Predictable Pipeline Benchmarking: ABM Execution Suffers from Misalignment
Tom Swanson
Summary
Four tips to improve cross-functional alignment for teams doing ABM:
1. Make it its own motion.
2. Develop a prioritization model and stick with it.
3. Standardize your intake scenarios
4. Structure cross-functional touchpoints
By: Tom Swanson, Senior Engagement Manager, Heinz Marketing
Everyone wants to bring in bigger deals. While not for every single company, the vast majority of the folks we work with are at least somewhat interested in ABM. Personally, I love the idea, but the execution I see is often deeply flawed.
So we come in to help with it. The scenarios are all nuanced and unique but they generally fall into one of 3 situations:
- Sometimes we come in to introduce ABM
- Sometimes we come in to where ABM was just introduced
- Sometimes we come in to only ABM motions
For context, we recently published a benchmarking analysis (it is ungated!) looking at how companies we have worked with rank across a number of marketing fundamentals. Cross-team misalignment is a big pain point for a lot of teams, particularly in ABM efforts.
Common among all ABM implementations is that communication and workflow is a challenge. A big one. This is compounded by cultural and political issues within the team. We won’t be talking much about those today, but if you know you have these issues then focus on fixing your culture and politics first.
I like to simplify things, so let’s get at it. Here is the problem in a nutshell:
ABM does not easily integrate into traditional marketing workflows.
The most common contributing factor to this is misalignment across teams. A team may be fine internally, but cross-functional collaboration is a different story.
This is what it can look like:
- Forcing ABM to fit into an existing marketing motion will create burnout. Then turnover.
- Competing priorities push things back.
- Teams begin blaming each other.
- Credit-squabbling. Who gets credit for what? Does it matter?
- Tools going sadly unused. Looking at you Intent Data.
Alignment across teams alleviates these symptoms. So then the question becomes: what are the common causes of misalignment, and what do you do about them?
Don’t start with 6th bullet syndrome
Before we get into that, we have to go to how ABM is implemented. If you do this part wrong, it will fail no matter what.
Nuwan Senaratna coined the term “6th bullet” to refer to when AI is just slapped on to a product to call it “AI powered”. In other words, it is the 6th bullet down on a PowerPoint slide in the product deck. It is fake AI.
This is by far the most common among companies that are just getting started with ABM. We often see leadership state that they need bigger deals. Then the effort takes shape as a target account list of desirable logos, only to be left to marketing to figure out how to pursue. This is fake ABM, and it causes team misalignment.
If you are going to implement ABM, make sure it is its own motion. We have seen it implemented as a box for campaign managers to check off. “Yep, we met with the ABM team, our targeting will hit our current target accounts.” This is also fake ABM. You are doing normal marketing, but just happen to have some target accounts in your theoretical net.
ABM is about dedicated touches to high priority accounts. Starting off this way will mitigate many of the “early adoption” problems we typically see.
The rest of this blog will be how to set it up. Honestly, each of these could have an entire set of blog posts, so just know that there is a lot of nuance.
A prioritization model helps with ABM’s shifting demands
The primary reason that teams are misaligned on ABM is prioritization. It is also the main reason ABM doesn’t mesh with traditional workflows. If teams aren’t all aligned on what is the priority right now, they won’t make the best decisions.
As ABM moves more to target multi-channel engagement, and given its requirement for high levels of personalization, the demands come fast and often.
Nobody wants to be the person who sinks the big deal. When a request comes through for content or support on a major account with a big $, who is going to say no? What usually happens is the big account gets the priority, and whatever else was going on gets shifted. People either have to work more, or deadlines need to be pushed back. Either way, it causes friction.
Furthermore, the complication it adds causes the “nobody knows where things are at” problem we see all too often. Stellar project management can help, but it won’t solve the problem.
Prioritization is the root, and it is a sticky problem. Getting overly specific with a model isn’t helpful here. I have never seen two look exactly the same. The team culture, political environment, executive pressures, and strategic goals all play a role, and those are highly varied.
