The ABM Blueprint
Join marketing experts Sheridan Gaenger (Productboard) and Sarah McConnell (Qualified) as they take you through The ABM Blueprint. This guide includes best practices on how to effectively execute an ABM strategy from beginning to end.
Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today for the ABM Blueprint
My name is Sarah McConnell. I'm the VP of Demand Generation here at Qualified.
And today I'm joined by Sheridan. Sheridan, welcome.
Hey, Jordan, and introduce yourself. Hey, everybody.
I'm Sheridan Ganger, the Vice President of Revenue Marketing, right up the
street of
product board.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, of course.
So today we want to focus on if you're building out whether you've built an ABM
strategy in
the past or you're new to ABM, we want to talk about the different steps it's
going
to take to set up this blueprint for an ABM so you can make this something
repeatable and
something scalable.
So starting first with your strategy, what is the first step that you would do
when you're
setting up an ABM strategy?
First step is to align everybody.
Sales, marketing, customer success, your entire go-to-market organization
around your
ICP. So your ideal customer profile, it's important that you have a focal point
, a
launch pad to get started with your account-based efforts.
And this is something that you would, again, work to develop and refine over
time, right?
So your ICP is evergreen, right?
It's something that you need to be constantly looking at to understand, are
these the customers
that are going to see success with my product and make adjustments along the
way as you
see, for example, shifts in the economy.
But starting with your ICP to understand the customers based on your closed-arm
data,
you believe these are the customers that you should be going after that are
going to lead
to quicker sales cycles, higher ASP, higher conversions through the funnel.
That's such a good point.
And when I think about setting up an ICP for your strategy, I think as a
company, you have
like your general ICP.
So I'm going to use Qualified as an example.
We have like 6,000 accounts that we think we can sell into that match like our
firmographic
and our technographic data.
But I think when it comes to building an ABM strategy, you have to get more
niche than
that.
It can't just be 6,000 accounts, the ICP for an ABM strategy to your point is
dig a little
bit deeper.
What's going to progress faster?
What's going to be better accounts for you?
And really set something that everyone can align around that these are the
right accounts
to go after.
And we call them named accounts.
So when you think about an average enterprise sales rep, they can probably work
about 50
accounts per month, right?
At the high end, usually it can be probably around 40 to 43.
I think it's a magic number that I've seen.
And so you should use your ICP is again, a baseline to think about how you
assign your
named accounts, right?
There's other things that go into this, your territories, right?
Your 10 years of your reps, right?
You have some strategic accounts that may be mapped to specific reps and
specific gos.
And so it's good to again, have that baseline of what that ideal customer looks
like, but
it's not going to be 100% of your named accounts.
It's going to be a part of it.
And again, it needs to be fluid.
Should be coming in, they should be coming out as your account executives are
working
them.
You're going to start seeing signals and make refinements to that list.
And again, an average enterprise sales rep should be working between 40 and 50
accounts
per month.
That's such a good reference point because I think it's so easy just to get
your ICP,
get your target accounts, named accounts, be like, yeah, rep, here's 300
accounts.
It's great.
You have the whole bunch to go work.
But I think to your point is really looking at what can you realistically work?
What's the best for your business and doing like a bottoms up modeling of not
only how
many can you work, but how many do we need?
How many accounts do you actually need to work to hit your goals?
And I think that goes into the next part of this, which is your budgeting.
How do you set budgets once you know your ICP and your named accounts?
Yep.
So I would say there's probably two steps to aligning your budget.
The first one is determine what an opportunity with one of your named accounts
is worth to
your business, all the way from opportunity to close one revenue.
And have a baseline again, that's a sort of a theme of this conversation to go
after
because again, EDM is not a tactic.
It's a strategy.
There's a lot of other tactics and assets that have to be developed to support
this strategy
that are going to cost dollars, right?
And so that's sort of step one within that step is to align with your finance
partners,
understand how much is it worth for me to acquire this customer?
And then two, when you think about all of the tactics that you need to get in
front of
and warm up, right, marketing job, warm up those named accounts, what are the
costs associated
with those events, totally.
And I love you touching on working with finance because I do think it's so easy
to create in
ABM budget in a vacuum and just go through all of those tactics and say, well,
it's going
to cost this much money to run this ABM campaign.
But if your finance team hasn't come to you and say, well, this is what an
account is
worth to us or here's like the LTV of that account and you're not having that
conversation
with finance and you're just not aligned, then either you're spending way too
much money
to bring in these accounts or in a best case scenario, you could actually spend
more to
bring in these accounts because they're worth more money.
We've found that in the past is if those accounts really are at a higher
lifetime value, they
really are a higher ASP faster sales cycle, you might be willing to spend more
money on
them.
