ABM Misfires, Part 1: Your ICP is Too Short-Sighted, and it's Shrinking Your Pipeline

Sidestep ICP shortfalls

By the time they land in market, today’s prospects have likely already decided on their vendor “because it’s a very buyer-led journey — even more so [with] AI,” Shumate says. To capture demand for the minority of accounts poised to purchase in your category, you must generate demand for everyone else, she explains. “I’m a firm believer in the 95-5 rule, where only 5% of your market is in-market, and then 95% are in different stages of the funnel.”  

In other words, a shrewd demand generation strategy for the 95% warms the 5% ready to buy a solution like yours. “In-market doesn’t mean they’re hot for you. And most likely, if you’ve not created demand, you’re a stranger,” Shumate says. “Marketing’s job is to create engagement and to educate and get them to a point that they’re in-market so that the BDEs [business development executives] can then call and create meetings.”

She advises her teams to use a “give to get” content strategy to drive awareness. “It’s, you know, ‘Hey, you don’t know us, but this is how we can help you do your job better,’” she explains. That might look like a free ROI calculator, template, or piece of thought leadership. That way, she says, “By the time they’re in-market, and they’re like, ‘Yes, we have a problem, we need to talk to that company because they’re really going to help us, and we really trust them.’” [Part two of this series will cover more ways to drive demand throughout the funnel.]

Aside from over-indexing on in-market accounts, teams with overly narrow ICPs also risk missing adjacent use cases, Shumate and Johnson say.

Johnson recalls his time as CMO of Emburse. The travel and expense software company had identified manufacturing as central to its ICP. But a focus on identifying adjacent industries with similar characteristics — a low barrier to entry and high propensity for satisfaction and swift adoption — led to the discovery of a vertical they’d have otherwise overlooked: construction.

“It’s not traditionally manufacturing, [but] if you think about it … you’re dealing with dozens of trades, subcontractors, and firms, and you want to manage your expenses, your costs, and you can commission very specifically what their spend allowance is,” he explains.  

When it comes to systematizing the hunt for new verticals, Johnson says it’s important to define what makes the juice worth the squeeze. Considerations might include the market’s size, health, growth rate, level of insulation from economic fluctuations, complexity of the sales cycle, revenue opportunity, average contract or deal value, and how entrenched incumbent players are, he says. Once a team has landed on its criteria, he recommends using a uniform rating system or matrix to see how potential expansion areas stack up.

Prioritize — and incentivize — people

Deep customer research is critical to a sharp ICP, Shumate says. “Ultimately, our job is not to sell or to market. Our job is to help our customers do their jobs better,” she explains. “If we can’t understand them and how to empower them, we can’t create an ICP.” She points to product marketing or third-party specialists as key partners in this effort.

Only after rigorous customer research can teams effectively segment by use case, Shumate says. She recommends drilling down into the top two or three identified and mapping the buyer journey for each to uncover core profile dimensions like:

• Who does this problem affect?
• What’s the cost of not solving it?
• Who are the key decision makers and influencers in finding a solution?
• What will drive their engagement at each stage of the funnel?

Leaders must also apply a people-first lens to their own teams, Shumate says. “Everything needs to be tangible,” she notes. “As people, we want to know, ‘What are our roles and responsibilities? What do you want us to do?’”

She recommends defining the ABM roles of individual functions, including marketing, business development, sales, and customer success; the responsibilities that these individual teams have to one another; and the goals and rewards they all share.

“You need to really back into … pipeline together as one team to really move the needle,” she says. For example, Shumate likes to identify a target number of meetings that the full go-to-market (GTM) team is rewarded for landing in a given month or quarter. Each week, the pod meets to review the status of key accounts and decide what each function can do to advance them, she explains. This approach can reframe a classic blame-game scenario (e.g., “BDE, you haven’t hit enough meetings this quarter”) as a problem to solve together (e.g., “Marketing’s decided to increase advertising spend to help warm the market so BDE can land those meetings.”)

In some cases, organizations might also opt to make broader structural changes to promote deeper collaboration, such as creating a shared budget for marketing and business development. “Putting the marketing team with the BDE team makes a lot of sense from an attribution perspective,” Shumate says. “Marketing should be creating demand so that the [BDEs are] focusing their time for the hottest accounts.”