The interview in full
We discuss the common challenges faced by B2B ABM Marketers with Tony Jarvis, Global MD for Client Relations, EI Advisory.
If you are building and working ABM programs that your sales team are paying lip service to then you might as well stop.”
EI: In your role, Tony, you speak with senior ABM marketers from across the UK, US and Europe. What are the common challenges?
TJ: “One of the biggest difficulties with ABM is measuring success. So, working out how we know if an ABM program is working. The second is achieving true collaboration with sales, engaging hearts and minds. And underneath both these sits the challenge of what is and isn’t an account-based marketing activity.”
EI: Why is it important for marketers to know what counts as ABM activity?
TJ: “If I am an ABM marketer, I want to know what’s in my remit, and it can be hard not to tread on the sales team’s toes. When Account based marketing focuses giving the sales team a new contact to approach and the hook to make that approach, this crosses over into sales activity.
EI: Which brings us to your second challenge, achieving true collaboration with the sales team?
TJ: “Yes. Sales historically see it as them vs. us. Marketers need to work out how to get sales onside. The ultimate way of doing this is to get the sales team excited by your ABM program. You want the sales team saying ‘I’ve got another account I want this support on’.
EI: Why is it important that sales pay for ABM activity?
TJ: “It’s about skin in the game. Let’s go back to the challenge of how you measure success in ABM. ABM is about contribution to the sales pipeline. You’ve got to have salespeople saying ‘my pipeline improved because of this ABM activity’.
ABM is about contribution to the sales pipeline.
EI: How can an ABM marketer demonstrate contribution to the pipeline?
TJ: “There are four main ways. Speeding up the deal, improving the likelihood of the deal, increasing the value of the deal, or creating a new deal. So, it’s Velocity, Likelihood, Size, New.
Speeding up the deal, improving the likelihood of the deal, increasing the value of the deal, or creating a new deal are all ways to show success."
TJ (cont.): If I am in the sales team and I am going to commit 20% of my budget to ABM activity, I need to be able to show in the CRM I use that the activity contributed in one of these ways. Improving the likelihood is a really good KPI, but it’s hard to show, because it’s a stealth piece. If ABM activity can bring about face to face meetings, enable sales to really grip into a deal, it can turn a deal that was smoke into something real.”
EI: So if I am an ABM Marketer, out of those four ways to show contribution, which are the easiest and fastest for me to achieve?
TJ: New deals is the most certain. Ultimately this is about getting the salesperson to tag it, to say that this deal was a result of ABM. The others are harder to quantify, and the salesperson is always going to want to take the credit.
EI: Is creating new deals and relationships as straightforward as it sounds, especially for mature accounts?
TJ: “Within any strategic account there is never 100% penetration. There is always headroom. You need your sales team to be really clear on the areas of the account they don’t know. When we work on our account intelligence reports we say to the sales team; "Tell us where you want to get to, and tell us where your blind spots are". Sales blind spots are where ABM activity should focus.
Sales blind spots are where ABM activity should focus.
EI: Let's go back to the challenge of how marketers measure ABM success. What should marketers be moving towards and what should they be wary of having imposed upon them by other teams?
TJ: “The ultimate KPI for any ABM program should be: does the sales team want it? If you are building and working ABM programs that your sales team are paying lip service to then you might as well stop. They might not have the budget to pay for the ABM activity, but you want them to love it. You want to give them genuine insight, new ideas and fresh intelligence.
If you are building and working ABM programs that your sales team are paying lip service to then you might as well stop."
EI: How does EI’s Account Intelligence reporting help with this?
TJ: Our account and pursuit intelligence reports focus on the blind spots in the sales team. We ask sales to group people at three levels. First, contacts they know, so our blacklist. Then, the aspirational people they were once in a meeting with or once on a phone call with, who they would get back if they could. Finally, the blind spots where the account has opened a new office or a new business line, and they have a complete blank sheet. We focus on the last two.
EI: What specifically does an EI report do?
We provide the sales team with evidence-backed ideas for engaging with these target people and stand behind them to say, if you did these it would move you forward. And we help execute the ideas. Then the sales team starts to take the barbed wire down and see the benefit. And we make the marketer look good.
EI can provide evidence backed ideas for engaging with targets at strategic accounts and helping sales execute these."
EI: So why doesn’t this happen from the start, why does the sales team have this attitude towards ABM?
TJ: Because often with ABM activity, they are played back information that they already know that they can’t really use. That’s my sense. There’s a historic mismatch between sales and marketing that you need to overcome to get sales buy in to ABM activity. You do this by creating ABM programs that focus on sales enablement activity which fills in the sales blind spots. Then you have the starting point for a really successful ABM program.
EI: What a great place to end. Thank you Tony.
