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3 Ways to Partner with Sales Leadership to Drive ABM Success

The are two sides to a great ABM program – great planning and great management. But, the most important key to a successful, revenue-generating ABM program is working with Sales Leadership.

Here are 3 ways to ensure that your partnership with sales leadership will lead to an excellent ABM program.

Design your ABM Program with Sales LeadershipToo many times I see marketing teams design their ABM strategies in a vacuum. This is not just about communicating effectively with sales leadership, but about partnering on defining the role ABM has in your company’s revenue and business objectives. For example, is the expectation that ABM will contribute to 10% of Revenue from new business, existing accounts or a combination of both. Or, will ABM improve your NPS by 10% or 15% year over year?

These are questions that need to be answered by marketing and sales leadership to develop and design an effective ABM strategy. This also need to be put in context at the exec level to ensure our ABM program gets the resources it needs to be success. This homework will aide in developing a solid business case for an effective ABM program.

Develop your ABM Program HolisticallyABM is about revenue-generation and improvement of key account relationships. At the end of the day its about sales and service strategy. What ABM isn’t is an advertising strategy on LinkedIn. Sure that could be a deliverable under an ABM program, but it isn’t the program. ABM touches many departments across a company that touch key accounts. Finance, Operations, Customer Service, etc. As such, all departments need a game-plan to employ an ABM program.

For example, for these key accounts do we have different payment terms that may be more liberal than standard. Does this change have finance’s sign-off? Does this change lead to improved NPS for those Key Accounts? These are the questions that need to be answered as you plan your ABM program. It’s not just a “marketing” program.

Report your ABM program to SalesAnother great way to partner with sales is to collectively identify the KPIs that will be used to measure the success of the program. These can be external numbers (e.g., NPS) or internal numbers (e.g., analyzing cSAT for our key accounts vs a company-wide average). But partnering with Sales leadership to identify these metrics will be paramount for organizational buy-in and long term management.

At TBM, we use a G.O.T. (Goals > Objectives> Tactics) mapping methodology to help cross-functional teams identify and select the best metrics to use to measure success. This methodology also puts metrics in context of overall business objectives. Working with Sales Leadership to ensure this alignment between revenue and the ABM effort will ensure program success.