What makes the difference between ABM programmes that fizzle out after a couple of years and ones that are going strong 5-10 years later? A thorny question.
At last week’s ABM Conference in London, we tried a new approach to coming up with the answers. Inspired by the BBC’s The Repair Shop, we set up our own version for marketers.
If you know the show, you’ll get the idea. People bring in things that matter to them, often a bit battered or neglected, and a team of craftspeople help bring them back to life. It’s practical and quietly optimistic. And there’s occasional tears of joy – a bit like any good ABM programme.
That’s the spirit we wanted to capture. A place for marketers to bring their ABM challenges, talk about what’s not working, and share ideas on how to put things right.
I was joined by Grace McLaren from Verizon, Annelie Kniep from Splunk and Alex Homer from Palo Alto Networks. Between them, they’ve built some of the strongest ABM programmes around, and they were refreshingly honest about what it takes to keep them running.
Don’t start ABM without linking it to a wider business transformation
The most common mistake when starting ABM is treating it like a smart campaign, or something for marketing to do ‘because the stats look good’. Something you can run, measure and move on from. The reality is that ABM only works when it’s connected to something bigger.
Grace put it well: “If ABM isn’t linked to a wider company initiative, it loses momentum.”
The programmes that survive beyond their first year are the ones rooted in transformation: a commercial shift already happening in the business.
That definitely struck a chord with me; the best programmes I’ve been involved in are ones where there’s been a lot of other changes at the same time as launching ABM. Things like new sales methodologies, new product positioning, or a different investor narrative are all good signs that there’s a wider business change to pin ABM to.
The biggest risk to ABM isn’t sales alignment or account selection. It’s loss of belief.
When an ABM programme starts to wobble, you can usually trace it back to a dip in belief. That might be from the sales or leadership team, or inside marketing itself.
You stop getting the same energy and collaboration, and then funding slips away. It brought back for me the importance of the internal communications stream in any ABM programme.
The fix is to keep reminding people what ABM is actually there to do, brought to life with real examples and testimonials from customers & the sales team, combined with regular clear reporting.
When sales go quiet, look for support elsewhere
Every ABMer knows the pain of silence. You’ve done the work, built the insight, shared the plan, and then a sales team goes quiet. Often for the best of reasons – major deals to support, or a big change happening at the customer.
Annelie’s advice was to look sideways. Find the people around the account who care about the customer and the relationship. It could be a regional lead, someone in customer success, or a solutions architect.
It takes a village to run an ABM programme, so if it’s all being left to sales & marketing there might be something else missing.
You can’t control the noise, but you can align the intent
Another common frustration is striking the right balance in what key customers see. On one side, there’s carefully personalised ABM materials, and on the other side the wider mass of marketing communications from the rest of your business. Different marketing teams running their own activity, all hitting the same accounts.
Alex’s take was simple. You’ll never control it all, and you don’t need to. The goal isn’t to manage every message; it’s to make sure everyone is pointing in the same direction. Grace and Annelie echoed the message talking about ABM’s role as a ‘conductor’ putting the best content/experiences from your company in front of key customers.
“These were our best accounts – they would have grown anyway even without ABM”
This challenge got us on to the topic of reporting and proving the value of ABM over the long term. You can have the nicest dashboards but still struggle to show the benefit of ABM.
A few angles from the panel stood out for me;
- We’re past the stage of trying to prove at a granular level “marketing should take credit for this” – it’s not healthy to set up in competition with the contribution from sales.
- Genuine control groups are the best way at an overall programme level to show ABM’s impact. And that takes courage to set up because in the control group you’re deliberately excluding accounts that would benefit from ABM. The principle is that excluding them this year can help get funding to expand the programme next year.
- You can absolutely show that ABM activities have better performance metrics than ‘spray and pray’ tactics (which is good practice to be on top of to keep optimising performance).
And similar to the point about ‘loss of belief’ above, the internal storytelling with customer and sales testimonials is essential.
More to come
We need more of this kind of openness to address the real challenges that come up in ABM. Massive thanks to the panel for starting the conversation. Hopefully it won’t be the last time we open up The ABM Repair Shop.