So work with your finance team, work with everyone involved in setting those
budget guardrails.
And then the last part is setting guardrails around the key indicators or
results.
Yep, the leading and lagging indicators.
And I will say there should be no surprises when it comes to ABM strategy,
right?
So we talk about your finance team understanding what you're doing and the
costs of the activities
and the work that you need to do to be able to acquire these customers, right?
Another element of no surprise is the results that you're tracking.
So when you think about all of the activity metrics and those leading
indicators, these
are key results that you should be aligning on with your partners in sales.
Again, marketing should not be creating these in a vacuum.
Sales should not be creating these in a vacuum.
Whether you have the OKR framework or I think you guys do the B2Mom framework,
B2Mom
framework, Salesforce stays, right?
So when you go into those key results, circulate them, socialize them, align on
them so that
when you go into those planning cycles, you are very clear with your partners
that these
are the key results that we are tracking to.
And then we'll talk later in this process around how we're going to report on
those.
And I think that one's so important.
I think it's so easy to skate by setting the key results and just moving past
and thinking
everyone knows what they are.
But I found one of the fastest ways to cause Mr. Limewtween sales and marketing
is if
you're running an ABM campaign and marketing thinks this is a result that we're
measuring
on but sales has a different idea and they're thinking about something else.
And all of a sudden you report on what marketing thinks is this great ABM
strategy and sales
is like, haven't any conversations with any of these accounts?
This isn't working.
So setting that up early, I think in that stage one is so important.
So we have that set up and now we're moving on to stage two and operations.
Let's talk about tech stack.
What does that look like?
My tech stack Sunday, as I call it, I'm particular about what technologies that
I have used in
my past and in my current life, right when we're thinking about setting up your
teams
for account-based success.
So for example, sales force, right?
You need somewhere to house all of your records and your customer data.
You need a tool like Qualified to understand that intent signal to clearly have
that line
of sight into what accounts are showing signal and intent and how do you staff
your teams
to be able to work those accounts.
You need an outreach tool.
For example, we use outreach to be able to communicate with those accounts and
drive
some of that outbound and inbound activity.
And then you need a prospecting tool like LinkedIn.
So these are some of the key marketing, sales technologies that you need to get
started,
but there's a lot of other flavors out there.
You need something to house your data.
You need to understand the signals of those accounts.
You need to be able to prospect accordingly, right?
And you need to be able to obviously report on all of your leading and lacking
indicators.
So again, lots of different flavors.
Figure out which ones work for you, but there's some great technologies out
there to support
it.
And we talked about data.
Data and dashboard.
Data and dashboard.
Yes.
You know, when we think about the key results, we just talked about leading and
lagging indicators,
right?
It's important that both your reps, your sales reps and your marketing reps,
right, your
campaign managers, anybody that's involved in this process and this strategy
have a line
of sight into the activities that again, you've aligned on with your partners
and sales
that they can report on every day.
There should be no surprises around what good looks like and every rep, every
manager, every
marketing counterpart should be able to go in day in and day out and understand
how you're
piecing against your goals.
And again, what is progressing and what needs more support?
The dashboards become your point of reference for improvement.
Your dashboards become a point of reference for celebration.
When you're hitting those wins as a team, you can again, reference those in
collaboration
with your partners across sales and marketing to demonstrate the success of
your accounts
moving through.
Yep.
And what I love about when we were setting up this blueprint is having the dash
boards
early and step two.
And then later, we're going to get into step four, which is execution, which
normally you
would think, okay, that's where you have the reporting and dashboards.
But I think building them early in your ABN strategy and campaign building
because there
should be no surprises.
If you're building that dashboard when you're already done and all of a sudden
you're looking
and people aren't aligned on it, then that's going to be a problem.
The other thing that I like to talk about here when we talk about dashboards is
it's
not just one dashboard.
You can have multiple dashboards for your org and with a good ABN strategy, you
probably
should.
You're going to have your exec dashboard.
What are the quick hits that your exec team cares about?
But then you've got your nitty gritty, the things your marketing team, your ops
team,
they're going to dig into to look for small red flags and things are tracking
more of
those granular things that's happening in the ABN campaign.
You can build multiple dashboards, just make sure you build them early and then
make sure
you have one place that's housing all those dashboards.
You can always go find that.
More so true.
As a source of truth.
Yep.
I mean, we've all been there.
I was looking at that report, but I was looking at that report.
That'll just slow you down.
And I'm typing into sales force that I type in pipeline generation.
I've got 72 reports.
Yeah, I've got five pop that, bro, which will put you know, what I like to do
is actually
in like our OKR trackers or in some of our like OKR slides that are circulated
across
the company is we link our source of truth report so that any given day, an
executive
or another member of the go-to-market team, if they're curious to understand
how a specific
program or strategy, account-based marketing is working, right?
