Watch Our On-Demand ABM Content Webinar PLUS Read On to Learn How to Enable GTM Teams to Go Upmarket, Drive Stage Progression, Displace Competitors and Land & Expand More Enterprise Accounts.
Most ABM Content Does Not Support Sales, Customer Success,
Buyers and the Collective ABM Program
While pipelines may be increasing as teams focus on scaling their ABM content and programs to source the pipeline, a recent study by Pavilion shows that enterprise win rates are dropping.
At Personal ABM, we are finding that GTM teams are struggling to increase their reputation and engagement within named accounts and improve customer relationships. Accounts are going dark vs. progressing in their buying journey, especially when sales get involved. Because GTM teams aren’t using ABM content as architects of trust across the buying journey, buyers are becoming stuck and unable to make decisions as they are afraid of failure, risk, disruption, and spiraling costs.
Pavilion’s study also finds that deal sizes are getting smaller. Gross revenue retention (GRR) is lower as teams are challenged to keep VP and C-suite engagement with accounts that are indifferent, disengaged, or actively looking to replace their vendor. And the chances of teams driving account expansion to increase customer lifetime value and net retention revenue (NRR) are dropping.
ABM is about accelerating accounts toward revenue. It’s about creating the greatest revenue streams possible YoY. It’s not about moving accounts toward pipeline. But, most teams do not have the content that supports a complete account-based GTM consisting of 1: many, 1: few, and 1:1 content programs. They do not have the content to support sales, customer success, and internal buying conversations. Then companies wonder why stage progression is a challenge and why CMO Alliance gives ABM programs overall a C- (as shown below).
Watch the On-Demand Webinar Recording Below to See the ABM Content Gaps That Keep Teams From Driving Account-Based Revenue Growth.
Note – After you watch the webinar, scroll down to see how our ABM content can help you
drive stage progression, displace competitors, and land and expand larger deals.
If you’re short on time and would like to skip the webinar recording, click below for an executive summary.
Below Are Some of the ABM Content Gaps We Discussed in the Webinar, Which Are Causing GTM Teams to Fail at Landing and Expanding Key Accounts:
Not Aligning Content with the ICP
During our ABM content assessments, we found that most ABM content speaks to the total relevant market vs. ideal customer accounts that have different needs, values, challenges, and strategic priorities than the overall market. Because the content fails to make the right connections, they are unable to add accounts to the pipeline that are most likely to land, expand, and provide the greatest revenue streams possible.
Not Increasing Relevance as Buyers Progress in Their Journey
In many cases, teams are focused on thought leadership and being top-of mind within target accounts. They disseminate content that shows buyers that they are smart, up-to-date on the latest trends, and they are a savvy, knowledgeable organization. This industry and persona content builds account awareness, but it does not help to sell and market change. It does not enable buyers to make decisions in your direction.
You need to have a personalization journey that matches the buying journey. As buyers progress and earn more of your attention, your content and messaging’s relevance levels need to increase, where you convey a strong POV about the buyers’ businesses and speak to their specific business problems, strategic priorities, gaps, and impacts. You want to tell buyers their story vs a generalized industry story that doesn’t match the buyer’s specific situation.
Not Aligning with Challenger and Other Sales Processes
Because marketing’s focus has always been on increasing thought leadership positions, account awareness, and MQLs/MQAs, many content teams do not understand the selling, retention, and expansion conversations that need to happen and how to support those conversations. The teams do not understand sales approaches and methodologies like those from Challenger, JOLT, Sandler, Value Selling, Force Management, Corporate Visions, and Winning by Design. For example, most content does not teach for differentiation against the status quo and competitors – a key aspect of the Challenger Sale. Most content misses the commercial insights, reframes, emotional stories, and the tailored business cases that are needed to drive change with named accounts. And, teams do not have the content they need to address the “why stay”, “why evolve”, and “why expand” conversations.
At Personal ABM, we specialize in creating content that supports the different sales processes and methodologies.
Not Answering the Buyer’s Biggest Question That Will Enable Them to Confidently Move Forward
Most content is focused on why companies should buy a solution, but most content does not address the buyer’s fears of moving forward. The content does not answer the question… What happens when I buy?
