Switching from Demand Generation to an Account-Based Marketing methodology is one of the best and most rewarding periods I’ve had in my professional career.  Marketing and Sales becoming truly aligned with one goal (Revenue) is pivotal for current business success.  The one draw back about ABM vs. Demand is what to do with all the leads… more specifically, how do we align our leads with the accounts we’re targeting.  It’s incredibly difficult and the companies that offer any services are very expensive.  Not anymore, Syftia: Lead To Account Matching has made our lives much easier.  Having an easy to use, integrated Account Matching tool that integrates seamlessly with our current ABM technologies and methodology has removed countless hours from numerous headcount and enabled our Marketing and Ops organizations to get more strategic in other areas.

You should check it out.

On February 25th 1989, after 3 straight losing seasons the Dallas Cowboys fired their first and only coach Tom Landry.  The team was in disarray.  New Owner Jerry Jones hired a coach with no NFL experience to rebuild the Cowboys from the ground up.  Jimmy and Jerry knew they had to instill a new organizational foundation and that winning would not come immediately.  They drafted Troy Aikman and traded Herschel Walker, one of the most popular players in history, to the Minnesota Vikings for a Kings Bounty of draft picks that would finish laying the foundation resulting in one of the greatest dynasties in sports.

Leading vs. Lagging Indicators

This blog primarily focuses on Account-Based Marketing, Sales, and other Marketing strategies, but the elements relating to foundation building are agnostic.  Business Transformation at any level, whether you’re breaking open a New Sales Segment, Region, Product, etc. requires conviction during rollout.

Transitioning to an Account-Based Marketing methodology is incredibly tedious, time-consuming, and requires an incredible foundation, both organizationally and strategically.  Success does not come immediately and you can’t and won’t transition overnight.  The most common pitfall I have seen early in B2B ABM journeys is manic reactivity to leading and lagging indicators.  Organizations say they trust the process but continuously use lagging indicators to discount the journey mid-flight.  This mania is often compounded by the length of the sales cycle.  The longer the cycle, the more Fear,  Uncertainty, and Doubt will creep into the process as previous leading indicators including MCLs and MQLs start to dwindle and unproven KPI’s relating to successful account penetration, that are not yet correlated directly to % of Revenue contribution, increase.  This is where conviction in your foundation is paramount.

Stay The Course

In my experience, companies transition to ABM for one reason. Demand Generation has become less effective.

More transactional industries and products may be able to generate revenue without transitioning to an account-based model, but the more sophisticated the product, sales cycle, or offering, the more important an ABM strategy becomes.  Buying behavior has changed tremendously over the last dozen years.   There are countless new ways to advertise and connect with potential customers and there are just as many new ways for these targets to conduct research. The number of devices has more than doubled.  The primary ways that customers research and affirm their buying decisions has more than tripled.  And according to Gartner, buyers are also as far as 75% through their journey before engaging sales.

This means wasting time, energy, resources, and dollars attracting the wrong type of customer has higher costs than ever.  An analysis of an optimized ABM framework has shown that the cost per opportunity creation has decreased between 40% and 65% driving a profound impact on positive revenue generation.

Other Considerations

All of this wouldn’t be possible without an amazing community and partners.  For anyone just beginning their ABM Journey I highly recommend checking out ABM for dummies.  If you are in a position to work with an amazing partner to bring your ABM strategies to life.  SiriusDecisions has an amazing ABM Practice.

If you don’t believe in what you’re selling, stop selling it.  If you don’t trust that the product you’re marketing works, stop marketing it. The core of Account-Based Marketing and Selling is providing value to the very best target accounts who can benefit from your offering.  While the majority of us work for profit driven businesses, we have to believe in our mission.  One of the best inspirational videos that always fires me up is Simon Sineks “Start with Why” TED talk.   It boils down to the fact that people don’t but what you do, but why you do it.  If you don’t believe your company’s “why” you should reevaluate why you’re there.  You can’t even start doing ABM without believing the why.

Do something you believe in

Find a product, company, or leader that inspires you. This isn’t a 25-page Mission Statement titled “The Things We Think And Do Not Say”, but it is a valuable piece of advice to consider.  My happiest professional moments coincide with my belief and conviction for my mission.  My unhappiest professional moments come when I am marketing or selling something I don’t believe in.  These swings also tend to bleed from professional to personal morale as well.

Conviction creates passion and confidence

Passion and Confidence are contagious and if you believe in what you’re doing from sales and marketing to product development or engineering, your job is going to feel a whole lot easier and coming to work won’t feel so much like work.

In closing,  The first step to helping target accounts realize the value of your products and services is believing in the cause.  If you don’t have that, you don’t have much and your success will likely be very limited.

Also – Cameron Crowe actually penned the full 25-page manifesto from Jerry Maguire.  It’s incredible.

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at FlipMyFunnel by Matt Senatore.  One of the major themes of the conference was Humanizing ABM.  My presentation focused primarily on the Human Element of our team and how the people, not the technology are what makes ABM successful for our organization.

Our story is similar to so many others.  SALES vs. MARKETING.  We generated leads,  they told us they were sh*t.  It wasn’t working.  We had to pivot.  Luckily we found ABM.  I’m paraphrasing my presentation, but here you go!

ABM Lesson 1 Fail Fast, Fail Often

The journey toward Account Based Marketing requires fluidity and flexibility.  It is impossible to implement a perfect ABM strategy on your first try. There are just too many components.  Account Segmentation, Messaging, and Outreach are just the tip of the spear.  Sales & Marketing organizations considering a transition to ABM need to be aligned on the journey and the stumbles that are bound to come.  Rigid organizations are going to have a much harder time transitioning to the Account-Based methodology making executive buy-in paramount to a successful roll out.  If your organization is unwilling to experiment, test, and validate the long term strategies, ABM will be unsuccessful. 

