Editor’s note: This is part three in an ongoing series on overcoming account-based marketing missteps. See the first two parts here and here.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is misunderstood.
“People think that ABM is just a marketing funnel — it’s not,” says Sophia Agustina, advisor at the CMO Council and co-founder and CEO of Gain Relationship, a customer-centricity consultancy. “It’s a relationship.”
ABM has evolved since its early days, when being “hyper-focused on those big accounts” meant closing faster than those who were still caught up in the “spray and pray” approach, Agustina explains.
Today, account-based sales take 3.1x longer than traditional cycles, according to one recent study, and competition is fiercer than ever. “Everybody’s going after the same accounts,” Agustina says.
Faced with these pressures — and the considerable ROI that a healthy ABM pipeline can fetch, it’s tempting to treat every engaged account like a sales-qualified lead (SQL). Often, though, marketing is delivering high-intent, top-of-funnel leads that are promising — just not ready. When sales starts tapping prospective buyers too early, conversion stalls, sales time is squandered, and leads are deemed bad, rather than premature.
What sets the best ABM teams apart isn’t speed but the ability to foster genuine, long-lasting relationships, Agustina says.
Defining quality and readiness
Marketing and sales must collaborate to ensure that the correct accounts are earmarked for ABM — but also that their readiness is correctly assessed.
“Your sales team should be working with accounts that have a higher propensity to close versus those that are more top-of-funnel,” explains Agustina, who’s helmed account-based marketing for behemoths like IBM and Iron Mountain.
By the time a decision-maker communicates with sales, they should already know — and ideally love — what you do, so the rep can use the limited face time to close business rather than rehash your value proposition, she says.
Unified goals and success measures can help reinforce this flow. Agustina holds cross-functional meetings every two weeks to review progress on key accounts, plan upcoming sales appointments and address broader roadblocks and opportunities. The frequency and focus help “both sales and marketing be accountable to each other,” she explains.
Reading the right signals
Today, ABM is less about tracking leads and more about astutely reading signals that a key account is ready to buy, Agustina says.
Be discerning about which members of the buying group to flag for sales outreach, she stresses. “Sometimes people go overboard and start engaging 50, 100 people, which doesn’t make sense.”
To identify the right profiles, study a prospective buyer’s “digital footprint,” Agustina advises. Often, that means reviewing third-party data (e.g., keywords searched via an engine or AI platform) and first-party data (e.g., the person’s interaction with your site, events and content).
Nurturing accounts to true sales readiness
When it comes to getting key accounts sales-ready, the full ABM team should use the 80/20 rule to zero in on the roughly 20% of accounts that’ll drive 80% of revenue, Agustina says, and then dazzle those clients with personalized top-funnel activities.
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