Many GTM teams retrofit ABM on top of existing content, messaging and processes and then wonder why there is limited revenue impact. Part of the reason is that they did not change their content to support the program and engage, nurture, close and expand the right ICP accounts. They do not have the content to support and enable sales, customer success, and buyers. They do not have the content to teach for differentiation against the status quo or competitors.
Within this article, you’ll read about the ABM content challenges that 6 companies faced. You’ll see why they struggled and the changes they made to their ABM content to drive more revenue wins.
DAT Freight and Analytics Struggled to Engage, Close, and Land High-Value Accounts.
DAT Freight and Analytics focused their content on the general transportation management audience vs. their ICP – which should have been more mature supply chain organizations that are integrating the different operations within the supply chain, finance, merchandising, operations, and sales/marketing functions and need rate analytics at the component level. While completing our ABM readiness review, our team looked at hundreds of pieces of content, including articles, whitepapers, case studies, podcasts, and webinars. While the content provided thought leadership, it did not provide commercial insights that help GTM teams teach for differentiation against their competitors and the status quo.
- DAT recently lost a high-value deal to Uber Freight because the rate analytics the prospect was getting was “good enough”
- There are lots of E2Open customers that are not DAT customers as well as the rate analytics are “good enough.”
- DAT’s win/loss data shows that they repeatedly lost to Freightwaves, whose costs are 2X-4X lower, and provide rate analytics that are “good enough.”
The content didn’t reframe the prospect’s thoughts on rate benchmarking analytics, show new ways of using the rate analytics, and the role it can play in key priorities across the supply chain organization. They didn’t show the impact that predictive rate analytics at a component level (something others cannot deliver) can have on:
- Pricing strategies to protect future margin growth
- Demand planning, distribution, and merchandising so you can reallocate products based on balancing demand data with predictive future “industry” and “component” freight rate trends.
- Supply procurement and operations as they can leverage demand forecasting with future component rate analytics to determine inventory levels for a stronger P&L based on inbound logistics costs.
- Sales and marketing, as they can plan ahead for promotions at the right time, based on demand planning and predictive freight rate benchmarking for minimal impact on the margins.
- Operational scenario planning to help build out playbooks to protect future profitability.
The content wasn’t showing how DAT Freight and Analytics can help each team across the supply chain, finance, sales, marketing, and operations make decisions based on real-time and predictive rate benchmarking data at the industry level and at the component level. As a result, DAT wasn’t getting the right accounts into the pipeline. Because they focused on transportation managers and their pain points, most of the deals coming into the pipeline through marketing were low ACV deals that would ultimately churn. They weren’t focused on the content they needed to drive demand with high-value accounts, capture demand across the organization, and then accelerate that demand to revenue.
Marketing content was leading sales to “nice to have conversations” with VPs and the C-suite When reviewing the data from sales and RevOps, we saw that most of the engagement was at the transportation manager level, where the content was geared. When sales spoke to a VP of Supply Chain or the Chief Supply Chain Officer, they were consistently directed to speak a few levels down to the transportation manager or director. Sales was not armed with the account intelligence they needed on target accounts to uncover areas of prioritization, what the companies were already investing in, and where gaps still lie that will affect the outcomes that companies want. They weren’t armed with the right content to show how predictive freight rate benchmarking at the industry and component level should have on the complete organization where it becomes a must-have, embedded solution.
As a result, sales focused on cost savings and the size of their data which VPs and the C-suite saw as nice to have as they did not see the role that DAT can play in the bigger picture. Even the transportation managers saw DAT as a nice to have, as reports from Clozd show:
- Toyota was only going to use DAT data to understand the value of long-term agreements between them and carriers, and they felt that they would not see the value based on the high price tag. DAT was only responding to the predefined need (use case) vs. building a vision for how their platform can be used.
- Matthews felt that they would not use the platform enough throughout the year to justify the investment.
