The 10 Reasons Why Your ABM Strategy Isn't Working

Hello and welcome.

I am Franco Caporale, I'm the founder of SaaSMQL and today I'm going to present the 10 reasons why your ABM strategy is not working and also a few ideas on how to fix it.

Why am I doing this presentation?

So what I'm going to show you today is not something I read on an article on a blog or LinkedIn.

This is actually the results of my experience working with over 100 B2B SaaS clients in the past 8 years running ABM programs and campaigns and designing the strategies around engaging target accounts primarily the enterprise level and mid market.

And before starting SaaSMQL in 2018 I was leading demand generation for A4VC funded startups in Silicon Valley.

So again this is the result of my experience and the learnings and what I saw working really well, what I saw as pitfalls in some of the strategies and this is what I'm going to present today.

So everything you see in this webinar comes from their work and their experience.

These are some of the pitfalls that we're going to cover today.

there are tens in total that I listed here.

They are ranked in order of importance but I think the most important one is the bonus which is at the end.

But at the beginning we're going to cover very important insight on what not to do when you are launching your ABM strategy or when you're trying to scale up your ABM programs.

So let's start from number one.

This is something I've seen many many times and it comes down to account segmentation which is obviously the foundation of every ABM strategy and program.

And from my point of view in many, many situation you see there is not an actual account segmentation that is actionable in terms of then executing campaigns.

For that to be done properly you always have to start from your tam, then develop account segments in multiple ways.

That's not just one way to segment your accounts.

Obviously you can segment them by account here, by industry, by product, by stage of funnel.

There is a lot of different flavor of segmentations and it can become very complex when you're working with enterprise campaign, enterprise companies.

But after that you need to run the data through orchestration because the data needs to be validated.

You need to fill the gaps between accounts and contacts, relevant contacts with your buying group.

You might have some cold contests, some warm contests.

All of that needs to be orchestrated properly.

Only at that point you can develop the Custom workflows for each segment, which is what activate those segments into then driving engagement and generating opportunities.

And if you skip the last two, you are left with a list of target accounts.

You're not really doing much with it.

It's just kind of like a reference table almost.

And I actually want to tell you a story because that happens actually very frequently.

I recently talked to a prospect.

They came inbound, they want to do abm, they want to launch their ABM strategy.

And they wanted to target only 25 accounts.

That was already decided.

25 accounts is going to be our target.

And they're all called.

So there was no intense signals or anything kind of attached to them.

when we started digging in a little more, the potential deal size for each account.

when, if they will turn into a customer, it would be about 20k ARR, some 20k per year.

So when you run the math, which is what we always do at the beginning when we create the ABM plan for each segment, you want to basically put them on a spreadsheet and run the math of potential ROI at certain conversion levels.

And you will see that the math was just not there.

Like literally the efforts and budget and time that will take to create custom campaigns for those 25 even at the best potential conversion rate that we could hope for, it just wasn't there.

So probably ABM will not even be the best strategy for those accounts.

But more importantly, if your deal size is only 20k a year, you can have a segment of cold accounts of 25 accounts.

You need literally hundreds of accounts per segment to make it worth.

Because each custom workflow that you're going to create is going to take a lot of time, efforts, budget, focus.

And again, you want to do it to generate a good ROI and not just waste months on 25 accounts that are not very large to begin with.

So pitfall number two, you are starting straight from cold accounts, your ABM strategy.

And my question is why?

I will say all the time, not 99 of the time, 100 of the time.

Each client and potential client that we talk to, they are sitting on a lot of data in their CRM, in their marketing automation, in HubSpot, in Marketo, in salesforce, previous engagement, warm accounts, warm contacts, intense signals on their website, on their content, from events, from the sales team.

is a potential source of opportunities.

And what makes it even worse is that data is not going to remain warm forever.

They're actually going to go Stale, they're going to become cold again.

So at the beginning when you're launching your strategy, you always want to understand which accounts are showing intent, how can we segment them?

Do we have lost opportunities that we can retarget?

Do we have contests that are doing research that we can create a custom workflow right away and that will lead to immediate roi.

And more importantly, you're not going to waste the data that you have in your CRM because you want to focus on cold accounts from the beginning.

Cold accounts are very important.

They're going to be the perfect accounts to target, but it's going to take time and you always want to have in front who is turning into warm.

You don't want to waste that data.

This is super important because it literally makes a difference in your four to six months ROI at the beginning of your ABM strategy.

The pitfall number three is sales is picking the accounts.

I've seen that many times and in some cases, actually, the selection was not bad.

But I've seen cases where literally the sales team was picking accounts that have no business being their target list.

And the only reason why they were picking them is because they had some relationship with an economic buyer in those accounts, but that was it.

And so marketing and demand generation teams and BM teams are sitting on a lot of data they have.

