So you decide to start your ABM program. You craft the strategies and messaging tailored to your target accounts. You bring in the best ABM tool you’ve identified as fit for your purpose. You start your campaigns and expect your strategy to yield the results you seek. A year into it you realize your ABM program isn’t giving you the return you were looking forward to. What could have gone wrong?
Many B2B marketers on LinkedIn and every other marketing community will tell you that ABM is a hit. They’ll quote openly available figures and statistics to support their claim but they won’t tell you if they’ve actually implemented an ABM program or successfully scaled one. And what challenges they faced in execution. Often, ABM programs fail not because of bad tools or strategies but because the execution is flawed.
Why will your ABM program fail
1. Lack of a clear ABM foundation
If you think about ABM and all you can see is a tool, the challenge starts there. Most ABM programs fail because of a tool-first approach. ABM platforms are heavy, expensive, and require a lot of data to operate. While these tools can enable ABM success, they can also hold you back if you don’t have the right ABM foundation. It is essential to start by building the team’s mindset for an account-centric GTM approach. Then, there has to be clear alignment on goals, ICP and target accounts before starting an ABM program. You can start on your ABM journey even before you jump into a full implementation. For this, you can use your existing CRM, MAP and SEP to understand what works and what doesn’t.
2. Lack of quality data
When you don’t focus on building a strong foundation, every team will have its own understanding of your organization’s ICP. This is detrimental to any ABM program. The more data you add to your CRM without a clear understanding of your target accounts, the more messy it’s going to become. It’s all going to become a more painful task to clean it up in the long run. You won’t even see value from using an ABM platform. All your campaigns, messaging, and tactics will have to be guided by your data. Data accuracy and quality is paramount when it comes to finding success with ABM.
3. Irrelevant, generic messaging
Jumping into ABM without having tested your messaging with your target audience is criminal. Even when you have ticked off all the boxes around your data, tools, strategy and channel selection, your messaging will dictate if your campaign is a success or a failure. It will also decide whether your prospects are tempted to buy your product or turned away by your content. Or boost your battle against your competitors. While you need to have a clear grasp on the messaging that resonates with your audience, you must continuously improve, tweak and test it through the course of the ABM program.
4. Over reliance on technology and only one channel
ABM has become synonymous with channels, buying signals and tools. In some quarters, ABM is email and in some it is display ads. For some, it is all guided by intent data. And for some, it is just a platform.
These are again a result of misinterpretation of the ABM approach. With a clear ABM foundation where you’ve identified your formula for success, channel selection is an easy process. You will know that not all your buyers reside on one channel. Or that they use multiple channels, both online and offline for different types of buying related research. It’s about building a channel mix that successfully finds them where they go without being intrusive. It is good to be guided by buying signals in the pursuit of your buyers but no signal should be exclusively used.
5. Tracking the wrong KPIs and Metrics
Of course, every metric counts and we need to track them. But this has to be done with specific perspectives. You need to keep a tab on your opens, clicks, visits, and responses to continuously monitor, iterate and improve on your campaign performances. However, ABM is all about impacting the pipeline, revenue and customer lifetime value. If marketers get stuck with the day-to-day performance metrics, there can be no impactful optimization in strategy and tactics for growth. Hence, the reporting is skewed and there is no way to bring in the continuous improvement process necessary for ABM success. Tracking input metrics turns your ABM program into a near-sighted dream for quick leads, which defeats the purpose of ABM.
Who owns ABM anyway?
Some say it’s marketing, some others say it should be sales, and then a few say it’s everyone in the GTM team. While we discuss this as a concept, there’s going to be people in your team who will be suddenly put in charge of your ABM program because they were doing demand gen or something similar. Or maybe you’ll hire an ABM expert and expect results from day one. Are any of these the right approach?
This is why we suggest starting with a pilot program approach. You start small with available resources and tools to discover your ABM formula. Then, when your GTM teams have aligned on the approach and functioning of an ABM process, transition people into ABM roles or build teams around your process.
