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3 Ways to Ensure your ABM Program is Exceptional

This Week's Buzz

Author

Adam Gelles
July 20, 2023

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

This week’s topic, Account Based Marketing requires significant cross-functional company-wide collaboration. In today’s discussion, I share a few thoughts to ensure your ABM program is exceptional and will drive revenue.

Want to properly understand the potential revenue an exceptional ABM program can generate? To find out, check out our ABM Business Case Calculator to help you quantify that potential revenue.

And, of course, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you for being part of the Buzz community. This endeavor is not possible with you -- our readers. For questions, comments, and feedback, please don't hesitate to let me know.

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3 Ways to Ensure your ABM Program is Exceptional

A well-orchestrated Account Based Marketing program will deliver material improvement to your firm’s revenue and NPS. But to achieve that requires an ABM program that has a well-defined shared vision, strong cross-functional company-wide collaboration, and exceptionally well thought through operations to deliver the desired results. Let’s dig deeper into these three components that drive an exceptional ABM program.

Component #1: A Well-defined Vision

Many ABM programs end up being tactical exercises looking at key accounts and figuring out ways to touch a group of business decision makers in these key accounts to close some deals. But that isn’t an exceptional ABM program, that’s a mediocre one. An exceptional ABM program is a company-wide strategic program that starts with a well-defined vision which reinforces the firm’s brand values.

This means that the scope of your ABM program must incorporate all the touch points that executives at key accounts experience your brand from sales to service to retention to renewal. The entire customer journey. This vision must be about customer satisfaction as well as revenue. So, the exceptional ABM program will have a vision that unifies all those touch-points into a single point of view.

Component #2: Cross-functional Collaboration

Given that breadth of scope, an exceptional ABM program is doesn’t just involve sales and marketing teams. But your entire firm needs to collaborate to develop your ABM strategy. Simply put, the scope for ABM is not only new logo sales, but also improved satisfaction for prioritized key accounts. Note the distinction, it is about how executives at a key account experience your brand from sales to service to retention to upsell. The entire customer experience.

Cross-functional collaboration is one of the hallmarks of an exceptional ABM program. And there are ways to ensure this collaboration. One, develop a company-wide steering committee that includes members beyond just sales and marketing but also finance, technology, customer service, operations, fulfillment and others. Two, drive collaboration through regular program communications. All too often these programs come and go but folks don’t understand why the are important and what the program has to do with their day-to-day role. This lack of understanding falls on the shoulders of program leadership to constantly “sell” and “educate” all parties that are touched by your ABM program. This will drive cross-functional collaboration success.

Component #3: Smooth Operations

The third component of exceptional ABM programs is smooth operations, that is delivering the highest business and revenue outcomes using the lowest-impact effort. Operations excellence is a must-have for an exceptional ABM program.

How do you ensure smooth operations, it isn’t setting up an ABM stack and calling it a day. Its about developing an operationally efficient program that delivers effective deliverables. It’s about a well management data infrastructure that’s constantly enriched with new insights that can help your sales, service, marketing teams collaborate with key accounts better. It’s about choosing technologies and building processes that improve the way these key accounts interact with your brand. For example, maybe the sales and account management teams need a specialized team who only focus on these key accounts to drive NPS and revenue.

An exceptional ABM program is hard to deliver, but the realized revenue improvement and NPS / SAT gains can be a game changer for your B2B brand.

Want to properly understand the potential revenue an exceptional ABM program can generate? To find out, check out our ABM Business Case Calculator to help you quantify that potential revenue.

What are your thoughts on what contributes to an exceptional ABM program? Let me know your thoughts in the Buzz community.

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