Most CMOs and marketing teams focus on optimizing “brand” and “demand” to drive greater pipeline now and in the future. Now, don’t get us wrong, it’s important to optimize “brand” and “demand” motions to ensure that we’re aligning content and messaging with our ICP (accounts that will predictably land and expand with us), so sales and marketing teams are engaging the right accounts that will move forward. We understand that one of the biggest reasons accounts do not move forward is… they weren’t the right accounts in the first place.
But, as mentioned in part 1 of our CMOs Guide to Mastering ABM series where we discussed how CMOs need to change how they think about ABM, if we solely focus on “brand” and “demand” motions and increase the pipeline by 50% and do not optimize “land” and “expand” motions to impact stage progression, sales cycle time, win rates and deal sizes, then the revenue impact will be 5-8% at best.
But….
* If you engage 5% more ICP accounts
* Increase your ICP pipeline by 5%
* Increase stage progression by 5%
* Cut sales cycle time by 5%
* Improve enterprise win rates by %
* Increase enterprise deal sizes by 5%
Then, the revenue impact will be at least 22%. And that doesn’t include the revenue impact you can deliver if you also reduce ICP churn by 5% and drive greater account expansion with 5% more ICP accounts. Then we’re talking about a 30%+ impact on revenue growth, compared to the 5-8% impact CMOs typically deliver by focusing solely on the pipeline.
While the majority of CMOs continue to focus on the pipeline (even those who engage in ABM), chatter across Slack groups suggests that many CMOs worry that activity is high but momentum is not. For example, Matt Heinz recently posted on LinkedIn that he took a year’s worth of CMO Coffee Talk conversations in Slack, ran them through ChatGPT, and created the top 5 things CMOs worried about this year. At the top of the list was mid-funnel and late-stage deal stall. These CMOs want to stop focusing solely on the smallest part of the buying journey (accounts-to-pipeline), while enterprise win rates continue to decline, deal sizes remain unchanged, churn is increasing, and revenues from retention and expansion are decreasing.
To Fix the Mid-Funnel and Last-Mile Revenue Leaks, We Need to Go Beyond Orchestrating Tech
If we want to fix the mid-funnel and last-mile account experiences to improve stage progression and win rates, we should not focus on ABM at scale, which is good for getting accounts into the pipeline. Once we get to the mid-funnel, then we need to focus on their account story and creating the account’s specific buying vision.
We need to focus on the struggling moments that sit at the center of every deal – the moments that need to be listened to, understood, catered to, reframed, and solved. We need to make sales and marketing personal, not just personalized, if we are going to help buyers feel uncomfortable about their current situation yet comfortable moving forward to drive change. We need to focus on helping buyers overcome their indecision.
The more we try to scale our activities and content in the middle of the funnel, the less valuable we become to the accounts we want to land and expand. 1:1 ABM for the mid-funnel is personal.
Our focus should be on:
- The account story – and the specific buyers within those accounts.
- Specific situations, needs, and challenges.
- Specific thoughts that need to be reframed.
- Specific selling and internal buying conversations that need to happen.
- Specific use cases and how your solution can be used across the organization — and the specific impact you can have.
- Making a connection with the buyers in the accounts you want to land and expand is at the heart of high-level selling and marketing: it’s about establishing a connection, then leveraging that connection to hopefully find a win-win for the prospect and the seller.
You can’t scale the connection that your content, messaging, and interactions should create between your teams and your buyers. You can’t scale the account experiences that will move buyers to revenue at a higher ACV and expand existing accounts. You can’t scale ABM in the mid-funnel and last mile, where you need to support selling, retention, expansion, and internal buying conversations, and make a difference with less fluff and filler, more insight and dialogue, and more “this is exactly what I needed.” It’s not about orchestrating tech in the mid-funnel and last mile; it’s about orchestrating the right digital, social, email, and live interactions to deliver the optimal account experience that moves accounts forward.
For example, we are in conversations with one of the largest sales engagement platforms that would like to go upmarket, land higher-value deals, and take market share from competitors like Gong and Clari/Salesloft. Sales and marketing leadership want stickier, longer-term, and higher-value deals that require the teams to go beyond integrated campaigns and 1:many ABM programs with content syndication.
The team is starting to onboard Ignitium, which will orchestrate the technologies needed to get accounts to the pipeline. Ignitium integrates ABM expertise, buyer group intent data, and GTM technology to scale ABX, streamline execution, and accelerate sustainable revenue—effortlessly. They are combining intent signals, orchestration, and execution into a single solution. They maximize the value of your existing account-based tech stack with their orchestrators.