Because we do not have content that addresses our buyers’ struggling moments and we’re not helping them, evaluate trade-offs and make sense of all the low and high quality information that is being pushed out, buyers are likely to settle for a course of action that is smaller or less disruptive than originally planed, And that’s if they make decisions at all in your favor.
GTM Teams Do Not Have the Capacity for 1:1 ABM Content
Many teams are ignoring the value that 1:1 ABM content can deliver because it’s not scalable, or they do not have the capacity for it. The more teams try to scale content with their limited resources, the less valuable the content becomes to accounts they want to land and expand. As a result, teams do not have the content they need to create a real connection and the right account experiences that move buyers to revenue at a higher ACV.
How a Supply Chain Tech Company Aligned Content to Their ICP to Land 13 Enterprise Accounts That Are on Gartner’s Top 25 Supply Chain List.
Redefining the ICP to focus on accounts that need freight analytics at a component level and have cross-functionally integrated tech and people across the supply chain was not enough for DAT Freight and Analytics. The company struggled with enterprise accounts seeing them as a “nice-to-have” solution vs a “must-have” solution. They were also challenged with making the competition irrelevant to win higher value deals, as there are many lower-priced competitors and suites like E2Open that offer transportation analytics for free. While the competition does not offer freight rate analytics at a component level and their analytics aren’t as extensive, DAT was consistently losing to their competitors.
- NDAT lost a high-value deal to Uber Freight because the rate analytics the prospect was getting was “good enough”
- NThere are lots of E2Open customers that are not DAT customers as well as the rate analytics are “good enough.”
- NDAT’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, or 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 can have across the supply chain, finance, marketing, sales, and operations organization – and why the competition’s “good enough analytics” is not good enough to achieve strategic objectives. This is why DAT’s sales and marketing teams were unable to gain and keep the attention of VPs and the C-suite. They consistently redirected to speak to the Transportation Manager (several levels down), and even the transportation managers saw DAT as a nice-to-have, as reports from Clozd show:
By focusing on 1: few and 1: many content that reframed how supply chain teams viewed freight rate analytics and then 1:1 content on the specific impact that their solution can have across the target organization, DAT was able to win enterprise accounts that were on Gartner’s Top 25 Supply Chain list.
How a Conversational AI and Contact Center Tech Firm Drove Stage Progression with Accounts That Previously Went Dark Due to a Lack of Relevance
Uniphore in the contact center and conversational AI space built a strong pipeline with named accounts like Bank of America, but the accounts went dark after initial engagement. They stopped responding to sales and marketing outreach as sales and marketing teams continued to push out industry thought leadership content vs. content that tells their bank’s story.
Bank of America (one of their target accounts) had a huge IT team that developed, integrated, and expanded 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, as content was not driven by account insights. 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.
Through our deep account research, we learned that Bank of America invested heavily into their self-serve platform as well as 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 by Uniphore within content and messaging.
When Uniphore started telling the account story, they were able to re-engage accounts that went dark, and they were able to land $500K deals with accounts that previously became unresponsive.
ABM Content Changed the Selling Conversation to Drive
200% Improvement in Enterprise Win Rates
Digizuite, a digital asset management (DAM) firm, came to Personal ABM wanting stronger pipeline growth with their existing ABM program to fuel 4X revenue growth over a 4-year period. After reviewing the business, we saw that the issues didn’t just lie with the pipeline.
The teams didn’t have the right content or the selling conversations to differentiate themselves from the respected legacy players like Adobe and Sitecore. They didn’t have the right content and selling conversations to show how going for a low-cost provider like Bynder that won on price would only fix a marketing departmental pain point and would not have an enterprise-wide impact.
They failed to teach for differentiation and show target accounts how their 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. They didn’t show gaps and impacts across marketing, advertising, PR, eCommerce, sales, operations, customer service, CX, account management, finance, and business leadership teams. There were no clear means for evaluating trade-offs. They didn’t have the content or the buyer enablement that was needed to help buyers move forward with certainty to justify a more expensive, potentially disruptive purchase.
By focusing the content on the selling conversations that need to happen, Digizuite increased deal sizes, improved enterprise win rates, and strengthened ARR, GRR, and NRR.
How ABM Content Drove Account Expansion
Growth and Margin Growth for Ascension
Ascension 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.
