This article is a guest article from Friend of Inverta, Lisa Dennis, President & Founder of Knowledgence ABM Graduate School™

Touchpoint 1:  Alignment is not a myth

Doesn’t it feel like we’ve been talking about this forever?  There are reasons we all know why it’s so hard to align the entire marketing and sales organizations. Different team leadership, different compensation structures, siloed marketing groups (discipline and geo), sales enablement ownership, the list goes on.  But for ABM, which doesn’t cover every account in your addressable market, it can be achieved with a “less is more” focus.  

While a path to alignment can be designed, the crux of the issue is there isn’t a clear owner to drive it, without a binary decision. We all want alignment; we just don’t want to have to do it because it’s hard!  Rather than marketing or sales taking the lead, consider having someone outside these two groups to lead and facilitate the right structures and processes.  In this scenario, it’s not all of marketing or all of sales that needs to be aligned – instead focus on building an integrated ABM Team model that can be assembled as part of the ABM ecosystem and managed by a Center of Excellence (with multi-disciplinary members), or Customer Success, or a defined project team that can facilitate the build, execution, and finetuning of an alignment  process for singular focus on the  organization’s most valuable ABM accounts.

Touchpoint 2: Put the “S” in Team

It’s not enough to say we want to collaborate with sales. It has to be deliberate which means Sales is included in decision making from the start.  The first step is getting agreement on where the collaboration connections are – a key piece of designing the ABM alignment approach.  ABM is not something marketing does for sales  It needs to be a “surround” of selected key accounts – with well defined actions that both teams contribute to for a fully developed strategy and action plan.  An ABM Plan and an Account Plan foster siloed efforts, and rarely is translated into common language, resulting in two separate roadmaps.  Areas of focus with equal input, discussion, and joint decision-making include:

Aligned Goals and Objectives

• Unified KPIs: Establish shared KPIs that both teams  agree to and are accountable for.  
• Joint Success Metrics: Create metrics that highlight the success of collaborative efforts, ensuring both teams see and hear the value of working together.

Defined Communications Cadence

• Regular Stand-up Meetings: Schedule regular inter-departmental meetings to discuss strategies, share updates, and address any challenges. Every meeting has clear roles for team members’ participation.  This needs to be bolted on to every ABM key account as standard operating procedure with clear and actionable agendas and post-meeting plans.

Joint Planning and Strategy Sessions

• Collaborative Account Strategy and Planning: Involve both teams in annual strategy sessions, followed by quarterly update sessions, to develop and evolve comprehensive account strategies as account activity progresses.
• Campaign Development: Include sales in the development of marketing campaigns to ensure joint goals and objectives are covered. To ensure this, joint input is needed on core messaging, content, tactics, and sales assets needed for field activation.  

Touchpoint 3:  Get Serious and Jointly Commit

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) for ABM between marketing and sales that outlines the responsibilities, expectations, and metrics for both teams to ensure seamless collaboration and effective execution of ABM strategies.  This SLA should be mutually developed, agreed to, and monitored.  Areas to consider including are:

• Shared Goals: Increase revenue from target accounts by X% over the next Y months.
• Customer Acquisition: Acquire X number of new accounts from the target list within Y timeframe.
• Customer Retention: Increase retention rate for target accounts by X%.
• Joint Account Identification: Marketing and sales will jointly identify and agree upon a list of target accounts.
• ABM Account Tiers: Accounts will be segmented into tiers (1-to-1, 1-to-few, 1-to-many, and pursuits) based on potential value, with specific strategies for each tier.‍
• Well Defined Responsibilities:
  • ‍Marketing: Account Research, Content Creation, Lead Generation, Engagement Metrics;
  • ‍Sales: Account Outreach, Lead Follow-up, Pipeline Management;
  • ‍Joint: Clear and active feedback loop, Lead Scoring Criteria, Lead Handoff Process, Follow-up SLAs, Shared Dashboards, Joint Training & Skills Development

Touchpoint 4:  Slow down to be able to go faster

Both marketing and sales are on the opposite sides of the company’s ‘pressure engine.” Marketing needs to be executing campaign after campaign after campaign - driving leads and looking for “low hanging fruit.” Sales is on the other side prospecting, meeting, and working the pipeline with deal closing being a constant that ramps up every three months. Everyone is going so fast that it is almost impossible to know what is happening on the other side. For ABM to drive the highest successful outcomes for revenue, relationships, and reputation, knowing what is going on around the account is critical. Marketing must consider the fact that the first launch of any program, activity or campaign needs to be internal first. Yes, the first target audience must be the sales team. It’s not enough to push it off to Sales Enablement if you have that function. You can partner with them, but the launch has to be internal first. Your full ABM team (ABM marketers, other relevant department members, Sales Enablement, and account teams) have to know the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY and HOW in advance to be able to fully leverage and activate in the field. This must be a precursor to any external ABM campaign launches. Not arming everyone in advance detracts significantly from the impact ABM campaigns can have on the accounts. If sales doesn’t fully understand what’s happening, and how they can leverage it, it can morph into no more than brand awareness, rather than highly targeted engagement.

Conclusion

Alignment doesn’t have to be a myth.  It can and should be a deliberate bridge between marketing and sales to reap the full benefits of ABM.  As I talked about earlier – less really can be more.  The smartest account teams will want additional support and collaboration.  Consider filtering for those teams by making inclusion of accounts in an ABM program an opt-in choice, rather than a corporate decision.  Teams that sign the joint SLA, and actively participate throughout the first six months, stay in the program.  Constant communication externally to sales on how those opt-in accounts are performing can build FOMO, and buy-in that is proactive, rather than having ABM marketers who are forced to work accounts without full sales involvement. 

Build a jointly defined alignment model.  Make sure the ABM team is complete and multi-disciplinary.  Fully commit to SLAs that must be signed and actively reviewed.  And finally, slow down just enough to be more effective together and drive great results faster.

‍