How to Create an Account-Based Marketing Strategy (ABM) (Full Guide)
Full guide to build an ABM strategy in 2024
👋 Hello and welcome to the 10th edition:
How to Create an Account-Based Marketing Strategy (ABM) (Full Guide)
In this edition you will learn:
What is Account-Based Marketing Strategy (ABM)?
Should you run an ABM program?
What are the criteria of success for ABM?
How to install an ABM Strategy (step by step)?
How to launch an ABM pilot (feat Andrei Zinkevich)?
In this edition I’m going to share my recommendations on how to install your ABM function. It’s based on my market analysis, experimentation, advisory, and discussions with industry peers.
Why is Account-Based Marketing (ABM) gaining popularity now?
Marketers are looking for new outbound tactics since mass emailing is not performing as much as before. Indeed, email open rates and reply rates have decreased a lot. In early 2023, generative AI deleted the last entry barrier to cold emailing.
ABM appears to be the best alternative to standard cold emailing as it allows you to not solely focus on inbound. It’s a great way to focus on quality while still reaching out to potential buyers. With this approach, marketers have less chance to “burn the brand” by sending thousands of emails.
What is NOT ABM?
A lot of marketers have been in this situation;
“We need to launch our ABM function! Let’s do it”
- They pick 1 industry;
- Create a list of 30 accounts;
- Write emails with quick personalization;
- Send bulk sequences with automation tools.
Then say "yes, we've tried ABM".
While in fact, they've tried 'standard outbound emailing'.
Honestly, it's normal:
- ABM is still an obscure strategy;
- There are not many online resources;
- And it's now getting popular among marketers.
That’s why I decided to create this complete guide in 5 parts.
So what is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?
If I had to define ABM, I would start from describing the three pillars:
1. Choose and prioritize accounts based on intent
2. Gather intelligence individually for each account
3. Create a tailored outreach strategy for each account
With these 3 pillars, you understand the nature of ABM.
You should focus on elaborating an outreach strategy that matches perfectly the account. You have to take into consideration more than firmographics (company size, industry, or growth rate).
It’s different from ICP-Based outbound which targets a list of accounts that matches your ICP without difference in the outreach strategy:
Should you run an ABM campaign?
ABM is a long and manual process but it can generate great return of investment. So the question you should ask is: is it worth it? Here is what you need to analyze in order to decide:
The time invested compared to potential return on investment
Here are 4 questions to know if it’s worth it or not:
Do you have an initial average contract value above $25K?
Yes → ABM is a good tactic
No → Move to question 2
Do you have an lifetime value above $25-50K?
Yes → ABM is a good tactic
No → ABM is probably not a good tactic
Do you sell a solution that requires complex sales process?
Yes → ABM is a good tactic
No → ABM is not a priority
Do you have easier tactics to close deals with complex sales process?
Yes → ABM is a secondary priority
No → Try ABM but increase your ACV/LTV
Note: You should analyze the average size deal (ACV) but also the lifetime value (LTV) of your clients. For example, if you have an ACV of $10K but a strong retention system, the LTV might be $50K and ABM becomes profitable on the long term.
By now, you should know if ABM is the right tactic for your business. The next step is to understand exactly: How to install an ABM Strategy?
The ABM Process: from target account to conversations
In this part, I am going to breakdown my step by step process to install an ABM Strategy. Here are the 7 steps:
Find accounts with intent (or signals)
Research each account individually
Map the decision makers
Craft one strategy per account
The ABM Pilot (feat Andrei Zinkevich)
Plan and implement the strategy
Execute the campaigns and analyze
1.a Find Account with Intent (Priority)
The best option is to create a list of accounts that have an intent to buy. If the concept of intent is still unclear to you, have a look at my Linkedin post here.
The objective of ABM here is to capture intent to transform interested accounts into revenue pipeline. In other words, your content, paid ads, and social selling tactics create “low hanging” fruits that you can reach with ABM.
You can find in the graph enclosed a non-exhaustive list of 30 buying intent signals:
Build an internal system to gather buying intent:
Identify intent signals that matter for your strategy
Install an internal system to find & centralize them
Prioritize accounts based on intent scoring
1.b Find account with signals (second option)
The second option is to create a list of accounts that have ‘buying signals’. Basically, based on selected characteristics, you will extrapolate the fact that this account might have an intent. It’s not the best option as it’s based on an extrapolation.
Here are examples of signals:
Recruiting a new sales team (job offers) → Might need to create new processes
In this statement, there is one accurate fact: they are recruiting a new sales team. But the second part is subject to your interpretation. Because hiring a sales team doesn’t necessarily mean that they need a new sales process.