- Dole thought the cost of the product was high to the extent it could equate to an analyst’s salary, and they thought there could be more cost-effective solutions. They were putting the DAT platform into a transportation analyst silo and not thinking about the impact it can have across the organization.
By changing their content and messaging, DAT Freight and Analytics were able to win high-value deals with accounts that were on Gartner’s Top 25 Supply Chain list – and they’re able to retain and expand them. The focus needed to be on the ICP with content and messaging that matches the ICP. Your ICP has to be more than just a tool to help you target better. It needs to guide your content and your messaging.
Click here to read the complete case study.
OpenWorks Struggled to Win Higher-Value Deals – They Kept Losing on Price
OpenWorks (a facility management service firm) had the aggressive growth goal of reaching $1B market share by 2030. But despite having an ABM program in place with another firm, they consistently missed MoM, QoQ and YoY revenue goals. Part of the reason is that they focused too much on intent data, which is speculative.
The team invested in ZoomInfo’s Marketing Operating System and focused on those accounts showing intent for certain keywords. The reliance on intent data kept the team from aligning with their core as Intent data is just noise without contextual insights. They were reacting to intent signals and engagement data (and creating content around that data) vs. responding by understanding why there may be intent in the first place. It’s the “why” that should guide content, communications, interactions and experiences.
GTM teams that simply react to intent and engagement data, get stuck in the sea of sameness as competitors react to the same data in the same way. Because the OpenWorks team lacked account-based insights, they fell back on “persona” and “industry” pain points. When you anchor on industries and personas you stop focusing on the companies and people you need to engage with – and you start telling everyone’s story. It’s the “why” that helps you understand the “account story” to deliver a differentiated account experience with differentiated content that helps you win higher-value deals.
OpenWorks also learned that intent data focuses on the small percentage of the market that show signs that they may be looking or may be ready to buy. They have predefined needs which resulted in lower value deals for OpenWorks. While it was important for OpenWorks to win those short-term deals, it was also important to focus on long term growth as they wanted to reach $1B in market share by 2030.
They needed to focus on accounts where they have a differentiated, relevant situational story to tell, that match their ICP and their business problem profile, and have a strategic priority that OpenWorks can play a strong role in but are not yet showing intent. With these accounts, the team needed content that would create the buying vision. It’s with these accounts that OpenWorks was able to create the greatest revenue streams possible YoY to put them ahead of schedule to reach $1B in market share.
We also found that the marketing conversation needed to change so sales can move away from commoditized, transactional pain point selling. Pain is annoying and it can be frustrating but it’s not a strategic business problem. Pain isn’t enough to drive business decisions at a strategic enterprise level. Yet, OpenWorks focused on pain points vs. account-specific business problems, root causes, gaps and impacts. They focused content and messaging on the pains of:
- Working with multiple vendors and why they should take a consolidated approach
- Working with unreliable providers and/or employees that result in missed scheduled cleanings.
- Hearing complaints from employees about the conditions of facilities.
As a result, when there was engagement based on the pain, it was only at the local level and not at the regional and national level. The conversations often led to price-based decisions that were often not in our clients’ favor. Content and messaging were not tied to a business problem. It was still about cleaning floors, windows and bathrooms.
They weren’t telling the situational stories and showing how their ICP accounts were being put at risk because their providers are taking a blanket approach across all locations, even though each location had different temperature zones and regulations that they needed to adhere to. They weren’t sharing how others like them were almost shut down by regulators – and how operations were disrupted because the facilities, including conveyor belts, were not cleaned and maintained properly. They weren’t discussing service performance issues and delivery delays to customers like Walmart.
