Brandon Redlinger posted on LinkedIn that marketing doesn’t deserve a seat at the table by default. Marketing doesn’t have the respect of the CRO by default. Marketing should have a seat at the table and earn the respect of the CRO and sales, but other members of the C-suite lose confidence in Marketing’s ability to contribute more broadly than just branding and campaigns. They need to see that:
- You develop strategies that directly align with the company’s financial objectives.
- You collaborate more effectively with sales, customer success, product, and finance.
- You drive measurable impact on business, revenue, and margin growth – and not just pipeline.
ABM should help the CMO “earn” a seat at the table, as the focus should be on:
- Increasing deal sizes, improving enterprise win rates, reducing churn, and driving greater ARR, GRR, and NRR growth. With ABM, you want to create the greatest revenue streams possible YoY.
- Nurturing enterprise accounts from a marketing, sales, customer success, and product perspective. We need to own the product roadmap and ensure it meets the needs of our most valuable future and existing customers. We need to own pipeline creation, fuel demand, and conversion with ICP accounts. We need to own revenue and enable every customer-facing team to have the right interactions and deliver the right account experiences. And, we need to own account adoption and expansion.
- Being a strategic partner to the business vs. a service team. We need to connect the dots between what’s built for our ICP, how it’s sold and marketed, how it drives value, and how each team is going to communicate that value. We need to be measured on our influence on revenue vs. activity.
- The complete account experience across the buyer’s journey and customer lifecycle, as the experiences that marketing delivers will impact the experiences that sales will deliver, which will impact the experiences that customer success teams deliver, and the overall account experience.
- Going beyond aligning sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams and actually integrating the teams to work together as one function in unison to shift how they GTM and win.
ABM should change:
- How CMOs and their teams think about the business and ensure that the organization has a strong POV so teams can come to each buyer/customer interaction with a POV about the buyer’s business
- How the businesses package their solutions to meet ICP needs.
- How GTM teams communicate their value
- How GTM teams are structured so they can work as one function or one pod
- How SDR teams are compensated to support ABM and business goals
- The content, interactions, and account experiences they deliver
- How GTM teams engage buyers across the organization throughout the buyer’s journey and customer lifecycle.
- How buyers and customers are enabled to confidently make a decision
- How teams overcome risk aversion and demonstrate the cost of inaction
- How teams teach for differentiation against competitors and the status quo.
As Joel Harrison mentioned on our ABM Done Right Podcast, you need to forget about tactics and technology and focus on business and GTM transformation.
But, here’s how many CMOs view ABM and how it’s not earning them a seat at the table nor the respect of the CRO.
CMOs view ABM as a “specialized service” that marketing provides by focusing on targeting and messaging specific sets of accounts within the ICP. It’s a tiering and targeting strategy to fill the pipeline. They have their teams simply retrofitting ABM on top of existing content, processes, and messaging – and adding ABM technology like Demandbase and 6sense on top, rather than treating ABM as a business strategy. Many CMOs have their teams simply do list-based marketing.
Don’t get us wrong.
The list of accounts you target with your ABM, Strategic Account, or Account-based GTM programs is important. But, it’s more important to focus on the interactions that need to happen, the account experience, and how buyers feel after each social, email, digital, and live interaction. It’s not just about mapping out 100-200 target accounts using an ABM account selection system built around your company’s goals and warm CRM relationships. And it’s not just about cohorting the accounts by relationship type. If you have the wrong interactions and deliver the wrong account experiences with the right list, you go nowhere. ABM should be focused on the experiences that are being delivered to drive the greatest revenue streams possible YoY with the accounts that can deliver the greatest returns to your top and bottom line.
Because CMOs have made ABM about lists, prioritization, and targeting accounts that have shown intent, they are automatically devaluing the impact they can have on the organization. They’re focusing on the small part of the buying journey (accounts to pipeline), while sales struggle to drive stage progression with the accounts that marketing and ABM programs put into the pipeline. They’re focusing on the small 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. Then we wonder why CMOs and marketing are not getting the respect of the CEO or CRO, and why CMOs are not getting the respect of the boards. Then we wonder why CMOs are not getting a seat at the table. It’s because the focus is on a small portion of the buying journey vs. having a business impact.
The compounding revenue impact that CMOs should deliver with ABM
If you increase pipeline growth by 50% – and stage progression, sales cycle time, win rates, and deal sizes do not change as CMOs haven’t led change across the GTM, 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 22% or more. 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. We need to take an account-based GTM approach and focus on how we will optimize BRAND, DEMAND, LAND, and EXPAND motions to drive maximum revenue growth with the accounts that will deliver the greatest long-term revenue growth.