ABM Lesson 2 It Has To Be Iterative

ABM has to be iterative.  There is too much data, too many tools, and too many experiments to launch your entire strategy at once.  Don’t oversubscribe to tools until the critical path requires them.  It’s better to go deeper and wider in your existing toolset than add a tool or technology that solves one problem.  Make sure that success drives implementation and that the KPI’s you’ve established define when you expand the scope.  

ABM Lesson 3 We Not Me

ABM is a Team Sport.  You can’t do this without buy-in from your entire team.  From the executives to the BDR’s, the entire organization has to be aligned on ABM transformation.  Marketing and Sales have to be in lock-step for ABM to work.  While each individual in the organization may have individual goals and quotas, the team objective must be the primary goal. 

ABM Lesson 4 If You Hire For Culture, Fire For Culture

This is the hardest lesson a leader can learn.  It doesn’t matter if a person is your top rep, if they aren’t aligned with the strategic goals of the ABM team, they have to go.  Trust is critical to successful ABM programs.  Each member of the ABM team must know that the other members have their back.  One bad apple can destroy a strategy.  Don’t sacrifice longterm success for a short-term win.

ABM Lesson 5 Don't Be Afraid Of The Unknown

ABM is fast moving.  Tools, Technologies, Techniques, and Strategies are changing almost every minute.  MarTech companies supporting ABM are popping up like weeds and consolidating just as quickly.  The good news is that the community is strong, vibrant, and growing.  The FlipMyFunnel community is incredible and companies like Terminus, Lattice Engines, Tech Target, and Sirius Decisions are fantastic evangelicals of the ABM movement.  When I look at where we’ve come, there is pure excitement.  I can’t wait to see what happens next. 

Do you view your vendors as products or partners?

Your answer to this question may be a leading indicator on how you view the quality of your stack.

A few weeks a go I was having a discussion with a colleague I hold in high regard.  He made a comment that stuck with me and became the genesis for this post.  While talking about our vendors he told me how surprised he was at how close I am with my vendors.  At first I was taken aback, but as the conversation continued I realized that this was a compliment.  A tight relationship (partnership) with your vendors can be the difference between failure and success.

Too often, companies don’t focus on customer success or retention until the contract term is nearing completion.  By then, it’s usually too late and they are likely to lose the customer. When vetting potential vendors or partners, understanding their churn should be a large indicator in your selection process.

Good Partners

• Successfully train, onboard, and coach their customers
• Maintain a semi-regular cadence with frequent follow ups and touch points in between
• Take time to fully understand the challenges and ideal outcomes customers are looking for

Great Partners

• Stay late and help you pull data for deadline sensitive reports
• Organize user groups for you to connect and learn from peers using the same tools
• Cross pollinate training and product knowledge to various individuals in a department
• Come onsite for reviews for no other reason than face time (not to upsell)
• Provide flexibility for changing business needs and requirements and allow changes outside of contract terms

Sometimes you are lucky and form relationships with your partners.  Over time, you get to know each other and in certain situations that extra mile drives meaningful personal gratitude.  A few examples of these are below:

The Outliers

• Give you opportunities to evangelize your story even when you’re unproven
• Send your wife a bottle of champagne when your flight gets cancelled (on her birthday), even if the event isn’t related to that vendor
• Give you baseball caps for your kids when you attend their event so they have something special that represents the city you visited
• Genuinely care about your success, your teams success, and the success of the company

Inserting a cliche quote- “People do business with people they like and Trust”

If you’re reading this as a buyer – find the vendors that go the extra mile, they will become your trusted partners.  If you’re reading this as a vendor – go the extra mile and don’t just call your customer when they are having issue or renewing a contract.  It’s easier to keep a customer than find a new one.

(I hate the Red Sox, but my kids loved the hats – Thanks Morgan and Venessa!)

FlipMyFunnel

What can I say about the conference other than it was incredible.  FMF reminded me of how marketing conferences used to be.  Huge networking events with a backdrop of incredible informative education.  The cross-pollination of ideas was inspiring.

The key takeaway from FlipMyFunnel is that ABM is the future. Account-Based Marketing is the convergence of Sales, Marketing, and Customer support.  The tools and technology available to uncover and support customer challenges is at an all time high.

There has been some great discussion from my presentation and I plan to share more detail on humanizing ABM and what I presented with Matt Senatore, etc. but the biggest request I’ve received is a screenshot of my subway slide that shows our tools. Here you go!

Building a Community

FlipMyFunnel has become more than an event.  The FMF team have created an amazing resource that includes podcasts, surveys, industry trends, and even a certification for ABM.   You have to check out this amazing community

My Major Concern

We as marketers are in a very unique period.  The convergence of Science and Art has resulted in so many new tools and functionality that the lines are becoming blurred between many ABM vendors.  This provides a few challenges as it relates to Date Enrichment, Account Selection, Prioritization, Execution, and Analytics. There is  a ton of white-space andPE firms are investing heavily in Ad-Tech and Mar-Tech. I expect the market to become more fragmented temporarily before major consolidation occurs over the next 24-36 months. The top CRM and Marketing Automation vendors are partnering closely with many of the ABM vendors, but won’t let any of these products get large enough to usurp or challenge market share before they become integrated.

I have been blessed to meet and engage with some of the greatest minds, thought-leaders, and Pioneers of Account-Based Marketing and Sales.  Many of these companies and individuals have given me opportunities to share my story, participate in ABM evangelism, promote the company I work for and my personal brand.  I am thankful to have formed these bonds and can’t wait to see what’s next in the industry!