They're analyzing and crunching sometimes hundreds of thousands of records to understand what's the ICP based on sales activity and sales pipeline and intent signals they can cross check.

So the account selection should always start from the marketing demand generation team.

But obviously it shouldn't be done in silo because the goal for me is always that if we generate a meeting and opportunity from a target account, the sales team and the account executive should be very excited to sit on that meeting.

And if that's not the case, something is wrong in the account selection and because obviously the sales rep needs to hit his or her quota.

And so that's the only thing that that person has in mind.

And so you want to always be aligned with the selection, but it should always start from the demand generation team.

The next one is you are targeting only economic bias in your ABM campaign.

And I've seen this a lot, especially with channels that are, let's say, more vip, more expensive than others, which primarily these are direct mail and VIP events, like if you do like a dinner or some invitations to a specific custom event, like a ball game or anything like that it's only directed to the economic buyer.

So the person that at the end signs the agreement, and that's obviously a mistake because from an ABM perspective, what really makes the deal moving is the champion is the power user.

Those are the people that are gonna fight internally to get to the signature at the end to really shape the deal to fight off competitors and do all of that.

The economic buyer many, many times will not even sit on a meeting with your reps.

They're just gonna hear from their colleague, the team member who is gonna done all the research and knows everything and that person is going to make a case and if it makes a case, that's when they're gonna sign.

But when you're trying to drive that first meeting, that first discovery call and you want the economic buyer or enterprise account to sit on that, that's the wrong strategy.

99% of the time they don't want to take your meeting.

So what you need to do, when you build a buying group for each account, you want to understand where most of your deal start.

So you go and look in your salesforce, in your HubSpot CRM and check the close one deals and try to identify who was the initial person that took the first meeting, that did the first discovery call and then maybe became the champion or maybe introduced to the champion.

Because you want to replicate the same path of your successful deals.

You don't want to invent a new path.

And it's true if the economic buyer is targeted first because you have some sort of relationship and that person says to their team members, you need to sit on a meeting and learn more about this platform, they're gonna do it.

But that's not usually the best strategy in the best path.

So always try to replicate what you've seen working in your actual close one deals.

And you're gonna see a lot of info about it and many times those are titles that you were not even planning to target.

This happens very, very frequently.

So you should pull a reports with all your close one deals, you salesforce, there is a report which is opportunity with contact, owners and opportunity with contacts report.

So you pull all the contacts associated to close one deals and try to understand who was the first one.

Maybe it's the person that requested an inbound, meeting at the beginning through the website form or responded to an email or to an event, came to the booth, whatever that was.

That's the path that you need to replicate and then you need to target other Person, persons that were involved later on on the deals.

That's how you create your actual buying group.

So it's not only the VP of Finance or the VP of HR or the CRO or the cmo, that's not how you build the buying group.

So this is a very, very crucial mistake because for some people still today ABM means just one to one campaigns where I have one account and I'm gonna build the entire campaign for that single account.

Let's say I'm targeting Bank of America as my target account and everything I build in my campaign is going to be custom built for bank of America.

From the landing page to the emails, to the direct mail assets and the banners, everything.

And that's a strategy for sure.

But I go back to pitfall number one and I'm going to run the math.

If you close bank of America, where you're putting all your resources to build this, all these custom assets and custom workflows and custom everything, what is going to be that deal size?

Because that account is either going to convert or is not.

So either you're going to have a hundred percent conversion on that segment where you're building all custom flaws and assets, or you're going to have 0% conversion.

So that deal better be worth above 1 million dollar ARR, or close to it.

Definitely not less than half a million.

I wouldn't put a ton of resources for a deal that close 80k.

And now I'm building all these custom workflows.

That's just if you run the math, it just doesn't work.

So you can have segments of four, five, ten accounts, you can have segments of 100 accounts, you can have segments of 500 accounts, a thousand accounts.

That's the famous one to one, one to few, one too many, which you hear many, many times.

And most of the times we run campaigns with one too few and one too many.

And very, very rarely one to one campaigns are worth it.

And typically like, know, if it's a one million dollar account, yeah, you can have a team of people just working for three, four months, five months to just build all of those assets, etc, but yeah, most of the time you have better ROI when you target a few accounts or many accounts.

And when you build a segment, the only thing you want is that those accounts should have enough in common where you can build the same assets, same messaging, same workflows and it's going to resonate with them.

So you don't need to have Their name necessarily, at the front of the page.

Like if the person is John, you don't need John to show up at the beginning of your landing page or your banner ad or anything.

That's not what makes it relevant.

What makes it relevant is your solution is speaking to a problem that they have right now.

And that problem should be a common issue for all of those accounts that you have in the same segment.

And the messaging works in the same way.

That's what you need in your when you build the segments for your ABM campaigns.

This goes back to the previous pitfall when we talked about selecting the accounts.

