How to Convince Stakeholders ABA is Worth Doing

In Part 1 of our series, we talked about when an Account Based Approach (ABA) should be embarked upon.  In today’s piece, we’ll talk about how to enlist stakeholders that ABA is worth doing.

Account-Based Marketing or selling cannot happen only within the Marketing department, which makes it very challenging for those of you in cultures that need to prove success out before embarking in a larger initiative. You need executive support, as well as the support of your peers in sales. 

CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM (CDP) BUYERS’ GUIDE 2019

Welcome to the 2019 edition of CDP Buyers’ Guide. As customer data platforms are becoming increasingly necessary for enterprise marketers, it is also becoming more complex to choose the best fit CDP platform amongst the pool of new and old vendors.

Download

To convince executives, get the data: Look deep within your CRM system and find out who your ideal customer profile is carefully inspecting closed won opportunities. Find ways to show or extrapolate market penetration – for example, you may have won 5% of the F500 companies, thus leaving 95% unpenetrated. This math is fairly manual to do so hiring external helpers may be needed here.

Having been a SaaS CMO for ten years prior to starting my own business, I found it is critical to either mirror the internal language used (rather than introducing new, unfamiliar terms as change is difficult for any organization) or find existing growth initiatives to piggyback and enhance further with ABA.

To convince sales, enroll them in the process: At the outbound xDR (companies define business development representatives differently, hence the ‘x’) level as well as account executives. Ask them what their targets are or come armed with data showing their target successes with companies that are similar to theirs in their territories. Ask them which key accounts they’re focused on. It’s highly likely that sales is already thinking about an Account-Based Approach, but not articulating it to Marketing in the same way we tend to talk about our marketing tactics .

“Hey, Marketing, where the $*@%* are my leads?” making reference to leads at an individual level is a common issue we see in our engagements. As we suggested previously, we’d suggest keeping the lead process flowing. However, you should be asking better questions of sales and the SDRs in/around territories and account objectives. Get them thinking around accounts where an ideal outcome is this kind of conversation: “Hey, Marketing, we’d love for you to focus on GE, Thomson Reuters, and SAP.”  In situations like these, they may not even be saying ‘ABA’, ABM, ABE, or ABX whatever acronym comes out next.

To convince your boss: If you’re the head of marketing, reporting to the CEO or COO, sell the value of an Account-Based Approach by showing potential revenue impact . You may want to quote the ITSMA, who found that account-based marketing “delivers the highest return on investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic. Period” .

To convince a marketing leader: If you’re at a level below that of a head of marketing, it may be more challenging to convince them about the benefits of ABA. They’re likely hearing the vendor chatter loudly. My advice to you is to bring data points to the table from your own internal systems, as well as that of external third-party viewpoints, supporting why there is a need for testing or change. Walking in hand-in-hand with sales will show you’ve done your homework.

A powerful script could be “Look, boss, I’ve been talking to Sales, and they want us to do XYZ…”  

In part 3 of our series, we’ll discuss the talent required to pull off Account Based success. You can also review this part in our on-demand webinar here.