Shifting from lead gen to ABM
How to initiate the shift in your company and avoid typical mistakes
In 2024, many B2B CMOs shared with me that they consider an ABM (account-based marketing) strategy as an alternative to traditional acquisition and lead generation (see the stats below).
But there is a big problem: internal change management.
They need alignment with executives on priorities and expectations before launching a pilot program and initiating the shift. They need to mitigate the concern: “Wait, are you saying we should kill our bread-and-butter pipeline-generation engine? ” (credits for the quote to Ofir Platner, our long-term client and friend :)).
They need alignment with sales on unified GTM Strategy, ICP, territory planning, metrics and playbooks aligned with the buyer journey.
Today we’ll share:
The step-by-step process to initiate the shift from lead generation to demand generation & ABM.
The vital change in KPIs and incentives for marketing and sales teams
How to fix marketing and sales misalignment
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The step-by-step process to initiate the shift from Lead Gen to Demand Gen & ABM.
Shifting from lead gen to demand gen & ABM is one of the most difficult challenges for B2B CMOs. You need to challenge the status quo and prove that "what got you here, won't get you there".
Your executives and sales teams will be resisting because it is challenging their worldview. But if you won't do it, your team is doomed.
Here is a step-by-step process we use.
1. PREPARE THE DATA FOR THE CHANGE.
Here are 3 layers of proof and reasoning we use to challenge the status quo.
a. Buyer journey of existing clients.
Start with interviewing recently won deals.
How did they become aware of you?
Did they check any marketing content before becoming a client?
What internal discussions did they have and how did they present your product?
Why did they decide to buy?
How do they typically do vendor research and evaluation?
Collect and present different touchpoints.
b. Performance of current programs.
Analyse revenue, pipeline, pipeline velocity and revenue metrics for the last 36 months:
Average Contract Value
Win rate
Sales cycle length
# of sales opportunities (not discovery calls)
Expansion deals
Payback
Account to pipeline ratio (how many accounts that were targeted became sales opportunities)
Next, analyze and categorize lost reasons.
Then, create diagrams to present declining pipeline and revenue.
c. Collect industry case studies.
Interview or talk to consultants and marketing agencies that work with your industry. Another option: talk to non-competing companies that made a change you want to make.
Why did they decide to make a change? What are their core activities and why do they run them? What are there before / after results?
2. INTERNAL BUSINESS CASE.
- Validate the root GTM challenges with the sales team
- Present to stakeholders the root challenges, solutions, arguments for it, and the cost of inaction (why this change is needed now).
- Present a pilot program, with its budget and resources.
*Check this guide: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/leadership-buy-in
3. LAUNCH A SMALL-SCOPE PILOT PROGRAM.
Define a small but committed pilot team. Set up clear responsibilities, timeline and expectations. Make sure your executives are aligned.
Your goal: not to drastically increase contribution to the pipeline, but to build a proof of concept.
*Read this guide: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/abm-pilot-the-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-10
4. PILOT RETROSPECTIVE.
Document your program and playbooks. Present the wins and results. Explain what could be done better and how to scale the program.
5. BUILDING A HOLISTIC DEMAND GEN & ABM FUNCTION.
After you get initial support, you can start setting up cross-functional collaboration and align your marketing and sales processes with the buyer journey - we’ll cover it below.
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
CHANGE IN KPIs AND INCENTIVES
One of the critical keys to change management success is adjusting KPIs for marketing and sales to drive pipeline.
Most companies, when launching ABM, expect new pipeline and sales opportunities, but rarely change KPIs of their team.
Sales stick to outbound daily KPIs: 80 dials & 25 sequences/week. Marketing continue measuring # of MQLs and cost of acquisition.
Here is what happens next.
Sales and marketing continue the old behavior and treat all accounts the same way. The personalization doesn't go beyond programmatic "FIRST NAME", "TITLE" and AI-discovered challenge.
This program fails fast.
To run ABM properly, you need to adjust KPIs for the ABM team (both for marketing and sales) to incentivize behavior aligned with the current buyer journey stage.