So the alignment here, where sales and marketing are not aligned is not just about selecting the account, which is an important step, but it's on the entire motion.

So how is the campaign going run?

What is the sales role in that?

When do they have to take any action?

How is the handoff happening?

if they are not aware even that you're running the campaign, you're gonna hit a brick wall very early in the program.

So someone from the sales team, you don't need the entire team obviously if you have 20 reps and 30 SDRs, but you need one representative from the team to join the calls to be aware of what is happening, when it's happening.

Do one meeting where you basically do some enablement for them.

You show what the campaign, what the program is going to be and how the role is built in the program.

When do they have to take action or send an email, do a call, when should they expect to have to follow up with the target account, what they should avoid doing, because maybe you have some automation running.

Like all of these things should be clarify with your team.

And it should be done at the beginning of when you're launching your ABM program and I'm saying ABM program, not campaign.

This is going to become important at the end of the presentation.

So and our point of view, ABM means multi channel programs, multi channel campaigns.

When you're running everything in silo, the results are very, very different because they don't compound.

So if I have a list of let's say 300 accounts that are carefully selected, they are segmented, all the data is built, it's clean, it's valid.

I'm running this, I want to run these campaigns.

The best strategy is when all of a sudden those 300 accounts and the buying group, the decision maker in those accounts, start seeing Your message, your solution, your ads, your company name, everywhere they go, they see it on LinkedIn.

They get an email, they get a package, they go to an event and you're there.

They get an invitation to a custom happy hour or some VIP events.

Everything is happening at the same time across multiple channels with a coherent messaging that is aligned and is relevant to them.

That's when you see everything compounding.

So if you're just sending emails or you're just doing calls, or you're just sending direct mail or you're just running ads, you're gonna see very little conversion rates and your cost per opportunity is going to be really high.

So when you are able to create this custom workflow that combine multiple channels together in a very efficient way and streamlined way, this is what is going to work really well.

And it's going to compound over time because you're going to be able to optimize those flows.

And maybe you need to cut one step from one channel where you cut one other step at the end or you a b test certain things.

Like these are workflows that you build and constantly test and optimize.

And so they're going to start compounding especially when they are combined together.

So your data flow is broken is pitfall number eight.

And this goes back to the pitfall number one or two.

Actually number two about called accounts and intent signals that are left there where a lot of companies are sitting on a gold mine of data.

In order to activate those intent signals you need to be able to channel them to custom workflows and you need to be able to verify, validate the data and then create this activity, these steps that actually turn into engagement.

if you just have dashboard that look at for example companies that are visiting your web pages and they fit with your target accounts.

You're like great, we got visit from, I don't know, from Walmart or from Adobe.

Someone from Adobe visited our website and Adobe is one of our target accounts.

Great.

What are you doing about it?

Do you have a custom workflow that retargets web visitors that are anonymous?

Obviously by pulling the right contest from the buying group and then using specific messaging and workflow and different steps to activate them.

Or you're just looking at the dashboard.

If you're just seeing the data and there is no action and there is no piping where that intent signals is channeled through the right workflow, you are just losing them because obviously six months from now that signal is going to be irrelevant and so you have to build new signals from scratch.

So it's very important for each intent data that you create different custom workflows.

And obviously not all the intent signals are built equally.

Some intent signals are much more powerful, much more important than others.

And that's where you should start from.

quick example on that.

People that request a demo and then never showed up.

So demo no shows.

Are you retargeting them?

How are you retargeting them?

Those are very precious, very high value contacts.

And so that's one example.

The other one lost opportunities that were close lost more than six months ago.

Do you have a workflow that is constantly acting to try to re engage those lost opportunities or you just do it as a one off?

A one off is not a workflow.

There are two different things and usually they don't compound because you can optimize a one off.

So pilot.

So at the beginning of your strategy or you're trying to pilot specific channels, let's say LinkedIn ads or direct mail or even some content strategy, if you're doing specific webinars, there is always the risk that you're running that pilot in a way that is too small or it's too short, you're cutting too early.

It's kind of the same of if you're trying to test Google Ads and then you spend a hundred dollar and then you say well Google Ads didn't work for us because we got zero out of it, but you spent a hundred dollar, that's probably too early to cut it.

It's probably the budget was too small.

You can't really have any data about it.

So when you test new channel, new strategy, make sure that at the end of the day, at the very least that even if it's working or it's not working, but you can say for certain that okay, this strategy this way doesn't work for us, we need to pivot to something different.

And you didn't cut that too early because that's something that happens very often and sometimes is even not a problem that it was too small, it was just a pure lack of data attribution.

I've seen a client a few years ago that cut LinkedIn ads because they said that the were not getting ROI from it and they spent a lot of money.

They spent about 80k the year before.

