Account-Based Marketing for Dummies

In every one of my posts so far I think I’ve said a version of the following:

“Make a target list of your Top 50 prospects”

That’s because it’s the single most impactful thing you as a marketer (at any level) can do. The great thing about B2B marketing is that you’re not marketing to some nebulous pool of consumers you have to make big data models to understand. You’re marketing to those businesses right there, who want [X] to do [Y]. They even post their addresses online!

Yet, I almost never see this kind of thing in mature organizations, let alone startups. Marketing has literally no idea which exact companies it should be marketing to. They know generally which category, what kind of companies, which trade shows to go to. But they don’t go that extra mile to figure out exactly which companies they should be tailoring their outreach to, planning events for, or any of the other things a good marketing team does. So they’re needlessly vague, lack direct feedback loops, and aren’t integrated with sales. And they wonder why layoffs always start with marketing. 

Here are the excuses I hear, and what you can do to overcome them:

1. We need an ABM platform, and that takes time to integrate

Oh my god no you do not. Stop. You need a platform to tell you what you’re doing to influence this list of 50 target accounts this week? It’s 50 of them! You can keep this on a spreadsheet, I don’t care! Put it in Salesforce, whatever. Measuring stuff is nice, but it should be your last, not first, concern. I know good people who get wrapped up into this chore mostly because they don’t understand what ABM really is and they try to explain it to me as some very complex technology and integration instead of just “hey, why not try to get those companies to take calls with our sales team?” There are great ABM platforms out there and some of them allow you to do very highly targeted display ads or CTV ads against your target list; 99% of you don’t need that and anyway you can get it other ways.

2. We can’t get Sales to commit to a target list

This is basic Sales / Marketing working together bullshit and the struggle here can be real. Sales often doesn’t know exactly who they should be going after and that’s not their fault. You need to help them define target segments and then commit to listing example companies within them. Do a segmentation workshop. Guide them through it. If you don’t know how to do this, I can tell you in a future post (or just email me). Get those 50 companies. If Sales is still reticent, or disagrees with your analysis after careful consideration, tell your CEO that Sales doesn’t know who they’re selling to, and you can’t get them to commit to a target list. When the smoke stops coming out of your CEO’s ears, they’ll be eager to help.

3. Don’t wanna

I suspect this is the real reason most companies don’t commit to a target list, mainly just inertia. I don’t think the benefit is obvious to everyone, so I came up with this third excuse mostly to turn the conversation to the positive arguments for aligning marketing around a Top 50 / Top 100 framework:

• Shifts focus from a wait-and-see kind of marketing (inbound leads are by definition this) to “go fucking get it” marketing. When you can literally see the names of customers you are targeting you really know what success looks like. Anyone who believes in visualizing the goal and making it real can understand why this is so powerful.

• “How we’re tracking against getting our Top 50 prospects” is a much more relatable story than “how we are converting MQLs to SQLs” to your CEO/CRO/leadership. The things you do that look somewhat fluffy (think: parties, dinners, etc) suddenly become mission-critical when they’re driving the Top 50.

• Forces you to be creatively focused. Think of micro-campaigns against each of your targets, or segments that are then personalized by target. The more you know about what each prospect actually wants, the more honed your marketing can be. Email outreach sequences, targeted ads (e.g. a highly targeted digital out-of-home ad around a conference you know they’ll be at), events, etc. all can be fully tailored to push the buttons of each of your prospects.

• Tighter feedback loops. “Hey, we did a webinar about this topic we know is critical to [Top 50 Prospect], and 3 people from [Top 50 prospect] showed up and asked the following questions…”

• Solves the “everybody’s a marketer” problem. When things aren’t going well, you start getting the peanut gallery telling you what you should be doing. And it’s hard to prove to them that their dogshit idea won’t work, so you end up taking their input and doing some amount of it (or getting fired because you won’t try anything). But when you boil down the challenge to influencing a certain set of companies, it helps focus the conversation on what things would actually impact those specific companies vs. some harebrained marketing idea that isn’t targeted at all.

Make a Top 50 list. Prioritize it. Then get to know your Top 10 inside and out, make dossiers for them; spend as much time making dopey one-sheets for Sales as you do helping them understand exactly who they’re selling to, which conferences they speak at or attend, who the likely decision maker is and who they report to, whether or not they’re working with a competitor and for how long (and are they happy?). 

Everything else you do will get better after you do this.