How to know if account-based marketing is right for your organization

5 min readJun 7, 2020

This week on CXL, I’ve had the opportunity of learning about Account-Based Marketing. I had heard it being thrown around in the context of demand generation, but never quite grasped it.

If there’s one thing I can say about the field of marketing is, it keeps you on your toes. Things are constantly changing and marketers are having to think up new ways of reaching their customers because the business’s survival depends on it.

There was a time when to acquire new leads, SEM, and SEO was the go-to strategy. Then came the advent of content marketing where brands scrambled for relevance by creating content that drove sign-ups for their product and helped people find them in search. These channels are still relevant to this day in B2B marketing. The issue arose when it became obvious that although these leads were coming in, they were not being closed at the same rate.

Enter Account-Based Marketing, to take on a more strategic and efficient way to reaching leads and closing them. Its classic definition is,

“a sustained, coordinated, strategic approach to identifying, engaging, closing, and growing the accounts that we know we should win.”

ABM takes time and involves commitment. It turns the traditional marketing model on its head by identify target accounts and reach out to them instead of arriving at the target company after filtering out the ‘bad leads’. It puts strong emphasis on quality outreach and relationship building.

What is ABM about

It is an ongoing process that is built, optimized, and drives results.
It starts with identifying the right accounts and the right people within these accounts.
It’s about going after those who you think you should win — the most desirable.
It is multi-threaded, multi-channel, multi-touch & highly targeted.
It allows you to target and reach high value and specific prospects.

When deciding if you should do ABM at your organization, there are several things you need to consider to determine if it’s a right fit:

How large is the deal?
How complex is your product or solution?
What is the size/complexity of the customer you’re going after?
How many prospects or stakeholders are in each of these organizations? How many people will you need to sway?
What is the current perception of your firm in the market? Do they know who you are and what you offer?
What is the competitive environment like?
What are the internal factors? How much budget do you have to allocate to ABM, do you have human resources to run this?

Account-Based Marketing is not a one size fits all and there are several approaches you can take when deciding how to run ABM at your organization based on the factors above.

Strategic ABM

This is used for very complex and large deals.
This involves very high investment per account and is also called one to one because of how personalized the experience is for individual accounts.
As expected, the deal sizes are upwards of about $250k for 5–50 accounts
It is also usually focused on expanding existing accounts, really engaging them, and building the relationship.

ABM Lite

Is focused on one to a few accounts.
Accounts are clustered into 5–15 based on industries or similar challenges and opportunities.
The programs for the clustered accounts are customized to a certain extent but not as much as strategic ABM.
ABM lite is good for deal sizes around the $30k mark.
The focus is a mix of getting new accounts and expanding existing ones.

Programmatic ABM

Is one to many accounts.
The programs are not as personalized but this type employs the use of technology to deliver these programs at scale.
The deals size is usually around $10k which involves 100s of accounts
The focus for this type of ABM is on new accounts acquisition.

ABM isn’t just about bringing in new accounts. With strategic ABM for example, the objective is not on new accounts but on expanding the revenue from existing accounts. There are other drivers of revenue you can explore with ABM:

improving the close rate of existing pipeline opportunities
increasing velocity of existing pipeline opportunities
increasing the deal size of existing pipeline opportunities
improving the retention of current customers

ABM is not an undertaking that can be done in isolation.

A very important aspect of building a strong ABM foundation is having executive alignment. What you need to be thinking about is how ABM initiatives tie into making money for the business. The bottom line is clearly important to the executive team so any initiative that doesn’t influence that will most likely not get any airtime.

Steve talks about this,

“I learned as I moved toward leadership roles was to get much better at rooting my planning in the financial realities and objectives of the company.”

Another key driver to the success of ABM at an organization is sales alignment. The sales team needs to be carried along from the onset to “co-own” this and not be siloed. They have a lot of insight to contribute and leveraging the sales team gives you a much better chance at success. Start with approaching some of the key players in the sales team to get their input in building the program and allow them to co-lead this with you.

One thing to keep in mind when starting your first pilot is that it will probably not scale initially and that’s ok. You want to make sure you’re maximizing your learning while also minimizing your risk so don’t spread your bets too wide. Focus and go deep. You need to be clear on what your objectives are and measure the right things. Like any optimization process, when you’ve seen what is working double down on that.

I found this content incredibly insightful and answered a lot of the questions I had going in regarding ABM. The instructor Steve Watt has been doing ABM for many years so he knows his onions. If you’re interested in learning more about growth marketing, CXL has an incredible amount of actionable resources curated by industry leaders in this space. You should check them out.