CROs today face intense pressure to deliver results immediately AND at the same time build LTV and NRR growth, as customer lifetime value is a key metric the board regularly reviews with the CFO. But many CROs lack a dual-operating rhythm where 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. You don’t just think about the “wins” now – you focus on the accounts that are most likely to land and expand.
The best CROs own the entire revenue cycle for short-term growth opportunities and long-term bets. They are the orchestrators of alignment between sales, marketing, customer success, RevOps, and partnership teams, driving an integrated approach to three revenue streams: acquisition, retention, and expansion. They focus on the complete account experience across the buying journey and customer lifecycle. They understand that the experiences that one team delivers will impact the experiences the other teams deliver and the overall account experience. They have the teams working together as 1 function in unison to shift how they GTM
However, most CROs do not have an operating system where BRAND, DEMAND, LAND, and EXPAND functions are optimized and integrated into one strategy for key enterprise accounts that can provide the greatest revenue streams year-over-year. This includes those organizations that have an existing ABM program, as they are not stacking the 4 motions to drive efficient, sustainable, long-term growth with the “big bets” that CROs, CEOs, CFOs, and Boards want.
How Most CROs View ABM
Most CROs view ABM as a “specialized service” that marketing provides by focusing on targeting and messaging specific sets of accounts within the ICP, which sales and marketing align on. It’s a tiering and targeting strategy to fill the sales pipeline with more highly-qualified accounts showing intent.
They see it as a way to help marketing deliver what their sales teams are looking for, as recent Mutiny surveys found that 82% of sellers and marketers say closing more enterprise accounts is important to their company. But only 15% of sellers say marketing is highly effective at generating opportunities with high-value accounts for them to close.
Yes, the list of accounts that sales and marketing teams target with ABM, Strategic Account, or Account-based GTM programs is important as we need to focus on the accounts that:
- Align with you and your solutions operationally, executionally, and culturally.
- Made shifts in the business to be strategically ready for your solution.
- Match the characteristics (beyond technographics and demographics) of the accounts that are seeing the greatest returns from your solutions and are delivering the greatest long-term revenue growth.
- Face a situation where your solutions are relevant, your competitors are irrelevant, and you have a differentiated story to tell.
- Match your business problem profile.
- Have business issues where each team can come to each interaction with a POV about the buyers’ businesses.
- Are a GTM fit from a marketing, sales, customer success, and long-term perspective
- Have an active strategic priority that you can play a strong role in and can embed your solution across the organization.
Yes, it’s important to ensure that your brand messaging, content, and stories align with your ICP accounts so we earn trust with the accounts that will provide the greatest, long-term revenue growth.
Yes, it’s important that we are driving demand with these accounts and creating a qualified pipeline with the accounts that will land and expand.
But ABM is more than just campaigns to a targeted list that sales and marketing align on.
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 as many teams are experiencing today. Their pipelines may increase with ABM motions but win rates continue to decline, GRR (retention revenue) slows, and NRR (expansion revenue) drops.
Strategic account-based marketing isn’t traditional marketing – it’s revenue-driven, customer-obsessed and deeply embedded in the sales and customer success motion. It’s about improving accounts’ experiences and interactions to make the big deals happen and make them as big as they can be. It’s focused on pipeline acceleration, customer acquisition, customer retention and deal expansion. It’s focused on how we’re going to drive business growth and impact:
- 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’ve been talking to CMOs, CROs, VPs of Marketing and VPs of Sales at organizations that have enterprise accounts like Google and Amazon for 7+ years but they are only in a couple of divisions. Even though their solutions delivered amazing outcomes, the teams struggle to penetrate other business units and other regions of the world. They did not setup a program to land and expand these strategic accounts.
Listen to this ABM Done Right Podcast with Nancy Harlan on Winning the Big Bets with ABM:
Read the Account-Based GTM Case Studies Below to See….
- How a digital asset management tech platform displaced competitors, increased new logo ARR by 55%, grew expansion ARR by 114%, improved win rates by 200%, and doubled deal sizes.
- How a facility management company stopped month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year revenue misses.
- How a supply chain provider protected their P&G account (40% of their revenue) from going to a larger, national competitor.
- How a supply chain tech company in the freight analytics space won 13 enterprise accounts on Gartner’s top 25 supply chain list.
- How a conversational AI firm captured $500K revenue wins with Tier 1 banks like Bank of America, which had previously gone dark on sales and marketing.
- How an IT service firm in the supply chain space grew profit margins by 25% with enterprises like Sephora.
- How an ITSM firm accelerated accounts to revenue and created the growth it needed to become acquired.
When you read the case studies above, notice we’re not talking about campaigns.
The case studies focus on revenue teams (sales, marketing and CS) that have changed how they GTM to create bigger wins. It focused on the business objectives of the CRO. It showed how marketing expertise was embedded directly into the sales strategy, driving hyper-personal relevance that progresses accounts forward.
Guess who was the driver for most of the case studies!
It was the CRO as the ultimate goal of ABM is…revenue impact. It’s why ABM should sit in the organization that is most accountable for revenue. A direct line to the CRO ensures that account-based programs are measured on business outcomes and not just marketing metrics. Those organizations that are making the shift where CROs are leading account-based programs are seeing stronger collaboration, faster deal velocity, and bigger wins.