They can pull that up and be able to self-serve.
That's an another important sort of benefit that a dashboard provides is that
ability
to self-serve.
But again, no surprises.
Everybody needs to be on the same page.
Align on that source of truth as part of that step two in the strategy before
you get
moving because I can tell you it's so hard to go back and try to like retro and
fix
and re-communicate all of those things.
Do it at the beginning.
We've been there.
We've done that.
Learn from our mistakes.
We've got your dashboards, Bill.
We've gone through step one, step two.
Now, I think this is the most fun part, which is the tactics.
You said earlier, there's like your strategy, which is ABM, and then there's
like tactics
within it.
So when you think this is like the hardest part for teams to grasp, when you
think about
tactics for ABM, how do you think about some of these?
How do you think about bringing all these teams together to actually execute on
this
ABM campaign or strategy?
I think of it as a framework, right?
It's sort of like a multi-level like you're building your house and at the
bottom floor
is your positioning and your messaging.
And so a lot of times you think, oh, we just start with campaigns or we start
building ads
and we go to this event and we try to focus on these accounts, actually, it's
how are
you going to be reaching those accounts?
And product marketing is an imperative, imperative partner in this entire
process.
So when you think about your ICP and you think about your name accounts, you'll
have a clear
profile of the accounts that you're going to be going after.
Couldn't be multiple profiles depending on what your sort of spectrum of name
accounts
looks like.
PMM needs that.
They need to understand it so that they can do research against either
industries or against
some close-one analyses to be able to put together a thoughtful positioning
that is
going to be the baseline for your campaigns and your sort of tactical
executions.
You have to start with PMM.
I love that.
I do think one of the bigger mistakes that's made in ABM strategies or ABM
campaigns is
just forgetting to bring in the product marketing team.
I think especially if your org has someone that owns just ABM, I think it's
easy for
other people in the org to think ABM is just one singular function, but it is
someone
that has to work.
They have to quarterback across so many different parts of the department.
And product marketing, who knows your ICP better?
They know their pain points.
I know what's going to reach them at different stages of the journey.
So I could not agree more starting with product marketing is like the
foundation first and
foremost.
And then what's next?
What's next comes the campaigns and content.
And again, when we think about, all right, you have this blueprint or this
framework for
your positioning, right?
There's consistency across everything that you do because we know as buyers,
the more
you see things in the same way, right?
And the same sort of story it resonates.
And so it's important again that PMM comes first.
They give you that framework and then you can start building out the content.
And when you think about content, you really need to understand across this
whole profile
of named accounts, where are they in their journey?
Yeah.
Right.
And this is where a tool like qualified comes in, right?
You can understand what accounts are showing signal and what accounts are
potentially
cold that you need to warm up and develop the right content, whether it's top
of funnel,
middle, funnel, bottom of funnel, to be able to align them and help them move
them through
to the next point in their journey.
And then you have your campaigns, right?
You can provide digital air cover.
We just launched qualified for advertising to understand that digital journey
that your
named accounts are going through to again, provide a better opportunity to have
those
specific discussions.
You can think about events.
So one of the tactics that we're executing currently at product board is we
have an amazing
field marketing program.
ABM can tack on to field marketing.
So we'll get six months out at all of the programs across the world and
understand where
the concentration is of our named accounts.
And then we'll do thoughtful localized activity.
Everybody is excited to be out.
They're excited to do dinners, excited to go to a ball game, right?
We're coming up to spring.
So thinking about different ways that you can engage with your named accounts
in a very
thoughtful and intimate way is a great opportunity at a low cost, right?
And so when you think about 10 or so folks that you want to engage with, again,
partnering
with field marketing on some of the tactics to get in front of them in such a
unique setting
is definitely something that we're testing and trying this year.
And then there's obviously a variety of other marketing tactics that you can
weave in.
But again, you can't do the tactics without the product marketing.
So that's sort of the segue.
And I think the content piece too, going back to that, is so important.
And I think one of the things that I've gotten caught, made mistakes doing, is
trying to
launch a full blown ABM strategy and realizing we don't have the right content
based on where
they're at.
So we did all the steps to figuring out our ICP and our named accounts.
And then we thought about where they might be in their buyer's journey and the
pain points
and which part of marketing.
But then we looked at the content we had to realize we didn't have enough
content.
So I think thinking through this blueprint early and pinpointing where the gaps
in your
content, where are the gaps in based on your named accounts in your ICP, what
you might
need to be telling these people in the content that they want to consume and
the channels
that they want to consume and making sure you're taking that into consideration
as you're
building that out.
And then also the field marketing piece.