These real business problems and stories were not captured and were not being told by marketing or sales. They didn’t have content that showed how your facility management approach can impact supply chain operations, the go-to-market, service performance to customers and the P&L. By changing the marketing conversation and focusing on the business problem, sales was no longer talking about the list of activities they’ll complete. They were talking about how they’ll remove risk from manufacturing operations, how the facilities will become a driver for growth and how they’ll help protect profit margins as regulator fines will be eliminated and on-time, in full penalties will be minimized. The marketing and sales conversations engaged regional and national leaders – and they weren’t being redirected to the local level. Most importantly, they were able to win regional and national deals.
Remember that Real Strategic ABM is about PROBLEM SOLVING, and educating key people on value propositions that matter to them.
Click here to read the complete OpenWorks case study.
Uniphore Struggled with Accounts Like Bank of America Going Dark
Uniphore – a conversational AI and call center platform that focuses on the digital, customer, and agent experience, approached Personal ABM because they were building a pipeline with accounts like Bank of America, TD Bank, and JPMorgan using Demandbase, but they were challenged with accounts getting stuck and becoming silent. This was happening because:
- There was limited alignment with the tier 1 banks they wanted to win. Content and messaging spoke to industries and personas vs. specific accounts, specific buyers, and their strategic priorities, gaps, and impacts.
- GTM teams lacked relevance. Content and messaging were not resonating as they didn’t tell the account’s specific story.
- Limited buyer identification as Uniphore failed to target the right people across financial institutions with the right content and messaging– and engage mobilizers who can rally teams around big ideas that can move the company forward.
- GTM teams failed to influence the internal conversations that were happening which involved blockers who were in love with the status quo.
- GTM teams failed to address the state of indecision due to their fear of risk. Buyers were stuck in the wasteland between intent and action, their minds were swirling with all the things that could go wrong. Our client did not create an environment and an experience where the buyers were uncomfortable with their current state but also comfortable in making a decision.
- Uniphore was taking a demand gen approach to ABM which enabled the GTM teams to slip into a zone where they were just disseminating thought leadership and being top of mind. They wound up sending out content that was confirmatory. They showed prospects that they are smart, up to date on the latest issues and trends, and that Uniphore is a savvy, knowledgeable organization. But they didn’t sell and market change. They didn’t show future and existing customers that they were missing something. The content spoke to the things that prospects already know about what’s keeping them up at night vs. what should be keeping them up at night. They missed the commercial insight that’s needed to change the buyer’s thoughts on their specific approach, process, gaps, and impacts. They missed the commercial insight that’s needed to uncover the specific big risks that buyers have not thought about before and unseen opportunities. They missed the commercial insight that’s needed to cut through the thought leadership noise because it’s provocative, it’s relevant, and it tells the buyers their story vs. a generalized industry story.
Example of How Uniphore’s GTM Teams Were Misaligned With Their Target Account…Bank of America
Bank of America (one of their target accounts) had a huge IT team that developed, integrated and is now expanding the capabilities of its own AI virtual assistant system named Erica. They have hundreds of AI patents. Awareness and generic “consideration” content and messaging would not move this account forward.
But that’s the content the team was delivering.
They focused content and interactions based on the buying journey: (awareness, consideration, purchase) vs. what the GTM teams will need to do to win the account (create demand, capture demand, progress demand, convert demand a.k.a close deals, retain demand and expand demand.) At best the company’s awareness content was thought curation and at its worst it was thought regurgitation. There was no clear POV. There was no teaching for differentiation. There was no driving change with status quo accounts and with those that would take in all the free information they can and then see how they can do it in-house. The content, messaging and interactions did not show Bank of America that the GTM team understood gaps in the bank’s current system and how it’s creating challenges within our client’s focused use cases: collections, complaints management, and compliance. They didn’t show the bank that they understand:
- The bank’s strategic vision
- Their product roadmap for Erica
- The desires of the bank’s 8 different lines of business.
- The impact that our client can have.
- Why the bank should outsource vs. spend time and resources on having their internal team implement the changes that our clients would make.
They needed account intelligence to guide content, messaging, and interactions. Through our deep account research, we learned that not only was Bank of America investing heavily into their self-serve platform, but they also invested in virtual reality to train agents and in voice of customer programs to get the feedback they need to improve the customer experience.