As their focus is on technology, an interpretation gap needs to be addressed to move pipeline accounts to revenue. Between every signal and every sale lies an invisible space: the Interpretation Gap. It is the distance between what your systems record and what your buyers actually mean. When teams rely on automation to define meaning, that gap widens. Signals are captured but not contextualized. Patterns appear, but stories disappear. The result is data that looks intelligent while the go-to-market motion remains blind. Then we wonder why we do not have the right content and messaging, and why our teams are not having the right interactions to drive greater stage progression.
Click here to read our article on the interpretation gap.
The sales engagement platform recognizes that it needs a more personal approach that cannot be scaled to move accounts to revenue. They realize they need to strive for true GTM efficiency, which is sales/marketing productivity + sales/.marketing effectiveness. They understand that orchestrating tech will not:
- Help them show how the competitors are irrelevant based on the target account’s specific challenges and strategic priorities. Our prospect, as well as Clari/SalesLoft, Gong, and others, are converging into “revenue platforms,” but they still have distinct centers of gravity. The sales engagement platform we’re talking to positions itself as a “Sales Execution / Revenue Orchestration Platform” that unifies prospecting → deal execution → forecasting (Commit) with AI workflows. They are pitching a unified AI Revenue Workflow Platform—not just sales engagement anymore, even though sales is focusing on that aspect as it’s the easier win. They are bundling prospecting + deal execution + coaching/revenue intelligence into one operating surface (Engage, Success Plans, Kaia, Forecast/Commit, new Agents). The storyline is end-to-end execution in one workspace, with agents that observe, decide, and act. Clari/Salesloft positions itself as the “Revenue Platform” for forecasting, pipeline inspection, and RevOps governance, and it has Clari Copilot (ex-Wingman) for conversation intelligence. Clari’s forecast/pipeline rigor + Salesloft’s engagement = “Revenue AI powerhouse” across $10T+ revenue under management. Gong is positioned as a “Revenue AI Platform” rooted in conversation intelligence, expanding into sales engagement (Gong Engage) and forecasting. They have unmatched capture fidelity and analytics depth across calls/emails, coaching/QA, and forecasting, with conversation ground truth as their center of gravity. That “system of truth” pitch resonates with CROs cleaning up pipeline fiction. If the customer needs truth and tape (record → analyze → coach), Gong’s the incumbent logic. If the buyer’s priority is forecast precision first, Clari’s solution is compelling. If they want truth and throttle in one seat—create, progress, and close deals without tool-hopping—that’s our prospect’s native terrain as their platform is the seller’s action surface—sequencing, multi-threading, Success Plans, automated follow-ups—plus coaching and commit in the same cockpit If the priority is seller productivity + deal control now with embedded agents, our prospect is the safer bet—fewer moving parts, faster lift. But they need the personal content and stories to show buyers how they are relevant and competitors like Gong and Clari are not relevant to their specific situation.
- Help the sales engagement platform teach for differentiation against the status quo and support Challenger conversations, which is important when, in many cases, our prospects’ target enterprise accounts will already have a system in place that their GTM teams will have to displace. Orchestrating tech alone will not help the narrative and the stories that all teams are telling to restructure and recalibrate their buyers’ thoughts and ideas. It won’t help them enable prospects to think differently about their situation, challenges, vision, and approach, and it won’t help sales and marketing take buyers and influencers to the point where they say, “wow! I didn’t think of that” or “didn’t think of it in that way before.”It won’t help sales and marketing create a-ha moments that lead to revenue wins.
- Help the sales team build a buying vision based on current and future needs. This is especially important for our prospect, as sales teams are still focused on selling the sales engagement product—iit’sthe easiest sell—whereas selling across their platform and across different use cases is where our prospect can play a strong role.
This leads us to the next step if we want to drive greater stage progression and win higher-value deals…
Buyers Need Content That Provides Context and Tailored Guidance to Shape How Companies Use Your Solutions in the Long Term.
Especially in crowded markets, sales and marketing teams need to differentiate and compete with content that provides context and tailored guidance. We have to build a buying vision that goes beyond current needs. This will require teams to orchestrate a roadmap for both existing and future accounts. We need to help buyers and customers understand what they need to optimize, automate, or reimagine now and in the future. We need content that helps sales and customer success/account management teams sell or gain adoption for solutions focused on current needs – but also helps them sell a much larger vision. The ones that will win will be the ones that show buyers they are not just offering a tool roll-out. They are providing a capability build that will continue to deliver even greater long-term outcomes aligned with the buyer’s strategic vision.
