Today, most marketers are aligned to the revenue goals of their organization. This means they are evaluated on the number of opportunities created. As marketers work toward their quarterly and annual revenue goals, they face two major challenges. A rapidly changing buyer behavior and the ever-increasing buyer group size. What do marketers need to do to tackle these?
There is a clear need for marketers to engage entire buying groups and strongly align with sales to enable informed buying decisions. This realization has made marketers look at ABM to enable this alignment and a shift in marketing approach. The MAAP framework will help them understand current ABM trends and what they need to adopt and implement ABM.
What’s the MAAP framework?
First things first, ABM isn’t a replacement for all your marketing strategies. Instead, it serves as a strategic approach for marketers to foster relationships and build a reputation with identified accounts. These are companies that possess the highest potential for contributing to revenue objectives over an extended period of time.
For any ABM strategy to be successful, these three points are absolutely necessary:
- You must have a deep understanding of your ICP
- There must be clear benefits that you provide to large enterprises
- You need to commit time and resources to create a center of excellence
The MAAP framework provides an excellent way to assess if you are ready to get started with your ABM journey.
MAAP is an acronym for Mindset shift, Aims and Objectives, Alignment and Prioritization, and Process and Technology. Let’s take a look at what the MAAP framework for ABM entails.
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Mindset shift
ABM is not a channel. Nor a tactic. It signifies your unwavering belief in the value of your offerings and the capability of your team to successfully sell them. The significance of ABM arises from the evolving purchase behavior of buyers. The number of stakeholders involved in the enterprise buying process is constantly increasing. The key to winning more of these accounts lies in transitioning from a lead-centric sales approach to fostering account-based relationships. As mentioned earlier, marketers need to start thinking about engaging entire buyer groups.
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Aims and objectives
The second point in the ABM framework checklist is deciding what specific objectives you want to achieve through ABM implementation. Whether you want to target specific accounts, increase customer retention, or boost revenue, you should make sure you have a clear understanding of what you want your ABM strategy to accomplish. This would help you establish the type of ABM program you need as well as the type of activities and channels to include in your ABM plan.
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Alignment and prioritization
A successful ABM strategy requires marketing and sales organizations to work together to identify key accounts to target. When the two functions work together without any gaps in communication and collaboration in the quest for the pipeline goal, they’re likely to strike gold. Defining the target accounts is as simple as:
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- Taking the list from your CRM
- Checking if the accounts match your ICP definition
- Identifying the top accounts based on intent signals, relationships and revenue potential
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However, even before the two teams define their TAL, they need to work together on defining the organizational ICP.
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Process and technology
One-to-few and one-to-many ABM motions require the right marketing stack and processes to execute campaigns at scale. Identifying priority accounts and running email campaigns isn’t ABM. It requires you to reach out to different personas with the right messages at the right time on the right channels. For this, you must have the right budget to leverage different marketing channels. With the right marketing stack, you can orchestrate and execute, and with the right ABM platform, you can get actionable insights into account readiness and engagement.
Hit business goals with better alignment through ABM
Like we’ve discussed, organizations need to be clear on where they stand in their marketing journey. And where they want to be before they dive into an ABM program. Once there is clarity on this, meeting the requirements of budget, resources, and tech stack to implement an ABM program is absolutely critical. ABM strategies cannot be successful in silos. There has to be a clear alignment on goals, ICP and processes. This is where our MAAP framework helps organizations assess their readiness and requirements for ABM implementation.
Want to learn more about the latest trends in ABM? Understand how you can make the most of your ABM implementation.
Read all about this and more in our latest report: The State of ABM in 2023