But everything was siloed and Bank of America was not bridging the gap between the digital experience and the live experience that customers would receive on the phone and in the banking centers. They weren’t bridging the gap between the customer experience and the agent experience as they did not have the conversational AI and in-call guidance that would help agents follow the best practices they learned during the training to respond to their banking customers’ struggling moments. There were no processes in place to ensure that the feedback that Bank of America received from customers was being acted upon by the agents. This wasn’t the story that was being told to Uniphore within content and messaging. As buyers move along in their journey, there needs to be increased relevance.
Within an account-based GTM, you may start off at the industry/persona level with 1: many campaigns that are focused on your ICP. But then, you take engaged accounts and cluster them to focus on shared situational relevance and shared needs. You then focus on accounts that continue to engage and have shown that they are strategically ready for your solutions and have a strategic priority in place – and you move those accounts to a 1:1 program that is focused on accelerating accounts to revenue. You focus on the specific needs and challenges of individual accounts and focus on the account story. From there, you personalize even further and focus on the decision making units within the account and address their collective priorities, gaps and impacts. And, you personalize to stakeholders to bring the organization together in one direction to help them form a consensus and move toward signing a deal.
In most cases, there is no personalization journey for buyers where they get increased relevance as they move along. This is one of the reasons why accounts go dark after initial engagement with campaigns.
Digizuite Struggled to make Bynder, Adobe and Sitecore Irrelevant
The digital asset management tech firm faced heavy discounting pressures from competitors like Bynder and they continually lost enterprise deals to trusted legacy platforms like Sitecore and Adobe. Sales, marketing and customer success teams focused on marketing departmental pain points just like their competitors, so they were not able to drive engagement across the organization.
They failed to teach for differentiation and show target accounts how Bynder, legacy platforms like Adobe and Sitecore and other competitors do not integrate into the enterprise organization even though Forrester and Gartner reports show that most DAMS are under-utilized and are not leveraged outside of marketing. The content didn’t show gaps and impacts across marketing, advertising, PR, eCommerce, sales, operations, customer service, CX, account management, finance and business leadership teams. The content didn’t show how the competitor-specific gaps will impact the strategic priorities of their target accounts and their ability to achieve strategic objectives.
In today’s digital environment where sales and marketing is pushing out more messaging and content, Gartner found that additional customer research and learning does not lead to greater clarity. It leads to ddeper uncertainty. More often than not, today’s customers are left with no clear means for evaluating trade-offs or moving forward with sufficient certainty to justify an expensive, potentially disruptive purchase. Digizuite needed account-specific content, messaging and interactions that would help buyers evaluate information, prioritize various sources, quantify trade-offs and reconcile conflicting information. And, they needed to do this all while helping customers arrive at their own understanding of why they needed to move forward with the Digizuite solution.
By changing their content and account experiences, Digizuite saw a:
Digizuite was also able to drive the revenue growth they needed to become acquired by Keyshot.
Click here to read the complete Digizuite case study.
Sumerian Struggled to Enable Buyers to Accelerate Forward to a Revenue Close
During an ABM Done Right Podcast, Cassandra Jowett (PathFactory’s former Senior Director of Marketing) mentioned that she likes to compare the buyer’s journey to the “floor is lava” game that kids play. You have all these jumping points to get buyers to the safe harbor, and you want to make sure they don’t fall into the lava halfway through their journey. You want buyers to jump from one rock to the next one and so on, and you want to lay out the path to revenue in a very clear way.
The problem is….
Most GTM teams do not lay out the path. They focus on getting accounts into the pipeline and put little attention to the fundamentals of revenue: sales velocity, stage progression, sales cycle time, deal sizes, win rates, retention, and expansion. They do not focus on accelerating accounts to revenue. Sumerian, a UK-based ITSM firm is an example of a company that was leading its buyers hanging halfway through their journey.
