How to Implement Account-based Marketing Without ABM Software

Part 1 of a Series

Account-based Marketing is having a new “moment”, it seems. The concept has been around for several years, but I’ve been seeing more discussion of it and more adoption of its principles.

The concept behind ABM is that you’re taking the classic lead generation funnel and flipping it on its head, so that you’re marketing to a known list of target accounts, rather than trying to generate leads in bulk and then going through a qualification process from MQL to SQL.

The reported benefits of Account-based Marketing include:

Other marketers I’ve talked to about ABM describe a wide range of adoption, from thinking about implementing some sort of program to having implemented a program relatively recently. Very few people noted experience with ABM for more than two or three years.

What this means is that it’s not too late for you and your company to get started.

While the concept of ABM is clear, the execution can seem fuzzy. There are many ebooks and webinars that explain the principles and benefits of ABM, but relatively few that go into any detail about how to actually deploy and measure a program. (One book I can recommend is Adam Turina’s Total Customer Growth.)

Proponents of ABM usually recommend the use of an ABM software platform such as Demandbase, 6Sense, Terminus or several other options. What these platforms can do is pretty impressive, such as monitoring the web and your site to provide insight into what information your prospects are consuming, and measuring a prospect account’s intent to buy in terms of timing and level of interest. They then take this a step further and use intent signals to launch ad campaigns within the platform and social and email campaigns with the proper integrations.

But, what do you do if you don’t have one of these fancy programs?  Is it still possible to implement an account-based marketing program for your company through other means?

The answer, I can report with confidence, is yes. I say this as someone who has spent the last year-and-a-half starting up and running an ABM pilot program at my firm, without the benefit of having a dedicated ABM platform at my disposal.

In this series of posts, I’d like to take you through how my team and I went about standing up the program, what we did right and wrong, and how we’ve adjusted along the way.

The minimum daily requirements for ABM success

Buy-in from leadership

Buy-in to the ABM approach from your leadership is step 1A. There’s no point in starting down the road to this account-based approach without your marketing leader, sales leader, and in some cases members of your C Suite on board.

When I first started exploring account-based marketing, I envisioned it as an approach that matched our needs, as our target market was well-defined and fairly small. The first person I won over was my boss. We then took our case to the head of marketing. We described the benefits and provided case studies of other companies who had used ABM successfully.

From there we met with the sales leader over our most strategic accounts, then onto the C Suite. We were careful to lay out the benefits and provide an estimated ROI over a three-year timeline. The ROI calculation was based on a set of assumptions that included the amount of new revenue and upsell/cross-sell revenue we could expect from this effort, less the cost of targeted advertising.

Be sure to set expectations with your leadership. ABM didn’t provide us with a quick boost in results; it’s been a slow build with a lot of trial and error, and we’re still learning 18 months in.

Chances are your sales and marketing departments are somewhat siloed. There are good reasons for that; for example, marketing has brand identity and messaging to communicate in addition to supporting sales efforts.

However, this “separation of church and state” can also result in marketing efforts not properly aligning with sales or account retention priorities. It can result in marketing throwing leads over the fence for sales to qualify, with a lot of chaff among the wheat.

The ABM approach necessitates a close working relationship with sales to identify critical target accounts. The same goes for account management with clients up for renewal.

A big adjustment that needs to be made is agreeing on common metrics of success between sales and marketing. This had not been a large concern at my company, and it’s pretty normal for the two areas to measure different KPI’s up to the point of common measures such amount of leads or pipeline and closed business.

In the world of ABM, both sales and marketing need to be looking at number of opportunities, the level of prospect engagement with those opportunities, and pipeline velocity. Length of sales cycle and average deal size should also be prioritized by both teams.

I think it’s worth mentioning at this point that you should also coordinate with your sales BDMs and your CRM support team, if you have one, on how prospect engagement with marketing content will show up in your CRM. Issues to be addressed include: How will engagement be recorded in a known opportunity with prior activities, and will a new lead origin overwrite the initial one or be additive?

It’s a good idea to schedule regular meetings with both sales and account management to get updates on opportunity progress, what they are experiencing in the market, and what is working or not.

You need data to inform every step of the account-based marketing process, and that data comes from sources inside and outside of your organization.

The stock in trade of ABM is intent data, knowing which are accounts are in market for what solution so as to focus sales efforts. Many ABM platforms can integrate with Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) such as HubSpot or Pardot, so intent signals or an accompanying opportunity score can trigger campaigns in the MAP.

Intent data can also be obtained through companies such as ZoomInfo and Bombora. While these services aren’t free, they’re a lot less expensive than an ABM platform. You can utilize this intent data without such a platform, it just becomes a more manual process where you monitor intent signals, pull manual reports, and use that information to go into your MAP and manually launch campaigns.

You may not need an ABM platform to get started with ABM, but you do need money! Money for ads specifically. How much do you need?

On average, in 2022, 28% of the marketing budget for the companies surveyed was dedicated to ABM, and that number is likely to be higher now, although it will vary depending on your targets and your overall marketing budget.

Another way to look at your ABM budget is to estimate how much money it will take to engage your targets through their decision-making process, then see how many accounts you can reasonably target given your budget allocation.

Okay! Once you have these “minimum daily requirements”, how do you start your pilot? That’s the subject of my next post in this series.

Note: No Generative AI was harmed (or used) in the writing of this article.