ABM should be about treating your tier 1 enterprise accounts (the 20% that can deliver 80% of your revenue growth) as a market of 1. But as leadership, sales, and marketing teams focus on scale, most are not designing interactions and experiences that are specific and relevant to each individual account and to the human buyers within those accounts. As teams aim to scale their interactions, they are failing to break through the noise. They are not aligning with and speaking to the specific business challenges, priorities, initiatives, and needs of specific accounts – and the human buyers within those accounts. They do not have the right ABM insights to create the alignment that’s needed to drive engagement, demand, stage progression and revenue. In this podcast, Rick Catino (CEO of Pipeline IQ) and Eric Gruber (CEO of Personal ABM) talk about the need for account profiles and account planning for the 20% vs. the marketing to accounts approach that many teams take.
Here Are the Key ABM Insights Points From the Podcast:
1. You should not be targeting an account just because they are in a certain industry, in a certain region with a certain revenue amount. This is why sales and marketing teams are treating all ICP accounts the same and are giving “seltzer” to “champagne” accounts and “champagne” to “seltzer” accounts and teams are having the wrong interactions. This is also why accounts are going dark after sales engagement, are getting stuck or ending up with “no decision”.
2. Sales and marketing teams need to have a greater reason behind their interactions and understand the drivers. For example, an IT service firm targeting banks should understand where the bank is investing around digital transformation and why, how have they grown during the pandemic, what is their strategy around RPA, blockchain, artificial intelligence and who are the people driving those activities. If you are targeting an analytics organization, you need to understand the tools they are using, how they are using them and what goals are they trying to accomplish. This will help sales and marketing teams map the content and messaging they need and the interactions/conversations that need to happen based on where target accounts are looking to go. In the podcast, you’ll learn about the account insights that should be part of your account profile and how the profiles should help you align your messaging with your current and future customers.
3. You should not look to automation or AI for your account profiles and for outreach to your tier 1 ICP accounts that can deliver 80% of your revenue. Account research and intelligence is not about looking for keywords – it’s about interpreting what’s happening within the key accounts you want to win, protect and expand and the role you can play across the organization. Many GTM teams are limiting deal sizes because they are selling and marketing to departmental needs and departmental pain points vs. speaking to strategic priorities, unconsidered gaps and impacts across the organization. ABM is also about understanding the human buyers within the accounts you want to drive revenue growth with – and how you are going to relate to them. GTM teams need account intelligence that go beyond industry and company relevance.
4. Buyers are demanding that sales and marketing teams have a greater understanding of their business landscape, their company, their needs, their research and their decision-making process.
By having a thorough account profile, you can eliminate most of your discovery time, enable sales to have higher level conversations faster and drive great deals by focusing on where accounts want to go vs. reacting to predefined needs. Your teams will be able to go beyond personalization and become personal to build strong relationships. And, you’ll help sales and marketing win internal conversations that buyers are having.
5. You need to optimize account profiles and account plans after the close. Customer success/account management teams are having the wrong conversations and 80% of B2B companies are either indifferent, disengaged, or actively looking to replace a vendor. 
