7-figure deals.
Here is a real example of how controversial KPIs killed an ABM program in one B2B company.
A B2B company wants to involve sales in thought leadership to create a future pipeline and create awareness among target accounts.
Sales are supposed to share and distribute content, engage with the target buyers, add value to the buyers' posts, and run account research.
But their KPIs remain the same: dials, InMails, emails.
Guess what happens next?
Sales either pitch buyers too early instead of trying to understand where they are in the buying process and how they can help.
Or, when they don't see immediate pipeline/meetings booked, they ignore the program and focus on their KPIs.
KPIs and leading indicators in ABM programs for SDRs
Here is how to create KPIs and leading indicators in ABM programs.
1. Account velocity.
How many ICP accounts (that pass qualification criteria and a define engagement and intent threshold) are you able to source, properly engage and connect to (without skipping the key steps) each week?
How many high-odds accounts (high product-need evidence, vendor awareness, and good relationship) are you able to properly research, reach out to and book discovery calls?
What is the total opportunity value of those accounts per month (velocity)?
These are the actions that you can control. What this doesn't measure is, how effective are these activities.
2. Future Pipeline.
Today's pipeline is the result of previous quarters' efforts. That's why you always need to work on future pipeline.
This means:
Identifying vendor aware, engaged accounts - where the product needs unknown, and we have limited relationships with
Working to validate the account challenges and product needs, and to connect to and warm-up the buying committee
KPIs:
account-to-conversation ratio
account penetration (how many buying center members did we engage and start a conversation with).
3. Active focus.
Identifying accounts with high odds of becoming an opportunity this quarter. They are vendor aware, and product need evidence is strong, and you have built a relationship with some of the key stakeholders.
The goal here is to generate demos/discovery calls and sales opportunities.
KPIs:account-to-pipeline ratio
sales pipeline velocity (total amount of revenue generated from these accounts per quarter and per year).
These KPIs are based on the leading indicators - activities I mentioned in the Buying Committee Engagement and Account Nurturing sections above.
Here is an example report we create with the clients to measure leading indicators (we cover it in our Full-Funnel ABM 2.0 course).
How marketing and SDRs should maintain the ABM program
Initially, I didn’t plan to cover that question, but since many of you asked, here are 5 pillars we review at weekly ABM pipeline review meetings.
1. 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁.
Example:
SDRs share insights from a call with the internal Champion and an introduction made by the Champion to one of the decision-makers.
Marketing reports that the account visited several case studies on the website and spent 15 minutes and actively engaged with the demand gen ads.
2. 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴.
What can we do next as a team to influence every reviewed account?
Example:
Marketing will prepare a content hub including all relevant industry case studies and references.
SDRs will receive feedback from the champion and ask if there is anything else to add. They will then share it with a new member of the buying committee. SDRs will start engaging with their LinkedIn content as well.
3. 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀.
Did we hit our targets? If not, what slowed us down, and how can we eliminate it in the future?
Example:
Marketing produced 2 fewer posts because the content marketer was involved in another project.
4. 𝗥𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲.
What’s moving us forward and what’s holding us back?
Define the things that work and discuss how to double down on them.
Define bottlenecks and challenges and discuss how to handle them.
5. 𝗔𝗕𝗠 𝗽𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝘂𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲.
What accounts should be added and removed from the campaign?
Review the qualified and researched accounts that were added from the intent and engagement data sources. Define those that should be added to your program.
In the same way, review all the accounts that don’t engage, stopped responding, or were disqualified to remove them.
ABM weekly pipeline review is the core and a simple step towards marketing and sales alignment and effective execution.
The key goal of that meeting is refocusing the ABM team on the pipeline and revenue goals instead of siloed work and “blaming-each-other” meetings.
Level Up Your ABM Strategy with SDRs
In the recent episode of Full-Funnel Live we covered the topics above and answered the most popular community questions:
What data platforms do you suggest for prospect list building and data enrichment
Any insights you have on getting leadership on board (CRO/CGO, other execs)
What is an account "love letter"?
What's the recommended structure for account owner + SDR in ABM? How do they not step on toes, yet SDRs have proper insights about the account and account owners know what is going on? More over, how do they work asynchronously and maintain a unified approach?
How to leverage SDR insights for paid media activations?
How to convince CRO that the traditional model for SDR doesn’t work for enterprise selling
How do you encourage new joiners or those uncomfortable with ABM to start trusting the process?
Tune in below.
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Super interesting read! I’d add:
For Tier 1 and Tier 2 accounts, AEs should also be involved alongside the ABM and SDR teams. For Tier 3 accounts, just ABM and SDRs should handle it.
Also, I wouldn’t leave account selection and qualification to SDRs. Most don’t have the business acumen for it, and that’s not a bad thing. Early stage? The GTM leadership team should handle it. Once you scale? Let your data team take over.
Great post!