Practical tactics to supercharge your ABM programs with marketing and sales playbooks

In this article, we’ll show you how to supercharge your ABM programs with marketing and sales playbooks.

Specifically, you’ll learn:

• ​How to create a playbook
• How to use the research cascade method to generate revenue for your ABM campaigns (+ practical examples)
• How marketing and sales should collaborate when running an ABM campaign
• Real ABM playbooks and case studies

Let’s dive in.

How to create ABM marketing and sales playbooks?

Most B2B marketers are obsessed with “more leads” without really caring about the quality of those leads. As a result, when they do ABM, one of the biggest mistakes they make is to build a long list of accounts (often with little personalization) and expect their campaign to produce mind-blowing results. 

Most of them want to sell to Fortune 500 companies, and they upload their list to ABM software and target accounts with display ads, ebooks, and gated content. Then they track clicks and downloads and send the contacts to the sales team saying, “Hey, these are MQLs, now it’s your turn to generate opportunities.”

But typically, this creates disagreement – and even tension – between sales and marketing teams. Why? Sales teams are usually excited to talk to people that are interested in your product. But what happens with the contacts they receive from the marketing team is that it doesn’t take long for them to realize that the leads aren’t top quality. And oftentimes, these leads ignore them completely.

With all that being said, what is the right way to create a playbook for your organization?

As a reminder, a playbook is a guide that defines the following point for a campaign:

• Key message;
• Types of communications;
• Best strategies;
• Optimized techniques.

When created well, a playbook should outline the process through which a company or a brand will manage their teams (both marketing and sales) over the course of a period with the ultimate goal to maximize their ROI.

But how do you do that?

Before creating an ABM playbook, the first thing you need to do is to look at the end goal. Identify your business needs and then match them with an ABM motion to develop your initial playbook.

For instance, if deals are taking too long to close, you probably need a pipeline acceleration playbook. But if you’re losing renewals to your competitors, then a retention playbook applies.

The next thing you need to do is to identify the metrics and the stats. This is where a lot of people miss it. They do not think of the metrics until the very end of the process.

But how do you know you’re winning if you’re not keeping score during the game?

Jim Gilkey, Growth Executive at Terminus

He went on to add: “Each of the playbooks that we have at Terminus has its own set of KPIs because a brand awareness campaign is going to have a different output than a retention campaign or a pipeline acceleration campaign”.

So starting with the end in mind, you should look at KPIs based on:

1. The goals you are pursuing;
2. The efficiency of the tools and tactics you use to run your whole campaign;
3. The performance of your marketing and sales teams

This last point is a reminder that the concept of incorporating your teams in the decisions and the creation of strategies is crucial because “people endorse what they co-create”, said Missy Shopshire from Compelling Clarity.

But which of the two teams should own the playbook?

Which team should be in charge of the playbook: marketing or sales?

The truth is, there has to be an equal partnership between sales and marketing when you’re diving into your playbook creation and execution. But a pre-work has to be done, that is:

Step 1: Determine your ICP criteria

If you’re at an early stage in ABM and you’re trying to determine your ICP criteria, you need to look first at the recent wins and losses within your company. 

Start to filter by some of the firmographic, technographic, and psychographic points. Afterward, look for the commonalities to build both your inclusion and exclusion criteria. For instance, look at the deals that might have closed but took four times longer and four times the resources to close. 

In addition, one of the most important things when determining your ICP criteria is how you integrate some of the ICP scorings into the CRM and database that you’re constantly using. This means that when new accounts start to surface from an intent signal or come through an event, you can very quickly run them through the ICP criteria that you know are effective. 

Step 2: Build a target account list

This is the step of bringing sales along the journey. 

Different companies might do this in different ways. Here are some of the possibilities we have:

Good: the marketing team reviews the report, starts creating the ICP, and then enables the sales team.

Better: the marketing team enables the sales team and starts getting feedback from them or bluntly lets them choose some accounts for the pilot. 

Best: The marketing team shows the sales team the exercise they did on the ICP and what they learned. They then solicit feedback from the sales team who suggest other things they could look at, and then they go and do the ICP exercise again to achieve co-creation of ABM accounts.

After this step comes the last one: create content based on key performance indicators to achieve the specific goals related to the business need you are trying to meet.

How to use the research cascade method to generate revenue for your ABM campaigns?

When companies want to build an ABM motion and launch an ABM campaign, they always think about net revenue. But to generate for example $300k revenue for your ABM campaigns you might need to use the research cascade method and here’s how to proceed.

Stage 1: Account Research

Account research is one of the most neglected steps when companies decide to embark on ABM despite its undeniable importance in the process of personalization. Simply put, account research consists of collecting insights about target accounts.

From Jim Gilkey’s point of view, when searching for accounts, it’s important to start uploading your best accounts to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This is an excellent tool that gives you enough interesting data that you can use for personalization purposes. Among other things, it can tell you when some of your contacts have switched companies. You can also find out when companies search for and interact with your content on LinkedIn, when they visit your company page and lots of other data you can use to personalize your outreach.

If you’re looking at OPR, you’re going to find the top goals and the top initiatives of these companies which is a really great place to start with personalization. Then moving from an account level where you understand the business, you can go down to the buyer level by looking at the podcasts that they’re on, and the things they post or engage with on LinkedIn.

And again, Sales Navigator is good for surfacing a lot of that at scale.

However, if you don’t have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can still reach out to your prospects through their content by leaving thought-provoking comments underneath their posts.

Important: Join Trenches B2B Marketing Community now.