*Learn about this account segmentation here: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/selecting-accounts-for-the-abm-program
CLUSTER ICP ACCOUNTS
Status: not aware of us & product need is unknown).
Goal: Creating awareness.
Leading indicators:
- Personalized connection requests
- Thoughtful comments
- Cluster thought leadership posts produced and published
- Non-sales touchpoints to start a conversation
*Get guided help to implement it in our step-by-step course: https://fullfunnel.io/abm-on-linkedin-course/
FUTURE PIPELINE ACCOUNTS
Status: Aware of us & product need is unknown.
Goal: Engaged buying committee + fully researched account.
Leading indicators:
- Fully researched accounts
- Buying committee members enrolled in the playbooks
- Insights collected from 1-1 conversations
ACTIVE FOCUS ACCOUNTS
Status: Aware of us & product need is known.
Goal: Generating discovery calls.
Leading indicators:
- Fully personalized solution offerings
- Personalized account and buyer-persona content
- Signal-based personalized engagement
- Booked "bridge activities": strategy sessions, audits, etc.
You can't make ABM successful if your team still reports on the old KPIs.
Make sure that ABM KPIs are aligned with the buyer journey of your target accounts. Otherwise, the program is doomed.
Lastly, you need to fix the misalignment that is likely to happen in your marketing department.
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.
FIXING MARKETING AND SALES MISALIGNMENT
Marketing and sales silos occur first because of marketing & marketing misalignment.
A lot of B2B teams follow a horizontal marketing setup where different units focus on their own KPIs and metrics:
Content - traffic
Demand gen - MQLs
Field marketing - MQLs
Client success - NPS
SDRs - # of lead gen touches & meetings booked
AEs - pipeline won
They are often not aware of the activities of other departments and don't care about their impact on the pipeline aside from Sales.
Changing people, hiring agencies, buying more expensive stack won't help until you fix the fundamental misalignment.
Here is how to do it.
1. Accept the fact that the horizontal marketing team setup (content, product, demand gen, acquisition, ABM) is broken.
It creates silos between different marketing units and focuses them on their own metrics instead of pipeline generation and revenue growth.
2. Develop a unified GTM strategy for marketing and sales that replicates the buyer journey.
Every marketing unit should influence the buying process, pipeline generation and expansion, not focusing on vanity metrics (traffic, keywords, etc).
3. Ditch vanity metrics and develop for each marketing unit its own leading and lagging indicators that incentivize the right behavior.
4. Switch from marketing/sales-sourced revenue to ALLBOUND revenue.
B2B buyer journey is a complex ecosystem that includes multiple touchpoints across multiple channels.
HockeyStack made a research on over 1.5mln contacts from 50 B2B SaaS companies on how long it takes to generate a sales opportunity. Here are the stats:
241 touchpoints and 2672 impressions from the first impression to closed won.
No team can do it alone. Stop the battle and the debate about who should get a credit.
5. Replace first-click /last-click attribution model with a blended attribution:
- Self-attribution
- Digital analytics
- Customer interviews
This is the only way to understand what actually influences the buying process.
6. Develop regular joint planning and review meetings.
The goal is:
Review the performance of the current playbooks and programs, and remove bottlenecks
Cross-sharing collected insights about target accounts
Prioritize next actions for target accounts: touchpoints, content, ads, etc
Plan the next week together
Celebrating small wins and positive signals
To your successful shift!
Andrei & Vlad
Listen to Full-Funnel Live - Account-based content strategy: Fullfunnel.io Playbook
*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 new episode of Fullfunnel Live we explored the ins and outs of Account-Based Content Strategy and share the Fullfunnel.io Playbook for success.
🔑 In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
How to create a holistic ABM content strategy for 1:Many , 1:Few , and 1:1 engagement.
An in-depth look at our ABM Content Playbooks and how to implement them.
Real-world examples and actionable insights to help you execute ABM strategies effectively.
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Great article as always!