In part 1 of our CMO’s Guide to Mastering ABM series, we discussed how marketing doesn’t deserve a seat at the table by default and how marketing doesn’t have the respect of the CEO, CRO, and the C-suite by default, as marketing is not able to contribute more broadly than just branding, campaigns, and pipeline generation. Marketing isn’t developing strategies that directly align with the company’s financial objectives, they aren’t collaborating effectively with sales, customer success, product, and finance teams, and they aren’t driving a measurable impact on business revenue and margin growth. We discussed how CMOs need to rethink their marketing approach and, more specifically, ABM.
Click here to read part 1 of the series
In this article, we’re going to take the next step and share how teams can align ABM programs cross-functionally with the C-suite (CEO, CRO, CCO, CFO, CPO, and the COO). This will require effort, as most members of the C-suite do not fully understand the nuances of account-based approaches. Most leadership teams view it as a “targeting” strategy to build the pipeline vs. a business strategy that should change how all teams communicate and engage with future and existing high-value accounts. They do not understand that ABM or a Strategic Account Strategy is a revenue-generating initiative that aligns with the company’s broader growth objectives. Account-based GTM approaches require alignment, integration, and orchestration between all teams to create the right account experience that lands and expands key enterprise accounts. The alignment begins with identifying where the teams can grow the most and how they need to work together to drive that growth. Most companies start with a high-level pie-in-the-sky type of strategy. They create a vision and set revenue goals, but when execution starts, every team pulls in a different direction.
By getting aligned on where you can grow the most, it helps you go beyond your total relevant market and focus on the real opportunity, based on your: – Best-fit segments – Highest-paying customers – Clearest value creation path When you answer it well: – Sales is focused on quality – Marketing stops guessing – Customer success gets aligned to revenue – Product stops focusing on features that no one cares about. The next step is to uncover the hard truths about your GTM and identify gaps that will limit success with your identified “real” opportunities. You can’t just retrofit an ABM or Strategic Account Program on top of current processes, content, and messaging – and then expect different revenue results just because you’re doing better targeting. The teams need to align with the areas where GTM problems lie and commit to working together to fill the gaps, improve the account experience, and win where the company can grow the most. For example, if we want sales buy-in, then they need to understand why we’re targeting specific accounts, besides it being on their “wishlist”. They need to understand why we’re changing how sales and marketing work together, and why we’re changing how they typically GTM and the impact that 1:1 ABM can have on sales.
Aligning Your Account-Based GTM and Strategic Account Program with Your CEO
To align an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy with the CEO, you must translate ABM’s activities into high-level business goals that matter to the CEO, such as revenue growth, increased deal sizes, and market expansion. We need to focus on presenting outcomes rather than granular marketing tasks to secure buy-in and demonstrate a clear path to revenue returns on investment (ROI). CEOs focus on macro business outcomes, not marketing jargon. We need to show how we’re going to drive business growth and impact the KPIs that CEOs care about, including:
- Revenue from specific high-value, target accounts, and how the program will be directly tied to the company’s financial performance.
- Pipeline velocity and how your account-based GTM and Strategic Account Programs will accelerate more high-value deals through the sales funnel to closed revenue,
- Enterprise win rates and average deal size, and how you’re going to go upmarket, engage with VPs and the C-suite on their strategic priorities, and embed your solutions across the enterprise to land the high-value deals that leadership wants.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) and how your account-based programs will help CROs and CCOs drive account expansion – and help teams drive deeper relationships and greater long-term revenue from existing customers.
We need to align with the top KPIs that CEOs care about and show where GTM gaps exist that will negatively impact their KPIs and how taking an account-based approach will positively impact those KPIs.
You need to shift to executive-level metrics, present a meticulously planned and comprehensive strategy that shows how you’re going to have a compounded revenue impact by focusing on making improvements across the buyer’s journey – and connect the strategy to the company vision. You need to show how the account-based program will support the company’s broader growth objectives. Most importantly, you need to create company-wide support before aligning your account-based GTM with your CEO. They will want to see that you secured cross-functional alignment across sales, customer success, and product teams. They’ll want to see the shared KPIs and how teams will he held accountable for their efforts in the unified program.
