How to convince your leadership on a target account strategy

Over 70% of CMOs say they don’t have the budget to execute their strategy, and nearly 90% report that they’re under pressure to change how the marketing function works to achieve sustainable results. Gartner states, “Growth, yield and return must be foremost in CMOs’ minds as they go beyond standard prioritization.”

As a marketing leader, you know this. You’re living it every day. Yet how do you build a strategy that allows you to deliver more with less, clearly showcases your team’s contribution to ROI and gets your leadership team behind it? 

At Arise, we believe in a Blended ABM account targeting strategy, aka Blended ABM. This strategy aligns marketing and revenue teams around customer experience and growth, increasing conversion, retention and expansion.

Blended ABM moves accounts through all known ABM approaches as the account requires. We use all three strategies, but we see the most productive outcomes coming from Blended ABM. It maximises HubSpot, third-party applications, culture, deals and customer experience.

Whilst demand generation and inbound have roles in the marketing mix, blended ABM only targets your ICP accounts instead of scattering persona-led messaging into the universe in hopes of capturing the right audience. We’re big believers in being proactive instead of reactive in a market landscape that can’t afford any waste.

This might feel unfamiliar to your leadership and a little uncomfortable. It flips the traditional model on its head and requires a cultural shift in aligning marketing with sales and customer success. So, how do you sell a targeted account strategy to them?

Firstly, you’re going to need your peers on board—that’s sales and customer success. Whilst standard ABM requires sales and marketing to align, Blended ABM involves both the aforementioned parties. Without sales, this strategy will not succeed. We break down practical steps for curating the right story when liaising with sales, customer success and product about moving to this approach. 

What we love about Blended ABM is that it drives RevOps; it absolutely requires your strategy to follow our ARISE framework, which at its core is:

• Plan to communicate your product's value and how your buyer succeeds
• Plan to enable your customer to buy from you across the buying committee
• Plan to onboard, retain and expand your customer lifecycle

Aligning with your sales leader

Reports

Numbers lead your sales leader, so convince them with a report-led approach. You should speak their language by extracting the relevant reports from your CRM and presenting their situation to them. These include:

• Average deal size: SiriusDecisions Command Center data shows that 91% of respondents say deal size is larger for ABM accounts, and 1 in 4 say it is over 50% larger. 
• Churn/retention rates: According to Marketo, 85% of marketers say that ABM helps retain and grow customers. 
• Win/loss rates: Terminus found that 86% of marketers report improved win rates with ABM.
• Annual contract value (ACV): The ABM Leadership Alliance recorded a 171% increase in the average ACV post-ABM implementation. 
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): Marketo reports that 80% of marketers say ABM improves customer lifetime value (CLV).

Leverage these reports by outlining the company's current situation and its future goals. The stats above are also powerful levers in your conversation. 

Sales enablement

Sales enablement is a success tool that every sales leader should want (read: absolutely needs) in their toolbox. You may be thinking, "We’ve done some sales enablement." 

But is it truly targeted? Does it cut through the noise and zero in on the right company at the right time? Or is it broader, encapsulating some content assets? Whilst the latter is a good start, great sales enablement needs to look more like the former - and to get there, you will need automated workflows, battle cards, playbooks, objection-handling scripts and data. And more than anything else, constant testing and iteration.

As the marketing leader, you know the quality of your data better than anyone else. Often, the data in the CRM isn’t fit for purpose, and this negatively impacts the business, particularly your team and sales. 

ARISE aligns teams across one CRM (HubSpot) so no data gets lost, and you get a 360-degree view of your customers/prospects. This combines with our Blended ABM approach, which puts comprehensive sales enablement at its heart. The entire point of a target account strategy is to drive the right content to the right prospect at the right time to create value—building trust, knowledge and, ultimately, conversion. 

It's efficient, but also accountable. Your sales leader will undoubtedly have a KPI for their sales team around the number of calls made. But it’s easy to make a call that’s successful merely by the nature of being made - but results in zero relationship or profit. By shifting the focus to quality over quantity

1) everyone becomes more responsible

2) everyone becomes more skilled through sales enablement upskilling

3) your sales leader can more easily identify and address weak links within the team. 

Ultimately creating a more predictable and scalable sales engine. 

But the business’s salespeople aren’t the only revenue team. The team should embody marketing, sales and customer success, and sales and CS should be aligned for a customer-centric approach.

Bringing customer success on board

We believe CS (and marketing) should think commercially and have revenue-based targets and KPIs. We build these into HubSpot with the relevant reports, including joint reporting with sales. For CS, these go beyond Time to Value (TTV) and incorporate such metrics as feature adoption, etc., so your CS leader can prove tangible ROI and give the customer a better experience. 

With ARISE, our trademark product, onboarding becomes health-scored. This means CS can also track data in HubSpot to see if an account falls below a certain “health-scored” threshold and fix it before it's too late. 

One of the other significant challenges sales and customer success often face is the handoff between one team and the other. Churn frequently starts here because there can be days or weeks between closed/won deals and handover to CS. Your customer has just signed a big contract, they’ve parted with quite a bit of money and the fear of the unknown sets in.

According to a recent stat by Gartner at their SaasStock 2023 presentation, 43% of vendor-related regret is related to the handoff between sales and implementation. 

An account-based strategy upends the traditional handoff between teams. No longer does marketing create leads, which are then given to sales to land, which CS then takes over.

Instead, think about a football team working together to get the ball down the field into the goal. This means during the latter stages of a deal, CS should be in the room, and then we use HubSpot to ensure customers are immediately enrolled into a customer success sequence: no gaps, no time for buyer’s remorse or a lapse in trust. 

When rallying your CS leader on the proponents of an account-focused strategy, one of the most powerful cards you can play is that this approach helps build a seamless and personalised customer experience. A playbook that takes an account from stranger to client to up-sell/cross-sell - one that is customer-centric and intent on building/growing a relationship. 

According to Salesforce, 70% of customers said connected experiences, such as seamless handoffs between departments and contextualised engagement based on earlier interactions, are crucial to winning their business. Almost half (49%) have no patience for disconnected experiences, so this is a game-changer. 

Let's not forget about the product leader

The product also has a role to play here, mainly because all of the daily challenges Customer Success faces with clients can be used to commercially roadmap what customers really need. 

This refines your positioning and messaging and how you differentiate yourself in the market, making your job as the marketing leader much easier. In fact, you can see how this makes every revenue leader’s job easier—and more able to prove their actions have ROI. 

If you want deeper results, your product team can push data into HubSpot, too, and you can then build an even more in-depth 360-degree view of the customer. Usage data could be a key insight into how and when you try to upsell, upgrade or cross-sell as an example.

Convincing the leadership

Once you have discussed the benefits of this strategy with your peers - and have their buy-in - you can now move on to your top tier of leadership. These include your Founder(s), CEO, Chief Revenue Officer and even Chief People Officer. Why the latter? Because this approach does equate to a shift in culture - a more transparent, accountable, cross-functional one - which will need to be reflected in your future hiring processes. 

Now, you can talk to your leaders about how this will impact marketing, sales, CS, product and culture. It will create new responsibilities and ways of working, but also more opportunities to excel. 

We recommend you use our free swipe file, which is chock full of all the ABM information you need to answer key questions your leadership may ask.