We’ve been talking to the AVP of GTM at a GenAI firm that offers solutions to help software engineering teams throughout the software development lifecycle. Through co-creation services and its AI platforms, the company looks to change, redefine, and reshape how software development teams work by ensuring that AI is integrated into every aspect of the enterprise software development lifecycle – and that modernization is seamless.
They need content to show future and existing customers how they can positively impact the end-to-end scope (from ideation to deployment) for targeted accounts, enabling them to see improved productivity, quality, speed, and transparency. They need to show a roadmap for how they’ll reduce the time to develop the minimum viable product, lower technical debt, free up capital, and drive innovation and growth across target accounts in the banking, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing industries. A recent HFS Horizons report even mentioned that the firm needs to showcase more examples of new value creation and innovation utilizing Gen AI. For each capability across the SDLC, they’ll need content that shows the new value creation that business, software development, and IT teams aren’t thinking about. Most importantly, they’ll want to show how the firm can deliver that value, as many clients do not perceive the company as a fit for various aspects of the software development lifecycle, including quality engineering.
As the firm’s GTM teams struggle to increase their relevance, association, recognition, and relationships within selected accounts, they are looking to change their content approach to position themselves as a strong software engineering organization and retain and expand key accounts. They need to create a broader vision for their customers and provide a roadmap to help them achieve their specific strategic outcomes.
Providing context and tailored guidance to shape how companies use your AI solutions in the long term is especially important when selling and marketing AI solutions. Click here to read our article on how teams need to rethink how they sell and market AI solutions with content.
Buyers Need More Relevance as They Progress in Their Journey If You Want to Keep Them Engaged
Value proof is landing too generic to move buying groups. You may start with industry and persona relevance, then move to clustered situational relevance, and finally tell the account story. Too often, buyers do not see increased relevance as they progress through their journey and receive extra attention. As Nancy Harlan (former ABM leader at UiPath) posted on LinkedIn…ABM was never meant to stop at account, industry, and persona-based messaging. That’s account-based demand generation. ABM is about engaging with the individual human buyers in the accounts we want to land and expand – and bring those buyers together to confidently move along in their buying journey in our direction.
You can read Nancy’s post below:
But because teams focus on scale, GTM teams miss the personal relevance needed to move deals forward. We are still thinking about campaigns. As Matt Dixon (author of the Challenger Sales, Challenger Customer, and JOLT) mentioned on the ABM Done Right Podcast:
“When teams think about campaigns, content, and messaging to their future and existing customers, they slip into the zone where they need to be front and center, disseminating thought leadership and being top of mind. They wind up sending out content that is confirmatory and shows prospects that they’re smart, up to date on the latest issues and trends, and they’re a savvy, knowledgeable organization. But it doesn’t sell and market change – and it doesn’t show future and existing customers that they are missing something. They miss the specific commercial insights needed to change the buyer’s thoughts about their approach, process, gaps, and impacts. They miss the commercial insights needed to uncover the specific big risks the buyers have not considered before, and unseen opportunities. They miss the commercial insights that are 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.”
Click the image below to listen to the podcast.
Uniphore, in the conversational AI/CX/contact center space, is a prime example of a company that continued to push out thought leadership content even after sales engaged. They believed that, from intent detection to automated plays, Demandbase would orchestrate the entire revenue engine. They believed they’d identify and engage the right buying groups with messages tailored to exactly what they’d need. They stopped translating signals into actionable, human insight. They stopped becoming relevant to key tier 1 banks like Bank of America as they continued to push out industry- and persona-based thought leadership around the signals rather than telling the account story. They failed to match the personalization journey to the buying journey.
Bank of America has a large IT team that developed, integrated, and is now expanding the capabilities of its AI virtual assistant, 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. The content, messaging, and interactions did not show Bank of America that the GTM team understood the gaps in the bank’s current system and how it’s creating challenges within our clients’ focused use cases: collections, complaint 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 eight different lines of business.
- The impact that our client can have.