Aligning Your Account-Based GTM and Strategic Programs with the CFO
For today’s marketing leaders, the mandate is clear: efficient growth. We need to show how our account-based GTM and Strategic Account Programs will increase GTM efficiency by improving sales and marketing PRODUCTIVITY and EFFECTIVENESS. You cannot increase GTM efficiency without both sides of the equation. Success hinges on your ability to translate marketing programs like ABM into the financial outcomes that matter most to leadership, particularly finance. Understanding that your CFO doesn’t care about the “dark funnel” or the 95-5% rule is the first step toward strategic alignment. One bridge between marketing influence and financial impact is: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is a key metric the board reviews annually with the CFO. It is heavily influenced by three things that marketing controls:
- Segment Selection: The types of customers you choose to target.
- Customer Quality: The caliber and potential value of the customers you choose to acquire.
- Optimized CX: The account experience that is driven by marketing and supported by sales and customer success teams.
The problem…We at Personal ABM are seeing a consistent miss across GTM teams. LTV and NRR growth are not being used to select target accounts and inform account-based GTM approaches. This means marketing teams are making significant marketing investments without a foundational understanding of the estimated financial return on those investments. In essence, marketing teams are placing expensive bets without knowing the potential payout. We need to demonstrate to CFOs how account-based GTM programs are aligned with potential payouts, rather than focusing solely on sequencing low, medium, high, and dedicated touch GTM motions based on arbitrary account tiers using outdated frameworks like the ITSMA ABM Triangle. We need to reevaluate our motions in light of today’s costs and outputs. The reason tiers exist is that ICPs are often defined only by firmographics. So you end up with a “good logo list” but no real clarity on the economic value, buying motion, or narrative fit of those accounts. If you take ICP seriously and infuse it with both hard data and narrative data, the picture changes. You stop thinking in terms of arbitrary tiers and start aligning GTM around:
- Outputs: revenue potential, cost to serve, efficiency of motion
- Buyer journey stage: what they actually need from you right now
- Touch integration: a mix of digital, human, and automated based on impact, not hierarchy
When you do that, ICP becomes the operating system. The GTM model flows from it. Tiers become irrelevant because every motion is aligned to the accounts that matter most and the journey they are actually on. So the real question is not “why tiers” but “why not ICP-led motions” that will align with your CFO.
Aligning Account-Based GTM and Strategic Account Programs with the CRO
The first step in aligning with your account-based GTM or Strategic Account Programs is to demonstrate to CROs that it’s not just about campaigns and why it should be owned by the CRO and supported by marketing. An account-based GTM is about delivering the right account experiences that enable buyers to make informed decisions in your direction with confidence. It’s about pipeline acceleration, customer retention, and deal expansion. These are core revenue functions where marketing needs to understand:
- The sales conversations that need to happen
- Challenger and other sales methodologies that GTM teams are following.
- The challenges that sales face, where they are winning, and where they are losing.
Unless marketing becomes part of the sales function and truly aligns/integrates with sales, they will not be able to effectively drive pipeline progression, increase retention, and create the greatest possible revenue streams YoY. As Nancy Carlyle Harlan (former ABM leader at UiPath) mentioned in her post below… If the ultimate goal of 1:1 ABM is revenue impact (which it should as it’s a waste of time, money, and resources to be used for sourcing the pipeline), it needs to sit under the organization that is most accountable for revenue. This will ensure that ABM programs are measured on business outcomes, not just marketing metrics.
The best CROs own the entire revenue cycle. They are the orchestrators of alignment between sales, marketing, customer success, RevOps, and partnership teams, driving an integrated approach to three distinct revenue streams: acquisition, retention, and expansion. As CROs are accountable for growth, value creation, and revenue strategy, we must align the account-based GTM and Strategic Account Programs with their strategic priorities, which are focused on achieving the company’s long-term growth goals. CROs today face intense pressure to deliver results immediately, while being expected to build scalable systems with minimal slack. CROs are expected to deliver on both, but they lack a dual-operating rhythm. One is focused on delivering near-term results, while the other ensures progress on long-term strategic bets, which is where your account-based GTM and Strategic Account Program belongs. We need to align with the CRO and build a joint vision for the next chapter of growth for the company – and most importantly, help them defend strategic investments that will pay off in future quarters and years. This goes beyond providing MQLs (or marketing qualified accounts) and pipeline.
