There’s a famous economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who recognised that 80% of your results come from 20% of your activities. Is 100% of that driven by having the right team in place?
Creating a successful team is both exhilarating and fulfilling.
I’ve experienced first-hand the profound impact that assembling talent has, thanks to my many years spent building and leading dedicated ABM teams. The true value however lies in how you integrate them across the wider marketing organisation, and in particular into field marketing. This is when ensuring you have the right individuals in place becomes mission (and outcome) critical. With ever changing team dynamics in business today, I find I’m being increasingly asked what the ‘secret sauce’ is…
What I can share is that for those starting on the journey of building or scaling ABM initiatives, cultivating the traits exhibited by top-performing ABM practitioners is crucial.
These are my four priority areas to focus on:
- Work within your sales team in order to determine shared goals
Trait: Build robust relationships. Top performers are proficient at engaging in, and managing, challenging discussions, they partner effectively with other core stakeholders, (e.g. customer success, subject-matter experts), demonstrate great analytical skills and are able to adapt their strategies quickly. When an ABM team of mine was approached by the Strategic Account VP (sales), to be part of the account planning weekly meetings and quarterly customer reviews they took the opportunity to go one step further and provided this sales team with ABM training. This resulted in one of the more successful sales managers becoming an evangelist for the team and the programme. The key point here is that you will get asked to be part of sales’ world – embrace it.
- Grow (and often accelerate) pipeline, wallet share and revenue
Trait: Take calculated risks to foster pipeline growth and accelerate revenue, accurately forecast outcomes, stop less effective approaches and build on what is working well. Top performers naturally influence leadership by showcasing results and advocating for strategic initiatives. The latter is the game-changer. One of my best examples here was working in tandem with sales to get a very large, existing customer to expand their purchase. One of the pivotal influencing activities was setting up an executive briefing centre meeting. We had peer-to-peer executives, C-Suite, in the same room as part of a highly bespoke discussion. The deal was signed a month later.
- Have richer, more relevant conversations with customers
Trait: Truly understand where customers are in their journey. Top performers take time to learn and research where customers hang out and develop conversation hooks that sustain consistent communications. I’ve always insisted that the right investment is made here which has instilled trust with the sales teams, as insights provided have been tailored and highly valuable. It saves sales a ton of time and is instantly impactful.
- Uncover new customers and opportunities
Trait: Use a data-driven approach to uncover opportunities, enjoy research, build ideal customer profiles for better targeting, partner closely with product marketing and solutions engineers. Top performers understand business portfolios and can tailor offerings to capitalise on emerging opportunities. I am a big advocate of partnering with marketing operations and sales operations to understand the existing landscape. Accompany data insights with context from customer success, layered with feedback from sales engineers and you have a brilliant framework to craft messaging from that will open new opportunities and drive engagement.
Top-performing ABM practitioners have an ability to forge collaborative relationships, navigate complexity with finesse, and consistently innovate when guided by a commitment to continuous growth and the unwavering pursuit of customer-centric excellence.
In a commercial world, can you apply 80% of your revenue as coming from 20% of your customers?
This is a topic that I’m beyond passionate about – and have lots of lessons learned that I’m happy to share – so I’m opening up 3 slots in my diary, during June, to connect with anyone who wants to talk about ‘no obligation’ ABM improvements. If you’re local I’m happy to do this over a coffee! Just drop me a line and we can get the conversation started – please connect with me on LinkedIn; DM’s are open.