Here are a few other examples to make sure you understand the concept of signals:
Expansion Announcements to a new country
New policy published on the website about remote work
The account started using a new software
Regulatory changes so the account needs to adapt
Partnership with another industry company
As you can see, these signals can be interpreted in many different ways.
The Output of part 1 is a list of accounts
2. Research each account individually
The core job of ABM is to individually adapt the outreach strategy to every account. Therefore, you will need specific details for each individual account. This part requires the right methodology, tools, and skills to gather intelligence around an account.
There are 3 types of insights to shape your strategy:
- Company's ecosystem → find market drivers with desk research.
- Company's details → highlight characteristic for true personalization.
- Company's core strategy → understand the internal buying dynamics.
The Output of part 2 is a one pager about each account
3. Map the decision makers
Decision makers
The tricky part of identifying decision makers is that it’s often much more complicated than expectations. In general we can say that decision are taken high in the hierarchy. That’s why marketers and sales tend to target Head of, VP, or C-Levels.
Now while this is true in general, it must be pondered with buying dynamics:
Buying committee: a group of people who will decide
Decision Dynamics: conversations happen to make decision
Champion roles: your ally who promotes your solution internally
There is a bad and a good news about buying dynamics:
Bad news: These dynamics vary for each company
Good news: There are recurring patterns and best practices
Understand who is in the Buying Committee
People are naturally wired to seek advice, get influenced, and take decision in a group setting. So while there is a final decision maker, the buying committee is a crucial concept to understand.
This is a visual representation of a buying committee. Here it takes the form of a formal meeting around a table, but the committee can take various forms:
Slack or whatsapp discussion
Meeting around proposals
Around a coffee, lunch, or dinner
A long email thread (with endless cc)
The point is that a set of people gather around a proposal or action plan to compare options and make a decision. At this stage, your offer needs to be like a 4-face coins. It needs to persuade and handle objections from 4 type of interlocutors:
Main decision makers: they will take the final decision but mainly listen to;
Subject expert matters: they are the ones who will use the solution, they bring their expertise, recommend, and influence the decision from an operational perspective
Support: they are often giving a ‘buying checklist’ of what can be done and what cannot be done (budget, legal, GDPR, processes, payment terms…)
Influencers: they are external or internal experts that have a strong influence on the decision makers (e.g. the advisor of the CEO)
You champion could be in any of those groups.
Identify a Champion who will advocate for your offer
A "champion" refers to an individual within a client's organization who actively supports and advocates for your product or service. This person is typically a key influencer or decision-maker in the client's buying process. They have 4 active roles as champions:
Take into consideration the decision dynamics
To understand buying dynamics, you need to understand how decisions are made internally. I’m highlighting here 2 of the numerous possible scenarios:
Bottom up:
The need to find a solution is spotted from the operational team. They are actively looking for a solution to cope with a current limitation.
They know exactly what they need, and they ask for approbation to their management. Depending on the strategic level and the budget involved, they will be able to purchase by themselves directly.
For higher contract value, they will have to involve their management in the decision loop.
In this case, the managers will ask them to propose different alternatives with pros and cons.
Then the operational team and the managers will decide together on the best option (often involving a support function such as procurement or legal)
Top bottom:
The C-Levels or VPs (depending on the size of the structure) identify a market trend, a new opportunity, an ‘exciting’ project or an internal problem.
These new ideas often come from discussions with peers, analyzing competitors, reading news on social media, or getting influenced by thought leaders
They often do a quick surface-level research and ask the team to find a solution to implement. (e.g. a CEO will say “we really need to use AI to automate our sales workflow” to a VP of Sales)
The team lead will then be in charge of identifying solutions. He will often ask a benchmark, ideas, list of options from his team and consolidate a file.
Then he will show the options to the C-level and close the loop.
The best option is to cover both scenario with your revenue playbook.
4. Craft One Strategy per Account
Once you have a prioritized list of accounts with all the insights needed, you can start creating a unique outreach strategy for each account. This is where most companies struggle. They often end up using the same outbound technique and sequences with only a few adaptation.
Here’s what they get wrong:
Prioritize accounts → Create one global outreach strategy → adapt sequences copy to each account
Here’s what they should do instead:
Prioritize accounts → Create one unique outreach strategy per account → implement separately
To adapt your outreach strategy to each account, you have multiple adaptations:
Target: who will you target within the account?
Messaging: what you will say?
Content: in what form will you say?
Channels: where will you reach them?
With those 4 variables, you can have endless possibilities of combinations.