Aligning Your Account-Based GTM and Strategic Account Program with the Chief Customer Officer (CCO)
A CCO’s focus is on the entire customer journey, from awareness to advocacy, which provides account-based GTM teams with the insights needed to deliver highly relevant buyer interactions and account experiences. The CCO’s role involves gathering and analyzing feedback across all customer touchpoints. This data provides GTM teams with a comprehensive view of customer needs, satisfaction, and pain points, enabling more precise targeting and messaging. They can also help to develop a more precise and accurate ICP that will be predictive of accounts that will land and expand with you. This is why we need to align the CCO with an Ideal Customer-Led Growth Loop.
When your entire GTM is ICP-led (as guided by the CCO), you put the team’s focus on the accounts that are most likely to land and expand with you, which leads to greater LTV before you even improve the product further and add expansion revenue. For example, DAT Freight and Analytics was seeing lots of churn. When reviewing exit polls and their win/loss analysis, we found that their customers saw the platform as a nice to have vs. must-have and that prospects and customers were not seeing the value of their solution, especially since Freightwaves offers “good enough” analytics at a much lower price and e2Open offers “good enough” rate analytics for free as part of their suite. They defined their ICP by size, location, industry, and freight spend, but not supply chain maturity. They focused on organizations with siloed supply chain operations, where transportation managers would only use the platform a few times a year to benchmark their performance. It’s with this use case that the competitors’ analytics were good enough. They needed to focus on organizations where predictive rate analytics would be embedded across the organization to help with pricing, inventory, merchandising, network optimization, and sales/marketing promotion decisions. They needed to be inside organizations that required predictive rate analytics at the component level and would combine demand forecasting with rate analytics to determine where products should be reallocated for greater revenue and margin growth. The more the platform becomes embedded within the enterprise and is used daily by team members, the more the platform becomes a must-have.
- Marketing content was specifically created for the new ICP, showcasing the role freight analytics can and should play across the supply chain, finance, and sales/marketing organizations. This created better “fit” opportunities for sales.
- Sales started closing better accounts, which included 13 enterprises on Gartner’s Top 25 supply chain list.
- The solution was adopted across the organization.
- Churn was reduced because the solution was no longer used solely for benchmarking the transportation manager’s performance. The solution was used daily vs. quarterly or a couple of times a year.
- Product teams assessed ICP gaps and customer needs, rather than creating a product roadmap based solely on what the company thought would be cool to market and sell. There was greater value creation that was relevant to DAT’s ideal customers.
- Accounts not only stayed with DAT longer, but they also expanded with the company. Ideal customer-led growth provided the greatest long-term revenue growth as it had each team focusing on accounts that would land and expand.
Not only can account-based approaches create greater LTV growth that CCOs want by ensuring closed deals are accounts that are also expandable, but they can also help CCOs create the greatest revenue streams possible YoY with existing accounts. 1:1 ABM is especially critical after a deal is closed, as you need to be able to tell the account story to penetrate other business units, regions, or markets. You need to be able to demonstrate the state of the business before working with you, the impact you had, and the value engineering where the next areas of opportunity lie. So we need to align with CCOs on the accounts with the greatest revenue growth potential and look beyond just who is giving the highest deal sizes now. We need to look at future growth, margins, who’s getting the most value, where the greatest alignment lies, what the relationship looks like, and who will provide the longest-term partnership. Your account-based GTM and Strategic Account Program is not about driving the next deal. It’s about driving the next huge revenue streams out of the customers year after year, and thinking about it in a 2 to 3+ year horizon.