Stage 2: Buying committee

What you should do here is to look for the core roles of the buying committee members such as: 

1. Champions: also known as purchasing managers, they set the environment for the success of your campaign
2. Decision-makers: they make the final decision to purchase
3. Influencers: can have an impact on the decision of other members of the buying committee
4. Blockers: as their name might depict it, blockers may stop the whole process from moving forward.

These are four categories of people that somehow influence your opportunity. That said, reviewing their KPIs, areas of responsibility, goals and potential challenges is of great help. 

Stage 3: Value proposition mapping

Value proposition mapping can come from a number of different sources.

First, you can start by looking at the specifics through Google Analytics and the pages that potential customers are visiting on your website. Indeed, no page visited on your website is trivial. 

However, there are certain companies that offer a wide variety of products or services on their website, and thus, it can be difficult to know which message to start the conversation with for maximum results. 

If this sounds like you, you need to segment or group the pages on your website in a way that indicates a specific interest in a product or pain point.

The other platforms you can leverage are Gong, Zoom recordings, and/or interviews with your sales team. The point here is to identify the frequently asked questions that companies keep bringing up in meetings. 

These questions are essential in that they will be your single greatest point of content creation.

Among other things, they will help you understand the words your prospects use to describe their pain points, and conversely, they will help you create a list of priority metrics that you can use to be miles ahead of your competitors who are probably reaching out to the same accounts with a spray-and-pray approach.

Below is an example of priority metrics that Jim Gilkey uses.

When you start to focus on individuals within a company, mapping to that value proposition, you get to a one-to-one level that allows you to stand out from the crowd. Bottom line, it’s a win-win for everyone. Because you’re providing them with a rewarding experience as they feel like you’re helping them!

From there, the personalized solution is going to be anything from your marketing automation that you set up with:

• Cadences in sales agent tools like sales Locker Outreach;
• Podcasts;
• Microsite; 
• Direct mail; or 
• Events. 

Given all of these different channels, the goal is to link these accounts so that when prospects log in and view ads, they receive the same message as when they are on LinkedIn, the same message as when they are on your website, and the same message as when they are contacted by the sales team. 

After all, it can be very confusing to see four different messages from your company at the same time. So, map to what they’re interested in now. Map to what you’ve seen in your research. That’s what you want to be hitting them on with every single account.

Stage 4: Personalization

We are far beyond a decade where personalization was just about inserting a token to have a company’s name. We are now in a world where people are inundated with messages and it is hard to cut through the noise. That’s where ABM comes into play – personalized solutions on a vertical level. But how do we personalize at scale? 

The ultimate goal here is to show the prospects and the existing clients that you know them. Let’s use some examples to break it down.

Mickey’s case

If you’ve seen the episode of Mickey Mouse where they are both buying each other an item that the other one needs, you might get to know that level of I know you and I know what’s most important to you. 

In Mickey’s case, he had to sell his harmonica to buy the necklace that would match what Minnie had. But you know what? Minnie sold her jewelry to buy the case. That’s exactly that level of “I know you and know what you need”. 

Manchester City or Manchester United?

In Manchester, almost everyone is a soccer fan and supports either Manchester United or Manchester City. But to avoid making a mistake and frustrating your prospect, you need to understand which team they support.

For one of our campaigns, we were faced with this dilemma: Manchester City or Manchester United?

But, after some research on our prospect, we found one of his photos on Twitter where he was with his young boy, wearing a Manchester United’s tee-shirt. So we knew which side he was on and we offered him a jersey of his favorite club as a gift.

Real-life ABM marketing and sales playbooks

If you are willing to leverage your account research process, looking after some signs is a must. It might be the company’s need to improve its communication or manage repetitive tasks.

In this video, from 34:17 to 38:12, Andrei shows you how Fullfunnel.io, proceeded to win one of their fastest deals ever.

Here’s the truth: you do not have to own a technology to run an ABM campaign. There are great platforms out there that can help you scale. LinkedIn is a great resource for reaching out to people, learning about them, and connecting with them.

And once you start to understand some of the ROI of your channels, then you can understand which are the areas that you’re going to start testing with small pilot groups — because Account-Based-Marketing is all about testing what really works. Then you can add more investment into the areas that worked after you test it. 

To illustrate, here’s a short story. A manager was using outdated playbooks and organizing webinars during which he pitched his product. After the event, his sales teams would follow up with the so-called prospects. After months of doing this, and analyzing the results, he realized that he needed at least 500 MQLs to generate at least one demo. And converting that demo into a real opportunity takes around six to nine months, which is by no means scalable.

That said, you need to focus on the following points:

• Conversion from your past activities;
• Cold outbound opportunities;
• Contacts you had to approach to generate at least one meaningful conversation.

Additionally: 

• Check how far the opportunities go through the pipeline;
• Study the High Intent Revenue Opportunity within the geography of the market you shifted to;
• Ask yourself those questions: are there opportunities to make it through to revenue? Or is there more than a 25% chance that they’re closing? Or are they just opportunities that fizzle out right away?
• Have conversations with people in the new geography in case you want to make shifts.

Recap’

In conclusion, you need to implement the research cascade method if you are dying to generate revenue from your ABM campaigns. But prior to that, it’s crucial for you to start with a list of accounts that fit your ICP criteria and, obviously, pass through the qualification criteria. 

In fact, ABM is all about finding the accounts that have a need for your product and presenting it to them -along with personalized solutions.

But, adopting all the strategies above, along with the playbooks doesn’t mean you should give up on all your current efforts. After all, you should find out if ABM matches your business. Whatsoever, if these strategies can generate great opportunities, they are definitely worth trying!