Account-Based Enablement: How We’re Going to Win, Protect and Expand Key Accounts Together
Watch this video to learn more about the “middle” layer that will bridge sales, marketing and customer success teams
Sales, Marketing and Customer Success Alignment
is Not Enough – Go-to-Market Teams Need Greater Integration
When sales, marketing and customer success teams only align vs. integrate to win as 1 team, ABM becomes nothing more than targeted demand generation as teams are still having a hand-off vs. a hand-shake. Marketing is still just impacting the pipeline (a small portion of the buying journey) vs. impacting stage progression, sales cycle time, deal sizes, ARR (annual), GRR (gross retention) and NRR (net retention – expansion). The teams are relying on sales enablement and their just-in-case training vs. providing content, messaging and insights to overcome the struggling moments that sit at the center of every enterprise deal.
As a result….

An ITSM firm left their buyers hanging half-way into their journey

A channel sales technology firm continuously lost to Salesforce and other large legacy platforms

A supply chain firm almost lost P&G (their biggest account) as teams did not have the right conversations
When Your Revenue is on the Line with Key Accounts, You Need to Go Beyond Sales Enablement to Change the Prospect and Customer Experience. You Need Account-Based Enablement:

Provides relevant messages, content, stories, insights and skills to enable sellers in the flow of work for specific accounts—when they need it.

Helps go-to-market teams respond with speed and precision, no matter what obstacles or opportunities come their way.

Builds situational fluency by providing contextual messages, relevant conversation skills, and content for the selling conversation and internal conversations that need to happen.
Here’s the Account-Based Enablement That Sales,
Marketing and Revenue Teams Need:
Account Profiles for Your Tier 1 Must Wins
Most go-to-market teams lack account-based insights so teams fall back on “persona” messaging, generalized pain points, and product messaging. They continue to tell “everyone’s story” in content, messaging and in live conversations even though a key Challenger element is to increase your relevance across all levels.
When selling to larger companies you must come to every social, email and live conversation with a point of view about their business. With our account intelligence, your go-to-market teams will know what their future and existing customers are focused on as those strategic initiatives for the business will trickle down to every department across the organization. They’ll be able to clearly show key decision makers the role they can play in the prospect’s strategic initiatives and the impact they will have so they are not just another item on their list of things to do eventually.
86% of communications by sales, marketing and account teams are off target and irrelevant.
Personal Relevancy Across All Channels (Website, Social, Email, Live Conversations)
Most sales and marketing teams are not speaking to and with the human buyers within target accounts that they want to win, protect and expand. With our account-based enablement program, your teams will be able to go directly to key decision-makers and influencers with insights that are specific to their gaps and impacts. Your prospects and existing customers will have content that speaks to them specifically.
With our account-based enablement program, we put a focus on each and every single interaction and touchpoint that go-to-market teams have with the human buyers and how your teams are relevant at the industry, company, rank, division, operational, financial, personal, and customer levels. We’ll give sales and revenue teams LinkedIn profile makeovers and a foundation to make connections with key decisions and influencers. 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.
Content That Meets Specific Buyer Expectations
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 but rather deeper 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. In fact, Gartner’s research shows that customers struggle to make sense of all the low and high-quality information that is pushed out, they are significantly more likely to settle for a course of action that is smaller or less disruptive than originally planned.
With our account-based enablement program, your go-to-market teams will be able to provide key decision makers with the right information through the right channels in a way that helps buyers buy. Sales will build trust, dramatically increase confidence and reduce skepticism while prospecting and nurturing by helping buyers evaluate information, prioritize various sources, quantify trade-offs and reconcile conflicting information — all while helping customers arrive at their own understanding.
Why Most Content Does Not Support ABM or Selling Conversations.
Content for Specific Selling Conversations and the Internal Conversations That Sales Is Not Privy Too.
In most cases, content is designed to support campaigns vs. the “selling conversations” and “interactions” sales need to close accounts. With our account-based enablement program, sales teams will not be left to their own devices to reframe thoughts and ideas, demonstrate relevance, make an emotional connection. build the business case, teach for differentiation, and move the prospects through the funnel to the close.
Sales and revenue teams will have the content they need to penetrate target accounts, VPs across divisions/business units and the C-suite. The teams will have the content they need to influence a buying consensus and win the internal conversation that many teams are losing.
“Sales, Marketing and Revenue Teams Need Greater Customer Obsession”
Account-Specific Buyer Messaging
With our account-based enablement program, the messaging will be customer-led. Value props will be designed for specific customer needs — not what’s available in solution stable to sell. Value props will be custom designed to the unique opportunity in each account. And, messaging will speak to and with the human buyers as each interaction will be treated as a mini sales and marketing conversation. This is the only way that your teams will build the connection they need with the status quo C-suite and become a priority. Templated messaging that sales teams run through Outreach, SalesLoft or other sales technology where you blast thousands of product-focused emails to buyers will not work with the 60% of the market that sees solutions like yours as “nice to have” vs. must-have.
Account-Based Conversation Support
Sales teams are consistently losing accounts to the status quo as teams are not equipped to overcome customer resistance to changing their current approach for solving a problem. With our account-based enablement program, sales and revenue teams will engage in a two-way conversation that helps future customers understand the gaps and the costs/risks of their current approach. Teams will stop responding to pre-defined needs and actually create a need and a specific buying vision.
Ongoing RevOps and Marketing Ops Support
It’s not just about the accounts you are targeting or the campaign you’ve built for them, but the process you are going to move them through. We can help your marketing, sales or revenue operations teams outline and audit an account-based routing process to augment your existing lead routing. As you scale, we can help to replace the lead routing process entirely– should you move to account-based only. Personal ABM has experience with the full technology stack and can help you to audit the systems you have, their integrations and how to optimize your workflows.
In addition, no campaign will work without measurement in place– so Personal ABM can help you to identify the KPIs for your account-based efforts, build those into your systems and begin to measure them. Our team can augment your operations teams, allowing for accountability and transparency through the customer lifecycle.
Continuous ABM Improvement
While we need to fix overall sales challenges with sales enablement, it’s time that companies go one step further. It’s time that we focus on targeted accounts that went silent, are slowly progressing in the buyer’s journey or are stuck. It’s time we focus on existing accounts where teams are unable to penetrate business units. And, it’s time we change the interactions we’re having with these accounts and the experiences go-to-market revenue teams are delivering.
We focus on the 1:1 interactions that your go-to-market teams are having with the 20% of accounts that can deliver 80% of your revenue growth. Because we put each interaction under a microscope to see why different responses and actions were created, we’ll be able to effectively optimize your 1:few and 1: many programs and help you design a prospect and customer experience that drives revenue growth.
Want to Learn More About Our Account-Based Enablement Program?
Let’s talk ABM and how you can win, protect and expand key, enterprise accounts. Whether you are looking to start a new ABM journey or need help with your existing ABM program, let’s talk so you can become part of the 33% of programs that outperform in delivering business outcomes.
During our call we’ll discuss we’ll discuss…
- NYour business goals
- NYour revenue challenges
- NYour ABM readiness – and the steps you need to take
- NOur personal account-based approach that drives stage progression, improves win rates and increases deal sizes for clients.
After you fill out the form, we will email you with next steps, our availability for your ABM strategy call, and additional ABM resources to review before we talk.