Just like there’s no “I” in team, there’s no “I” in ABM. No one individual can do it alone. And, just like with any sports team, it takes a combination of vision, leadership, and a team mentality to beat the competition and find success.
Unfortunately, many marketing teams approach ABM as separate components working toward separate ends rather than as a unified team where each person plays a part in achieving the same goal. Indeed, despite 52% of marketers spending 6-15% of their budgets on ABM, 26% of ABM programs don’t follow basic ABM best practices. In an increasingly budget-tight climate, low-performing ABM programs are at risk of getting cut.
Input and planning need to be a concerted team effort between everyone involved in an ABM program: one complete with the right leadership, essential frameworks, thoughtful strategy, and the right skills to make it happen. So, what makes up a winning team, and how does that apply to ABM? Let’s break it down.
What Makes a Winning Team?
In sports, a successful team requires both players and a coach. However, not just any coach or players will do. More specifically, a winning team needs a coach and players who understand their intended roles and how they come together to achieve their goals.
Winning coaches are responsible for:
- Setting the goals. A good coach creates the vision and plans for how the team will accomplish what it sets out to do — win the championship.
- Inspiring the team, getting them excited, and helping all players believe in themselves.
- Building and teaching a playbook that demonstrates how and why all the players must work together to accomplish their goals.
In short, the coach ensures their team knows that no one individual star can achieve their goal alone. It takes a team effort, and the coach’s role is to rally and lead the team together toward their common cause.
Likewise, winning players are responsible for:
- Committing to the goal and believing in the plan.
- Showing up every day ready to put the work in.
- Living with a team mentality — no one likes a ball hog.
- Playing to their strengths.
- Excelling at communication, both on and off the field.
While all great teams have excellent coaches and players, teams that excel and end up winning the championship tend to have one ingredient that stands out above all others: culture. Only the select few teams who truly get along, inspire one another, lift each other up, and have fun along the way will make it to the end.
Applying Leadership, Teamwork, & Heart to Your ABM Program
As with sports, applying a team mentality can make a world of difference for your ABM program. Everyone has a role to play. Thinking of your ABM efforts as a championship game can clarify each person’s role and motivate your team to achieve more together than they could alone.
With ABM, you need leaders who are responsible for:
- Setting the goals and vision for ABM. Your ABM leaders need to communicate where they feel ABM will have the most significant impact on the business, their expectations, and what they hope to achieve with the ABM program.
- Bringing the team together and getting them excited about the ABM program. Leaders should show their team that the business is invested in this program and believes it can have a substantial impact on growth goals.
- Building an ABM charter that clearly outlines each person’s role, how they should work together, and when they should leverage the tools in their toolbox.
There’s not a single star player that can get a team to win a championship. The AE or Sales rep alone can not get ABM to work, nor can one individual “ABM marketer.” Each person on the ABM team is essential.
With ABM, you need skilled marketers and team members who:
- Believe in the vision and are committed to doing their part to achieve the goals that the leaders have outlined.
- Own each of their individual pieces of the overall playbook and work to collaborate. No one individual or department should try to take it from start to finish.
- Develop a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) chart and follow it.
- Excel at cross-department communication.
So, what sets the greatest championship teams apart from all of their opponents? The secret ingredient of culture. The same holds true in the corporate world when it comes to ABM.
What do we mean by that? Getting your target accounts to engage, take meetings, and lean into your ideas is a payoff that rallies the team around the ABM approach. It’s that feeling of scoring the game-winning goal — it’s motivating, thrilling and exciting!
The Magic of Making ABM Win
A team-minded ABM strategy is an investment in your team’s full potential; 76% of marketers saw higher ROI with ABM than any other strategy. Indeed, the greatest ABM programs become highly successful when everyone across marketing, sales, and customer success is aligned, has bought in, is communicating, and is having fun — just like with any successful sports team.
Keeping competitors at bay and winning over your competitors happens when ABM programs go from disparate efforts to a united front. If you’re ready to take your ABM team to the next level, Inverta can act as the coach or a key player to help you win.
Learn More About Inverta
- Interested in how Inverta can help coach you through an ABM strategy? Contact us here.
- Peruse through our ABM-specific content including our latest eBook on ABM Readiness – click here to access.