DAT Freight and Logistics – An Example of Compound Revenue Impact from ABM
By focusing on improving the account experience across the buyer’s journey, DAT Freight and Analytics was able to improve its enterprise win rates, close 13 of the 25 enterprises on Gartner’s Top 25 Supply Chain list, and significantly reduce account churn.
When we reviewed DAT Freight and Analytics pipeline, we saw that they struggled to go upmarket. When they actually got the attention of the Chief Supply Chain Officer or the VP of Supply Chain, they were consistently told to speak to the transportation manager.
When we looked at their win/loss analysis, we learned that enterprise accounts were turning to lower-cost providers like Freightwaves or Uber Freight, or they would opt for the free predictive rate analytics that were part of their E2Open suite because the analytics were “good enough,” even though they didn’t offer analytics at the component level. And, the churn analysis revealed that supply chain organizations were not utilizing the platform frequently enough to justify the investment. DAT was seen as nice to have vs. must have.
- They had a brand problem – they focused on the pain points of the transportation manager rather than reframing how predictive rate analytics should be used. This approach should be extended beyond benchmarking the transportation manager’s performance to include strategic decisions across the supply chain, finance, merchandising, operations, and even sales and marketing organizations. Their ICP should have been those supply chain organizations that are not siloed and where there is cross-functional integration, external collaboration, and/or ecosystem orchestration. And, they needed content that aligns with their ICP and the C-suite, buying groups, and stakeholders within their ICP.
- They had a demand problem. They didn’t have a story that aligns with the strategic priorities of their ICP accounts to fuel demand and conversion, as they didn’t focus on business problems, gaps, and impacts.
- They had an issue landing accounts because they did not have the content and stories that demonstrate how their competitors are irrelevant to their specific situations. They didn’t have the content that tells the account story and helps them build the vision, since most content was top-of-funnel industry and persona content. They didn’t have the content to enable buyers to come together and make a decision in moving forward with a higher-priced solution that would be embedded across the organization. They didn’t have the content that answers the question: What happens when we buy, and what will the relationship look like in the long term?
- They had an issue retaining and expanding accounts as teams focused on responding to the transportation manager issues vs. driving adoption across the organization and showing how the company needs to continue evolving how they use predictive freight rate analytics to achieve their strategic objectives.
Click here to read the DAT Freight and Logistics case study.
Digizuite is another example of the compounding revenue impact ABM can have
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. They continually lost deals to lower-cost providers like Bynder and suites like Sitecore and Adobe. They had issues across brand, demand, land, and expansion motions.
When it came to their brand, they lacked a POV. They would discuss omnichannel, but that’s a broad and overarching theme. When it came to their content and messaging, they inherited the baggage of the industry, and they spoke to the same marketing department pain points. There was no differentiation, and then they wondered why accounts would opt for lower-cost providers or the more trusted legacy platforms. They lacked a true understanding of their ICP, which would encompass accounts that require the digital asset management platform to extend beyond the market department and have an impact on marketing, sales, customer service, operations, legal, finance, and even business leadership. This was especially important since Gartner and Forrester studies showed that most DAMs are under-leveraged in the organization and that most DAMs do not integrate well into the organization, which was Digizuite’s true differentiator.
They had a demand problem as they failed to teach for differentiation and show target accounts how Bynder, legacy platforms, and other competitors do not integrate into the enterprise organization. They didn’t show gaps and impacts across marketing, advertising, PR, e-commerce, sales, operations, customer service, CX, account management, finance, and business leadership teams to connect with the different buyers in the buying group and the stakeholders.
They didn’t have the content for the middle and bottom of the funnel, where sales and marketing teams need to help buyers prioritize various sources, quantify trade-offs, and reconcile conflicting information. They didn’t have the content that would help buyers see a renewed vision for using the digital asset management platform based on current and future needs. They didn’t have the content to alleviate the buyers’ concerns about fear of non-adoption, failure, and disruption to operations. As a result, enterprise accounts would become indecisive or go for the cheaper or less risky solution.
By focusing on the sales and marketing conversation and the account experience across the buyer’s journey, they achieved a 55% increase in new logo enterprise ARR, a 114% growth in expansion ARR with enterprise accounts, a 200% improvement in enterprise win rates, and a 2X increase in ICP deal sizes. Notice the compounding effect of their ABM program because we focused on the complete GTM vs. just filling the pipeline.
Click here to read the complete Digizuite case study.
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.