Leadership at the UK ITSM Analytics SaaS firm had the vision of creating a new category, “Capacity Planning as a Service (CPaaS),” and becoming an international player like VMWare. But, as 451 Research indicated in their report, the ITSM firm would have to break out of its finance niche category. They needed to create demand for a new product in a new category in new markets. So, they brought in a PR firm to drive greater awareness for the new category. They invested in intent data platforms like 6sense and Demandbase for their ABM tech. The firm drove awareness and pipeline growth, but there was limited-stage progression and revenue improvement.
They did not have the right content to support ABM, sales, and the selling conversations that teams needed to have with future customers. The PR firm drove awareness for the category, but it was tech-focused and not business-issue focused so it did not help to drive change. Like 86% of the content and messaging that sales and marketing teams push out, the content had no commercial impact on the buyer.
Sumerian did not have the right content and messaging to move accounts forward. Sales and GTM teams soon discovered that 4 out of 5 targeted companies outside the financial industry lacked senior executive understanding of the business issues the ITSM firm was trying to solve with their on-demand cloud-based capacity planning subscription service. Senior executives did not see how their IT teams, the business, operations, P&L, and customers were impacted by their infrastructure visibility gaps, manual IT processes, homegrown technologies, and inadequate tooling like VMware that only looked at “current” infrastructure performance issues vs. where infrastructure challenges will lie in the months ahead. More importantly, they did not see how the business “issues” were related to them because content and messaging focused on general industry assumptions and pain points. Their one-to-many and one-to-few campaigns missed the personal relevance needed to win over IT teams, the C-suite, and the CFO, who did not see a reason to change.
More personal relevance was needed to move accounts forward. As Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson mention in their book, “The Challenger Sale,” in most cases, buyer unresponsiveness is not because you failed to make a logical argument. It’s because you failed to make an emotional connection. It’s not that buyers didn’t believe your story. It’s because they didn’t see it as “their” story.
Sumerian’s sales and marketing team did not align their content and messaging with the specific retailer, airline, and online service accounts they wanted to win. As Doug Landis mentioned in a recent Forbes article: “When selling to larger companies you must come to every social, email, and live conversation with a point of view about their business.” Sumerian’s GTM team needed account intelligence to know what their target accounts focused on as those strategic initiatives for the business trickled down to every department across the organization.
Sumerian needed more than persona-based content and messaging. The airlines, retailers, and online service firms needed to see their specific gaps and how they would impact their strategic initiatives’ success. As you can see by the image below, IT buyers need to see that you understand their business landscape, their company, their needs, and what they will need for each stage of their buying process.
And, because buyers were indecisive and stuck in the status quo, Sumerian needed calculators, content, and stories to show the cost of inaction for specific accounts as they needed to sell the reason for change before they sell “ROI”. They needed content that build a stronger case for better capacity management and show how IT was misaligned with business objectives at target accounts since Sumerian struggled to go beyond IT managers.
They were not penetrating accounts and building relationships with VPs, CTOs, and CIOs, They were not extending beyond IT managers to drive engagement with business strategy, CX, and finance teams. The GTM teams were not able to influence the internal conversations that sales teams were not privy to and have teams discussing how last-minute reactions to threshold crossings impacted IT finance, IT security, IT operations, eCommerce, revenue, and customers. The content did not support selling conversations.
When Sumerian changed their approach to content across the buyers journey, GTM teams were able to gain new customer logos like GoDaddy, JCPenney, British Airways, and others. They were able to create partnerships with companies like ServiceNow, IBM, DXC Technology, VMware (which recognized its own gaps), and many more. They became an international player that positioned themselves for acquisition. Now the ITSM firm is now part of ITRS Group, a larger firm that has:
- 800+ clients worldwide that rely on their IT estate monitoring, capacity planning, analytics, and load testing platforms.