Unfortunately, many CMOs are finding themselves on the frontlines of the much-discussed (and uneasily anticipated) economic headwinds of this year. Between employee layoffs and budget cuts in the face of increasing revenue targets, a perfect storm has landed right on the CMO’s doorstep.
If you’re a CMO, the question now remains: What marketing strategies will pave the way for success now and in the future?
To make your existing resources go further, find new growth opportunities amid shifting consumer expectations, and hit revenue targets, something needs to change. In this blog, we’ll break down the challenges CMOs are facing, what top CMOs are doing differently, and how you can think about growth in 2023’s unique market.
Challenges CMOs Are Facing in 2023
While budget inevitably does play a factor in marketing outcomes, strategic planning and execution become even more important during times of uncertainty. Indeed, the problem for many CMOs lies in their organizational processes, core skills, and implementation rather than their wallets.
Underused Tech
What good is adding a new martech tool to your belt if you don’t even use your old tools to their full capacity? (Asking for a friend…well, asking for a lot of friends, actually.) Accordingly to Gartner, marketers used just 42% of their martech stack overall in 2022—a decrease from 58% in 2020.
As more and more tools are emerging, it’s important to remember that your biggest source of untapped potential might be sitting right there in your URL bar. If you’re unsure where to start to get more bang for your buck, try auditing your existing tech stack.
Underdeveloped Skills & Support
There’s a simple reason a greater portion of marketers might be underutilizing their tech stack: they don’t know how. A majority of martech leaders (64%) agree that their teams lack both the technical skills or support required to operate and increase the usage of their martech stack. Plus, as more marketing organizations are taking on the ownership of their tools, this presents a real challenge for internal teams.
Couple this with the talent acquisition and retention issues of late (28% of martech leaders have difficulty identifying and recruiting martech talent), and CMOs have a real problem on their hands.
Where’s the ROI?
Finally, a pervasive problem facing CMOs this year is proving the ROI of their tools and processes. Gartner estimates that, despite marketing budgets allocating 31% of resources to marketing operations (MarOps), 72% of MarOps pursuits aren’t resulting in success.
If CMOs are going to be serious about growth during an era of budget squeeze, ironing out the challenges of ROI for the martech stack AND operations is key for success.
The Solution: A Shifting CMO Role, New Focus, & Smart Growth
If anything, 2023 has demonstrated just how far the CMO role has changed in the last few years. Whereas success used to be more nebulous and targeted to a few small marketing areas of focus, today’s success is much more narrowly defined.
Jim D’Arcangleo, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer of AWeber, says the CMO role of today encompasses much more, including:
- Utilizing dozens of channel options with dozens of media players
- Owning GTM plans from end to end, including client engagement and upsell campaigns
- Purchasing the right tech to enable the strategy
- Ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of all marketing activity with the data to prove it.
Where CMOs Should Focus Now
So, with all the changes, where is the best place to focus? Bryan Law, CMO at ZoomInfo, believes that it’s in creating a shift in focus from driving volume to driving value instead. That means aligning with sales across metrics, target accounts, campaigns, and outreach.
How can CMOs do this?
- Be consistent and distinctive in your marketing approach to capture mindshare.
- Invest and leverage the right technologies that enable alignment and eliminate silos.
Short-Term Wins, Long-Term Focus
Ultimately, Lisa Ames, CMO at Norwest Venture Partners, gives a word of caution to CMOs making adjustments in 2023 to not get near-sighted. While a focus on ROI-driven performance with short-term demand gen is important, it should be balanced with a long-game effort to improve brand building and market trust.
Between inflation and a recession, customers will be holding on to their wallets a bit more tightly, and brands who can build long-term value during this time of uncertainty will come out better for it in the end.
Final Takeaways: How Inverta Helps CMOs
At the end of the day, CMOs can jumpstart growth in 2023 if they make a few key adjustments to their strategy and teams today. That might look like jumpstarting your existing team by investing in skill development so your martech has additional use cases, doubling down on proving ROI in the areas where you know it works, or bringing on a marketing consultancy to fill in the gaps.
At Inverta, our team of seasoned marketers can help with everything from martech evaluation and implementation to resource augmentation.
Learn More About Inverta
- Interested in how Inverta can help you achieve revenue growth? Contact us here.
- Peruse through our CMO-specific content including our latest eBook on Managing Change with a New B2B Strategy or Technology – click here to access.