- Why the bank should outsource rather than spend time and resources on having its internal team implement the changes 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 in its self-serve platform, but it was also investing in virtual reality to train agents and in voice-of-customer programs to gather 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 and live experiences customers received on the phone and in the banking centers. They weren’t bridging the gap between the customer experience and the agent experience, as they lacked conversational AI and in-call guidance to help agents follow the best practices they learned during training to respond to their banking customers’ struggling moments. There were no processes in place to ensure agents acted on Bank of America’s customer feedback. This wasn’t the story being told to Uniphore through content and messaging. As buyers move along in their journey, there needs to be increased relevance.
Buyers Need Us to Answer the… “What If We Buy Question”
On another ABM Done Right Podcast episode, Dave Anderson (COO and Co-Founder of SellingInnovations) mentioned that COI (cost of inaction) is stronger than ROI, but GTM teams continue to sell and market the ROI of their solutions before they even sell the idea of change to the key accounts they want to land and expand. We need to help buyers answer the question — should we do something different or not?
But, he went on to say that selling and marketing COI and ROI is only 1 part of the equation. In their minds, buyers are wrestling with what happens if they actually do something. They are worried that if the risk were to come to fruition (i.e., the configuration doesn’t work, the teams don’t adopt it, or they don’t get the promised ROI), they would now be responsible. That exposure around making that change and being responsible for that change is what drives customers to go dark. Buyers are afraid of programs going sideways. The buyers are afraid they won’t be able to execute. We have to help buyers build the confidence they need by giving them a plan to get the company to value. We need to show buyers that a plan is in place to ensure the program’s success and that it aligns with their strategic goals, objectives, and vision.
We need to guide buyers to the most critical capabilities they need. We need to show them how to make the right trade-offs and show them the right solution for them, given what they’re trying to accomplish and what their limitations are. It is our job to help guide buyers on what’s important, what’s not important, what they should read, and what they shouldn’t read as buyers get into analysis paralysis with all the information that’s being pushed out. We want to focus them on what matters and give them the confidence that we’ve thought of everything.
Click the image below to listen to the podcast episode with Dave Anderson:
Most importantly, we need to be architects of trust. We recently talked to the sales leader at a digital transformation firm. One of their biggest prospects spent half a billion dollars ($500M) on transforming with firms like McKinsey, and they failed twice. The sales leader gave a proposal price of $4M (pennies compared to what the prospect spent in the past), but he still can’t get the company to buy.
- The company was so afraid of failure again.
- They were afraid of disruption.
- They were afraid of risk.
The sales leader had to deal with the burden of the team’s past failures, the fear of risk, uncertainty, and conservative decision-making. You cannot just sell value. Buyers do not just care about value – they also care about perceived risk.
Buyers fear the risk of failure and disruption to their operations. They need to believe that you have the right processes in place to mitigate their risk. You need to show buyers that you understand their specific situation and the concerns it raises. You need to identify potential challenges and ensure you can mitigate the risks.
Most teams like to paint a rosy picture in their case studies without the thorns, but it’s how you handle the thorns that helps companies see that you actually mitigate risk and deliver the promised value.
Your 1:1 ABM content can be the architect of trust that you need with your buyers. You must demonstrate that you can remove the risk of failure, disruption, and spiraling costs. You have to show that staying the same is riskier than moving forward with you—and that you are the safer choice. Unless you do that, you will not displace legacy tech or win over those who failed before or are indecisive about moving forward with your solution.
Click here to read our article with more information on the 1:1 ABM content that GTM teams need.
GTM Teams Need to Stop Being a “Nice-to-Have Solution” and Embed Their Platforms Across Their Target Accounts
A recent study by the venture capital firm Norwest shows that sales and marketing teams struggle to position their solutions as must-haves rather than nice-to-haves.
GTM teams are not embedding their solutions across the organization. When you focus on departmental pain points, you automatically make your solution a nice-to-have vs. a must-have.DAT Freight and Analytics struggled with enterprise accounts seeing them as an “nice to have”solution vs a “must-have “solution. They were also challenged to make the competition irrelevant to win higher-value deals, as there are many lower-priced competitors and suites like E2Open offer transportation analytics for free. While the competition does not offer component-level freight rate analytics and its analytics aren’t as extensive, DAT was consistently losing to its competitors.
- DAT recently lost a high-value deal to Uber Freight because the rate analytics the prospect was getting was “good enough.”
- Many E2Open customers are not DAT customers, and 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 frame 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 can leverage demand forecasting and future component rate analytics to determine inventory levels and improve P&L based on inbound logistics costs.