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.
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 and only seeing 5–8% of the entire picture was leading to missed details and requirements, as there’s no visibility into pipelines, growth plans, customer-driven needs, and current/future operational bottlenecks. Ascension 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.
By having content that supports the “why evolve” conversation, not only was Ascension having the right interactions – they were able to build a consensus for change. Ascension created 25%+ more profitable growth with Sephora and other top accounts.
Building Account-Based GTM Content with Increased Relevance
While long-term goals of the ABM program are to increase relevance, association, recognition, relationships, and revenue growth (ARR/GRR/NRR), in many cases we find that teams initially need the “umbrella” 1: many content to address the “why change”, “Why You” and “Why Now” conversations with their ICP. They need us to build out and create their:
- $Company’s narrative, their capability narrative and the account narrative
- $ POV content for their ICP
- $Big idea theme content that can build interest and excitement across ICP accounts.
- $ICP gaps and impacts content
- $Use case content for their ICP
- $Persona-based content that speaks to the different stakeholderw and decision-making groups
From there GTM teams need us to cluster ICP engaged accounts based on their situation and provide:
- $Case study “situational” content that speaks to the success of existing accounts in similar situations and share why there were business challenges, how the solution uniquely helped the enterprise, and why the company saw exponential impact.
- $Reframe content that will change how clustered target accounts think about their situation.
- $Reframe content that will change how clustered target accounts think about their common situation
- $ Content that shows the clustered accounts a new way
- $Content that goes beyond industry and persona thought leadership that is created for 1: many programs
From there, we further increase sales and marketing’s relevance with the content below:
Account Manifestos – These are executive briefs that will help the customer see their journey with you so far (or what the journey should be if it’s a new account), what the present state is, where there is misalignment, and what the next steps are. For existing customers, the manifestos will show where gaps were before using your solution, the impact your solutions already had, and the evolving impact your firm can have on the account. It will address the why stay, why evolve, and why expand conversations.
Business Case Content – We will create content that makes the business case for the suggested solutions across software engineering, IT leadership, finance, and business leadership teams.
Strategic Priority Content – We will create content that is focused on where target organizations want to go (their business vision), what they are prioritizing, the cautions, and a new approach that will help them achieve strategic objectives.
On-demand Content – We will create specific selling conversations that the GTM team needs to have with buyers inside target accounts and in internal selling conversations.
Buyer Enablement Content – We will create content that helps buyers evaluate information, prioritize various sources, quantify trade-offs, and reconcile conflicting information — all while helping customers arrive at their own understanding of why they need to land and expand with you.
Complete Buying Vision Content – We will create content that orchestratse a roadmap for future and existing accounts. The content will help sales and customer success/account management teams sell or gain adoption for solutions focused on current needs – and help them sell a much larger vision. The ones that will win in the future will be the ones that are showing buyers that it’s not a tool roll-out, it’s a capability build that will continue to build and produce even greater outcomes over the long term.
Risk and Fear Reduction Content – Most content falls in the 1: many and 1: few “why should I buy category” but buyers want to know what happens if they buy. Because their fears and concerns are not addressed within content and conversations and case studies only a paint rosy picture with their “best case scenario content”, buyers become indecisive.
Note: While we can help your GTM teams with 1: few, 1: many and 1:1 content – we can just focus on the 1:1 content, which is our specialty. Scroll down to schedule a time to discuss your ABM content needs.
Book an ABM Content Strategy Call with Our Chief ABM Content Strategist – Eric Gruber
Eric Gruber, our CEO and Chief ABM Content Strategist, had his own content marketing firm long before joining forces with Kristina Jaramillo to form Personal ABM. His focus has always been on how to enable sales and customer success teams to reframe their buyers’ thoughts and ideas, make an emotional connection, build the business case, and progress deals.
His ABM content strategies helped companies:
- 9Reverse “no” positions with Fortune 50 accounts like UPS
- 9Re-engage and land accounts like Bank of America that previously went dark
- 9Capture their largest deals ever with companies like Verizon
- 9Protect at-risk accounts like P&G
Book time with Eric to discuss your ABM content strategy and your challenges. Afterward, you will receive an executive brief that will outline where content gaps exist and your next steps.