What Kind of Talent is Required for ABM Success?
Feb 02 2018 | 12:03 AM | 6 Mins Read | Level - Intermediate | Read ModeJon Russo Founder, B2B Fusion
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Jon Russo is a three-time global Chief Marketing Officer in successful public and private SaaS companies in Silicon Valley, New York City, and Luxembourg.
Today, he leads B2B Fusion to optimize marketing technologies and business process to drive revenue growth, with an expertise in revenue conversion optimization and Account Based strategies. Jon also currently serves on the Board of Directors of MOCCA, Marketing Operations Cross Company Alliance, the industry best practice association that drives operational excellence in Marketing, with fellow board members from Intel, SAP, Adobe, and others.
A former active duty U.S. Army officer, Jon earned his MBA from the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley and his Bachelors of Science in Finance from the University of Connecticut. In addition, Jon is a certified master in Eloqua, a Marketo Certified Expert, and Salesforce Certified Expert.
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As Gartner recently pointed out in their October 2017 survey, nearly half of all discretionary marketing spend is dedicated toward internal people or external agency support.
In today’s series, we’ll talk about key resources needed to successfully pull off an ABM strategy to build on our earlier ABM posts of when to create a strategy and how to convince stakeholders of the strategy.
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DownloadThere are at least 4 critical roles that internal resources need to fill:
- Executive: it’s critical to get ‘all in commitment’. It is imperative they are ‘in the canoe’ with you on this strategy or test, that they are not watching your progress from the shore. Without this level of endorsement, we’d not suggest pursuing an ABM Strategy.
- BDR/SDR: Collaboration is critical. Someone who can work or communicate across marketing and sales silos, often times is the SDR/BDR who is the ‘&’ in Sales & Marketing. Having a leader communicate early and often what is working on both sides of the divides makes for a more effective experience .
- Sales Leaders – internal empathy is key. We find that sales leaders are under tremendous pressure these days to produce results. These days, everything is so transparent. What may not be fully understood or appreciated is the level of effort it takes for Marketers to lead an ABM strategy – data, content, customer profiles, etc. There are several ingredients to get right so having an empathetic leader will improve marketing’s odds of success.
- Marketing Leaders are orchestrators. While sales hunts, Marketing’s job is to make that hunting job more effective. Make sure the sales team is informed with relevant insights and intelligence around accounts. Leverage vendors to extrapolate new insights or leverage existing technology investments.
It’s key for sales and marketing to retain key talent. Losing one or two critical people will have a negative impact on ABM performance, regardless of company size, although it is more acutely felt in smaller SaaS companies we see more aggressively adopting ABM.
When talent gaps are missing, it is prudent to look toward external resources. Here are 3 considerations in finding external help:
- Agile. Built for speed with a blend of demand generation strategy and execution is a must. Having one without the other is like a bicycle wheel missing spokes, the performance will be uneven, and in today’s environment, a nimble external party is needed.
- Vendor-neutral, hands-on, best practices experience CROSS platform in a variety of different instances, not just in your industry or in your situation. Being unbiased improves the odds of finding the best situation for your company and your situation. Be highly aware of vendors that get any kind of funding from other MarTech players.
- Trusted advisor / extension of the team ideally with a CMO viewpoint. With the chaos in today’s landscape, it’s critical to distill more quickly what is critical business-wise versus being whipsawed by technology or getting lost in execution tactics .
In our recent webinar on ABM success (you can watch it on-demand here), you’ll see more ways to think about ABM/ABA people resources. In our next part, we’ll describe lessons learned on our 100+ ABM deployments.