In the table, I highlighted an overview of the outreach strategy:
We will target the champions of our target accounts
We will focus the messaging on the outcome of our solution
We will explain the outcome with a case study
We will reach the champions on Linkedin and by Email
For a full scope ABM Strategy, you can also select multiple elements per column. For example, you could include in your strategy a case study, industry insights, and an audit document to increase your chance of success.
The most important is to adapt the strategy and its components (messaging, copy, design) to each account based on the insights you have collected.
5. The ABM Pilot (feat Andrei Zinkevich)
I contacted Andrei Zinkevich to write a part of this guide as I love his ABM pilot model. I believe you should not start from a too ambitious program when trying ABM. Instead, you should aim for a pragmatic and simple approach.
That’s why I love his 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-10 technique:
Here’s how to implement this pilot program:
Select 1 target market
Select 1 vertical within this market
Get 1 SDR in the Pilot team
Get 1 Marketer in the Pilot team
Choose 1 source of intent data
Choose 1 warm-up tactic
Choose 1 specific goal
Target 10 accounts
It’s important to choose a specific goal
Make sure to keep only one goal (Net new revenue, Expansion, Acceleration, Renewal) otherwise you will have to run multiple playbook at the same time. Keeping one goal per pilot helps you to centralize your learnings and avoid spreading too thin.
Focus on a market vertical for better targeting
A vertical is a subsegment of a market segment e.g. Financial institutions. Verticals are: insurance, banks, loans, financial consulting, VC, private equity, etc
Adopt a ‘test and learn mindset’ for the pilot:
The Pilot campaign is an experiment. You make hypotheses about your ICP, do preliminary account research, and learn a lot about target accounts.
You need to apply learnings to improve account qualification criteria, account research process, and activation processes.
The goal is to launch a campaign fast with minimum resources to avoid losing momentum and trust from execs and sales.
Avoid the most common traps in the ABM Pilot:
Including lots of accounts in the pilot program, you won’t be able to run ABM properly
Adding a wish list of accounts instead of engaged accounts
Allocating big budget Involving the entire sales team.
You need 1 SDR who’ll be your Champion in the sales team helping to scale the program later.
6. Plan and execute your ABM Strategy
The link between strategy and implementation is called planning. The best way to plan your ABM campaigns (pilot or full scale) is to divide the implementation into 6 steps:
Prioritize accounts
Research accounts
Map decision makers
Tailor an outreach strategy
Run the ABM Campaign
Analyze results for better iteration
I am proposing a 3-month roadmap here for an ABM campaign:
It should obviously be adapted to your industry, sales process, and ACV.
As explained early in this
Create a squad to run the ABM campaign
The best way to run an ABM program is to create a squad composed of several experts. Pick one champion to be the squad leader (project manager) and pick one person from each team as follow:
1 Marketer in charge of content creation, copywriting, and marketing outreach
1 SDR in charge of the sales process, meeting, client relationship
1 Subject expert matter to help on the core topic for content and to answer questions from the client
1 or more support experts to help depending on the needs (designer, legal team, procurement) - those experts can come and go depending on the stages
Choose your north star metric
The squad should be aligned on one core metric to walk in the same direction.
Here is what you should avoid:
The SDR waiting for ‘leads’ from the marketer
The Marketer sending ‘leads’ to the SDR
The content being too technical, or not technical enough
7. Analyze results and iterate
As in any other marketing experiment or program, you need to analyze the actions and results to iterate. The analysis will depend on the strategy you chose but here are some guidelines on how to analyze the results.
Breakdown the process and ask the right questions
First you need to breakdown each step of the ABM process and highlight the success and bottlenecks of each part of the process.
Identify if you hit your target with this ABM program
The second step is to list the results and see if they match your expectations:
Here I highlighted 4 metrics that make sense in an ABM program. While the 3rd and 4th lines are the most important, the 1st and 2nd lines are also important. Indeed, an initial (meaningful) connection with a champion or a decision maker is a real success for deals that take 4-5 months to close.
List recommendations based on your analysis
The third steps is to write an executive summary of the results and list how you can improve the next ABM program:
A set of rules to be respected (based on what worked well)
A set of actions to avoid (based on what didn’t work well)
A set of recommendations on HOW to conduct the ABM program
A set of new experiments that you were not able to test
Here are some examples:
Have at least 5 touch points with a champion before pitching anything
Avoid contacting the champion and decision maker simultaneously
Combine linkedin, email, and a letter to invite to a private event
Try to identify physical event where you can meet the champion
Alright, that’s the end of this 10th edition
How to Create an Account-Based Marketing Strategy (ABM) (Full Guide)
Thank you for reading! And thank you to Andrei for sharing his pilot process.
If you enjoyed it, feel free to share it with your connections.
Thanks for sharing and its very informational content.
Thanks for sharing and its very informational content.