Aligning Your Account-Based GTM and Strategic Account Program with the CPO
There is always a trade-off in any strategy. The balance of doing it successfully is that the business understands and buys into the trade-offs that are being made. [For example, a] big client with specific requirements means we lose control of the product roadmap. A strong focus on product vision rather than listening to the client’s needs means that we risk missing near-term revenue goals. We need to help business and product leaders understand these sacrifices and recognize the revenue growth potential of adopting an account-based approach to product development. Chief Product Officers need to see the account story, understand where gaps exist, and why customers are not experiencing full value realization. They need to see the LTV and NRR potential of aligning the product map with the needs of your most valuable strategic accounts, especially if it’s going to translate into missed near-term revenue goals.
Aligning Your Account-Based GTM and Strategic Account Program with the COO
Aligning Account-Based Marketing (ABM) with the Chief Operating Officer (COO) enables the integration of strategic sales and marketing efforts with core business operations, driving efficiency and revenue growth. It can ensure that the business does not see diminishing returns after the deal is closed.
For example, Ascension was seeing diminishing returns after implementation completion. Clients like Sephora would trade dollars for hours to fix on-demand challenges that may arise. 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 GTM, 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 yields higher profit margins and revenue growth. Sephora would try to penny-pinch and negotiate the number of hours and resources required 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, 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 outperform them in customer loyalty, and for Amazon to make inroads into the high-end beauty market, as the time to market new products and shades was increased by six months.
Ultimately, they lacked messaging, content, and support for the “why evolve” conversation that is necessary to change buying behaviors and expand profit margins and revenue growth. Once leadership, sales, and account management teams were able to shift the customer conversation with content and messaging designed specifically for the “why change” and “why evolve” conversation, they were able to change Sephora’s perception of the firm from “technicians” to “strategic partner”. Our client was involved in the leadership team from the planning stages. They added value through processes that demonstrate how changes would impact the warehouse, distribution, and transportation under different scenarios, allowing the beauty retailer to adapt and align at scale with new system changes without disruption to stores or customers. With this added value came more profitable revenue growth that was stronger than trading dollars for hours.
Sephora was not the only client that Ascension Logistics was able to change their buying behavior, and evolve how they were using them. They also now had the right stories and messaging to build a vision with new clients on how they would partner with Ascension once the implementation was completed. They were able to prove early on how they can be a strategic partner and the continuing value they can provide on an ongoing basis.
The COO is the “executor-in-chief,” so we need to translate the high-level business vision into actionable, data-driven operational plans that show that account-based GTM programs do not just generate leads. It contributes directly to the company’s overarching strategic objectives, which can include driving greater profitability with key strategic accounts, like we did with Sephora for Ascension. We need to demonstrate how an account-based GTM approach enhances efficiency across the entire customer journey, from sales and marketing to customer success and account teams. We need to show how ABM shortens the sales cycle and reduces wasted time and resources on unqualified leads. We need to show projected financial returns from targeting high-value accounts and how ABM optimizes resource allocation. And, most importantly, we need to show how account-based GTM approaches will scale the impact on revenue as the company grows.
Your Next Steps…
So, CMOs can deliver maximum impact and earn the respect of CEOs, CROs, CFOs, Boards, and the company as a whole, we are creating a workshop that will focus on aligning and integrating all teams on a Strategic Accounts Program designed to drive revenue growth. Within this workshop, we will:
- Gain strategic alignment on business goals and your ABM or Strategic Accounts Program objectives
- Prove the need for change in how teams GTM as we will do a complete GTM assessment and show gaps across people, skills, GTM readiness, content, and messaging. Whether you are selling externally or internally, you need to sell the “why” behind the change if you want action and adoption.
- Share what an account-based GTM should look like for your organization, the changes the teams will need to make, and how the teams will need to work together to land and expand key accounts.
- Complete a blind spot audit to catch what will derail your ABM or Strategic Program launch.
- Perform a capability check and see what your in-house team can own (and what they can’t – and where they will need additional support from Personal ABM.)
- Provide you with the success metrics that should be tracked, as they will be tied to the business GTM problems in the organization and real business outcomes.
- Show you a reporting framework built to provide all teams with transparency and to give CMOs the credibility they need to demonstrate their impact on business growth and profitability.