- Offices throughout North America, UK, Europe, Nordic/Benelux, and Asia Pacific regions.
Ascension Struggled to Drive More Profitable Growth with Enterprises Like Sephora
Ascension (a Blue Yonder partner) saw diminishing returns after implementing their TMS or WMS solutions. Clients like Sephora would trade dollars for hours to fix on-demand challenges that may arise even though Sephora’s warehouse and DC were not scaled to meet the needs of a fast-moving operation or the needs of their 2300 global stores and their e-commerce customers. The manufacturer’s tech did not enable the warehouse to prioritize replenishment, which led to delayed orders, waves, and carrier moves. They weren’t engaging in planned distribution where the warehouse knows how products will ship to stores even before it arrives at the warehouse. While they implemented automation for expected volumes, the company lacked fulfillment automation for surge demands caused by new, hot lipstick colors or holiday demand.
Driving this, most tech implementation consultants functioned like the manufacturers’ line workers: reacting, not proactively strategizing. Our client kept receiving a shortlist of 30 pain points needing coverage within six weeks to go-to-market causing our client to build for “wants”. Because our client was not having the right customer discussions, Sephora would treat our client as technicians and pay for man hours vs. strategic value that has higher profit margins and revenue growth. And Sephora would try to penny-pinch and negotiate the number of hours and resources that would be needed for different projects.
Leadership, Sales and Account Management Teams Were Having the Wrong Conversations and Interactions. There was no conversation involving our client in the go-to-market planning of new products or lines. They didn’t have the content, stories, and messaging to show how building for 30 software points, only seeing 5–8% of the entire picture is leading to missed details and requirements as there’s no visibility into pipelines, growth plans, customer-driven needs, and current/future operational bottlenecks. They couldn’t show the impact and how it delayed retail/e-commerce presence, wasted marketing dollars, increased days in inventory, slowed cash conversion cycles, missed customer shipments, and created out-of-stock conditions. They couldn’t show Sephora how the current reactive IT approach was allowing Ulta to beat them in customer loyalty and for Amazon to make inroads with the high-end beauty market as GTM time for new products and shades was increased by six months.
Ultimately, they didn’t have messaging, content, and support for the “why evolve” conversation that needs to happen to change buying behaviors and expand profit margin and revenue growth.
To win the “why evolve” conversation, Ascension Logistics needed to:
- Document results so Sephora can acknowledge the impact that our client had on their business for 5+ years
- Highlight evolving supply chain pressures and competitive pressures from companies like Ulta and Amazon. They needed to describe shifting internal and external pressures as a logical progression or evolution not a surprise or disruption.
- Share the hard truths on Sephora’s supply chain gaps and impacts on operations, customers, sales and the P&L. They needed content and messaging to highlight the missed opportunities both internally and externally from Ascension’s vantage point as a trusted partner and not just another technical vendor.
- Emphasize the potentially harmful risks and repercussions of not changing their approach to supply chain technology and de-risk moving forward in a new way.
- Get personal and show Sephora the specific upside opportunity that’s available to them and not generic benefits. They needed to transfer ownership of the solution and all of the internal/ external positive impacts Sephora can expect from making the change.
Ascension needed content for specific account management conversations and Sephora’s internal conversations. Before, working with Personal ABM content was designed to only support “acquisition” campaigns vs. the “customer success conversations” and “interactions” that account management teams need to drive revenue growth with existing accounts. Account management teams were left to their own devices to reframe thoughts and ideas, demonstrate relevance, make an emotional connection and build the business case as described above.
By having content that supports the “why evolve” conversation not only was Ascension having the right interactions – they were able to influence the internal conversations that happened behind closed doors and build a consensus for change, Ascension was able to drive 25%+ more profitable growth with Sephora and other top accounts.
We need to change our approach to content to support ABM, sales, marketing and customer success teams. To see how you need to change your content, schedule a free ABM strategy session below.