So let’s focus on principles.
A good prioritization model does the following (in order of importance):
- It yields a single top priority. Not 2, certainly not 3. 5 is right out!
- It has a clear tie-breaker
- It prioritizes alignment to business objectives above all. This makes it difficult to unseat a top priority.
- It doesn’t overweight urgency. Urgency does not equal impact.
- It doesn’t underweight team capacity. Overwhelming teams isn’t going to get stuff done well.
- It is easy to adjust. You will need to test this and hone it in over time.
Make sure your executives buy-in to this.
Standard intake scenarios maximize data efficacy and communication
Chaos in, chaos out.
How a project starts is often a good barometer for how it will go. If it starts as a crapshoot, it will end that way. If it starts well organized, it stands a chance.
When projects come in, they need to have a standardized set of inputs and steps. Often times this looks like a campaign brief and a kick-off call. In theory this looks good, but in ABM it struggles. Because ABM requests are way different than traditional marketing, they bring the chaos.
ABM requires agility and often times a campaign brief is just too much. This is why you need a custom intake scenario for ABM (and ideally a custom workflow with its own resources). It also greatly helps to have a clear way for how intent tools like 6Sense and Bombora can be used to trigger requests. This makes things more understandable and predictable for the execution teams down the line.
You probably don’t need a full brief, nor a huge kick-off call, but you do need to do a few things:
- Sales and your ABM planner need to align on the request, purpose, supporting data, and release window.
- Pass this request through the prioritization model. Adjust accordingly.
- Prepare a brief in a standard template format.
- A lighter kick-off call (15-30m) with the relevant execution folks and share the purpose and release window.
- Include Sales in this to answer questions about the account.
- Make the project plan in whatever PM tool you use.
As with the rest of the suggestions here, you can’t set and forget the process here. You have to run it a few times, do retrospectives, and update the process.
Effective structure in ABM is dynamic, not static.
Have structured touchpoints for teams
Another common problem faced by early ABO adopters is a lack of best practices around team touchpoints.
Whatever workflow you wind up using, make sure it is clear when the team comes together and for what purpose. Here is an example:
Sales alignment is central to the ABM motion. They often get left out of the marketing discussions, but it is crucial they be engaged here. Nobody knows the account as well as they do. Use this knowledge to both plan and to keep things focused.
Then, ensure that sales is one of the key reviewers on drafts. It is crucial that their expertise is brought into the work regularly. You also want to avoid the nightmare scenario where the final draft comes and sales (the expert and person accountable to the results) is seeing it for the first time with significant edits that could have been handled earlier.
Where folks get hung up on this is time. Enterprise rep time is expensive, so spending it on meetings can seem like a waste. However, if they can provide guidance to marketing that improves the outcomes of the ABM effort, then it is worth it.
This can be generalized to any team that is involved in the effort.
There isn’t too much more to say about this.
Conclusion
There isn’t an easy way to solve team alignment. It is, by far, the stickiest pickle facing would-be ABMers. A paradigm shift is required to do it successfully, and many teams just aren’t ready for that. This is a heavier lift.
Resist the temptation to implement it into your existing flows. It doesn’t work like that due to its high priority nature, fast turn-around requirements, and situational specificity. Keeping teams aligned around ABM means treating it as its own thing.
Even as its own thing, unless you are able to bring in a fully-stocked ABM team, you are going to wind up tapping other marketing resources. Prioritization, orderly intake, and structured communication touchpoints are 3 tips for improving cross-team alignment. There are others, I might write a post about them. Here are a few:
- Have a project RACI to define ownership
- Track time spent on tasks to better grasp capacity
- Build out clear documentation around what content/assets/campaigns you do to support ABM
- Structure in executive touchpoints to ensure leadership is involved
- Track project risks and build in tools to deal with common ones
- Revisit your process every 6 months
If you want to talk about this, we offer all sorts of ABM services, just reach out to accelerate@heinzmarketing.com