- Sales and marketing can plan promotions at the right time, based on demand planning and predictive freight rate benchmarking, to minimize impact on margins.
- Operational scenario planning to help build out playbooks to protect future profitability.
The content didn’t demonstrate how DAT Freight and Analytics can help each team across the supply chain, including finance, sales, marketing, and operations, make decisions based on real-time and predictive rate benchmarking data at both the industry level and the component level. 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 using 1:1 content that shows the specific impact DAT can have across key organizations.
Because DAT Freight and Analytics failed to show VPs of Supply Chain and the Chief Supply Chain Officer their specific gaps across the organization and the impact DAT can have on their strategic priorities, sales were often directed to speak a few levels down to the transportation manager or director. They weren’t armed with the right 1:1 ABM content to show how predictive freight rate benchmarking at the industry and component levels should impact the entire organization, making it 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-haves, 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, but they felt they would not see that value, given the high price tag. DAT was only responding to predefined needs (use cases) rather than building a vision for how their platform could 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 considering its impact across the organization.
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 their solution can have across the target organization, DAT was able to win enterprise accounts on Gartner’s Top 25 Supply Chain list.
If we want to drive stage progression, improve enterprise win rates, and increase deal sizes, then we need to sell and market transformation and the impact solutions can have across the enterprise. This is how Digizuite (a digital asset management platform company) increased new logo enterprise ARR by 55%, achieved 114% growth in expansion ARR, improved enterprise win rates by 200%, and doubled deal sizes. This is how Digizuite competed and took market share from Bynder, which previously won on price, and how they won deals over trusted, legacy platforms like Adobe and Sitecore.
While everyone else focused on marketing departmental pain points, Digizuite showed how the DAM should integrate into the enterprise organization, as Forrester and Gartner reports show that most DAMs are underutilized and not leveraged outside of marketing. Through their 1:1 content, stories, messaging, and interactions, sales and marketing teams showed their named accounts their gaps and impacts across marketing, advertising, PR, eCommerce, sales, operations, customer service, CX, account management, finance, legal, and business teams. They became a must-have by showing exactly how they’d transform the business of the enterprise accounts they were targeting to achieve their strategic vision.
Click here to read the Digizuite case study.
We Need to Support Our Champions So We Stop Losing the Internal Buying Conversation That Kills Deals Mid-Funnel
Mark Stouse, CEO of Proof Analytics, mentioned on another ABM Done Right Podcast that the analytics show that ABM has a greater impact at the middle and bottom of the funnel than at the top. Yet most organizations do not think about how they will strategically accelerate accounts toward revenue. They do not think about how they can use ABM to drive a buying consensus across the organization. In fact, Mark Stouse said that most ABM content and campaigns work against the objective of ABM, as they promote “self-interests” rather than “team interests”.
He also mentioned that ABM is about relationships. It’s about the relationships between you and targeted human buyers at accounts you want to win, protect, and expand. It’s about building internal relationships within targeted accounts as well. You want to be an umpire in the buying decision, bringing together disparate players on the prospect side to not only understand their specific needs but also the needs of their team and everyone on their side, so they can reach consensus.
The problem is… most champions are left to fight alone because they lack the content and messaging to support internal buying conversations. They do not have the content, stories, and messaging to show different buyers their gaps and impacts on their divisions, operations, teams, objectives, and the collective business’s strategic goals.
Click here to see how we helped CNBC Software win a deal that was on the fence.
Most Importantly, Buyers Need Us to Stop Leaving Them Hanging Half-Way Through Their Buying Journey
We need to compare the buyer’s journey to the “floor is lava” game that kids play, which was also a popular show on Netflix. 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 value for them (and revenue for you) in a very clear way. We need to be more intentional with our mid-funnel engine design to improve funnel quality and speed so we can land and expand more enterprise accounts.
When you read our Sumerian case study, you’ll see how their GTM teams created engagement and conversations, then left status quo CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, and their business/IT teams hanging by failing to support the complete buyer’s journey.
Click here to read the Sumerian case study.
Your Next Steps….
If you did not read parts 1 and 2 of our CMOs Guide to Mastering ABM Series, read the articles below:
If you’d like to discuss how you can optimize your brand, demand, and, most importantly, your land-and-expand motions to drive greater stage progression and revenue growth, let’s talk. Schedule time on our calendar below. We’ll discuss where you are losing deal momentum, why deals are stalling in the mid-funnel, and how we can, together, change the account experience that sales and marketing teams deliver.