So important.
I couldn't agree more that people are just excited to get out there and events
are just
coming back in full speed and play some point, right?
Which leads us to the next step in making sure it's housed in a place that's
easy for
sales to act.
Yes, right.
So think about it.
If we just said an average rep is working 50 accounts, like they got a lot on
their mind.
They're trying to do a lot of different things and partnering with their ADRs.
They're monitoring their qualified signals and you understand when and when
they can
pounce on those accounts.
I didn't forget.
Like, what's happening next?
There's so many things.
There's so many things.
Like, I thought we had a ballgame.
Is that coming up?
I know it's spring.
You need to house it in a calendar.
Not every little thing, but at a high level, any sales rep, any marketing
member should
be able to go in and understand what is happening.
And I'm not talking just the account based activities, right?
That is a layer.
That is a section in the calendar because we want to be leveraging all of the
things that
are happening across marketing to be able to engage these accounts.
So having a sales friendly calendar, you can build it in a variety of different
tools,
make sure that it socialize often.
One practice that we've developed at product board is every Monday, we do a
marketing announcement
across all of our key sales channels.
And we say, if you are looking to drive cold accounts, here's some type of
funnel content
or some top up funnel activities that you can execute to be able to warm them
up.
Or if you're trying to move people through sort of that middle stage, here's
some events
or some webinars or new case studies that we have.
Or if you're looking to again, bring them through to sort of that bottom of
funnel motion.
Here's a new demo video.
It's great to continue to communicate, which is another part of this strategy
that we'll
get into in more detail.
But housing it in a referenceable self-serving calendar, absolutely.
I'm telling you, it is a way to go and people will use it.
They just need to be reminded that exists, which is why we have that Monday
reminder.
So last couple minutes here, moving on to step four now that you've got all the
things
that you're going to do, all those tactics you have in a calendar where sales
can reference
from an execution standpoint, what are the top things that you would focus on
from an
execution standpoint once you start this strategy?
It's not lunch.
There's something that comes before the line.
And that's training your reps.
So we talked about dashboards, we talked about tools, we talked about content.
People need to be trained on that.
And you can't assume, no surprises, right?
You can't assume that people are going to know what you expect of them, right?
So you need to work with your sales managers, you need to work with your enable
ment team
if you have an enablement team and bring them through this journey.
This is all the things that we expect you to do.
Here's the tools that are at your disposal.
Here's the content that we are launching.
Here's how to leverage it again in those different stages of your funnel.
Here's how to understand what accounts are, you know, showing, signaling
qualified, for
example, no question should go unanswered before you launch.
Yeah, right?
And so you need to be able to train them.
You also need to give them the mechanism to get their questions answered once
you do
launch.
So think about office hours.
So we have office hours where different sales members can meet with different
members of
our marketing ops team, our marketing team.
One of our team members, Lilly, hosts qualified office hours.
So as we are continuing to ramp the team up on some of the new functionality
with the
pipeline cloud, we're giving them that opportunity to get their questions
answered and so that
they feel confident and excited about everything that's coming up.
So step one of step four is to train your reps, right?
And be accessible to them when they have questions.
Perfect.
Okay.
We've got like 40 seconds left in the last 40 seconds here.
Last part of execution that you're like, we have to hit on this.
And then we obviously have the blueprint for the team, which number for the
attendees here
which I will send you on.
Celebration, you launch, you get your ads up, you get your activities planned,
you get
your content in the market, right?
Then you communicate, communicate often.
Yeah.
So Madeline Crowley, who heads up our account based programs at product board,
sends messages
every Monday and every Friday.
Monday is here's what's coming up.
Fridays, here's what happened.
And she also communicates one on one with the reps when she sees accounts that
are showing
signals.
So keeping that constant pulse with the sales organization around what's
happening and what
is some things to look forward to.
So communicate, communicate, communicate and then report whether it's your
monthly digest,
whether it's your quarterly business reviews, whether it's participating in
your sales
all hands, bring people into the results.
Even maybe when the story isn't great.
Bring people in, help them feel like they understand what is happening.
Again, no surprises.
I think that's a key theme of this conversation today.
And make sure that those reports are the ones that are in your source of truth
library
so that people can reference them often.
I love that, Sheridan.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
I think the Sunday analogy was my favorite part of this.
And I think no surprises.
I'm going to keep reminding myself when I'm building thing.
No surprises when it comes to ABM campaigns.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us.
Thank you, Sheridan.
For those of us who are interested, we actually did build out the ABM blueprint
so that things
that we talked about today, we actually have it as a resource in the resources
tab that
you can go download as something to take home with you to reference as you
start building
out your next ABM campaign.
So thank you so much.
Thank you.
And we will see you soon.
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