So when we started looking into their LinkedIn ads engagement and their deals in Salesforce we realized that actually the ATK have brought more than half a million in recurring revenue the year before.

They were just not connected well from attribution, perspective and so that's another potential risk.

But more often than not we seeing companies that maybe spend know, $1,000, $2,000 on LinkedIn ads, which is know, an expensive channel and then they want to cut it because they didn't see any opportunities.

Same thing with direct mail where they want to send know, 50 direct mail and then try to drive any kind of insights.

Those are pilots that are obviously too small and so they can lead to bad decision.

So this is the last pitfall before the bonus and this is back on tracking attribution, tracking results and roi.

so if you're only tracking close one deals for example, but you're at the beginning of your ABM program, it depends on your sales cycle, it depends on a lot of factors.

But you want to look at your leading indicators at the beginning.

You want to see are we generating account engagement, are we seeing a shift in how many people from target accounts coming to the website, how many obviously replies responses we have from target accounts.

They don't have to be necessarily meetings from day one, right?

Especially if you're targeting cold accounts at the beginning.

You just want them to come to your website to maybe read some content, take a look at some assets that you have built and just become interested or at least aware that you exist because the timing might not be right at the moment because there is no initiative internally to source whatever platform or solution you have, but it might be in a few months.

And now you become part of the picture, you become part of the shortlist potentially.

And so you want to look at those replies, you want to look at website visits, then you want to obviously track meetings and then opportunities and all those leading indicators at the beginning.

And if you see things that are moving, you don't want to stop your ABM strategy obviously just because you didn't close any deal, that would be an expensive mistake and then you will have to start from scratch again in a few months.

And so with that I want to go to the bonus pitfall which is a very important one.

And so that's why I left it at the end as a bonus which is you're treating ABM as a campaign, not a system.

You are looking at ABM as is a one off initiative like where everyone came together, sales and marketing and we came up with a theme to target specific accounts.

And we did a really cool campaign with marketing assets and everything is aligned and the branding and the colors.

A lot of work from many people and for several months and that was it.

That's not abm.

That's a cool campaign that shows really well in slides at the board meetings and internally.

But that's not what the ROI is.

The ROI only shows up when you're building a system that compounds that.

You're optimizing month after month, quarter after quarter, where your workflows are live and are running in the background consistently.

For example, you are targeting cold accounts from scratch with particular workflows that you have tweaked and optimized and you are feeding more cold accounts to those workflow every month, every quarter.

Then you are retargeting lost opportunities.

Then you are targeting specific accounts that have shown engagement but they are not, they haven't booked a meeting yet.

And then you are, you have a workflow for your dream accounts for the top 100.

All of this must become live and always on workflows, not a one off that you do after an event or just because someone from the C level executive said that we should do xyz.

Those don't compound, but the system does.

We have clients that have the same workflows running for two and a half years, three years and more and we have optimized them, tweaked them, update them.

But the workflows, the backbone is the same and they still generate opportunities and engagement in a very predictable way.

That's what you want to arrive, that's your goal.

Don't think kbm, as a one off campaign because that would be an expensive mistake.

So to recap everything, the best ABM teams that we've seen across more than 100 companies, they always have a spreadsheet running the math on each segment to see if it's worth to build the custom workflows and what that value will be and what the ROI will be in dollars literally.

And that's something, it can be done.

The more data you have, you can plug potential target conversion rates, best case scenario, worst case scenario because we have data that we can use, especially if you are not starting from scratch, you want to activate the intense signals that you already have.

And so don't start from day one with cold accounts.

Those are very important.

You need to target them, you need to nurture them.

But always keep an eye on what data you already have where you can generate roi.

Even this week you don't have to wait months to driver zones.

when we talk about segmentation, the data is what matters.

And so sales data, pipeline data, engagement data is what we need to use to build the ICP and then the target accounts and then the segmentation and then the custom workflows.

The sales team is very important.

They need to be aligned, they need to be on board.

But they shouldn't dictate who we target and who we avoid.

because that's usually is not the best strategy.

You want to sell to the entire buying group, the champions, the power user and economic buyers, not just economic buyers or you will miss 90% of your deals because that's not where the deal originate.

The economic bias needs to be brought on board, needs to be sold to usually from your champion.

But it shouldn't be the first person that you engage.

with a cold account in particular, don't waste too much time on the minutiae, on the details where you look at, too much, on the colors the, the font or things like that.

Obviously it needs to align with your branding, it needs to be polished, it needs to be a nice, a very well built campaign.

But you need to ship like timing is important and the target data, the buying group, all of those things come before all of the, know, creative aspects and know, the details of the personalization and all of that.

I've seen teams wasting weeks or months on those kind of issues, which is usually another expensive mistake.

And then finally I'm going to repeat it again.

ABM is not a one off campaign.

You're building a system.

You're building an engine that is going to drive opportunities from target accounts and those that engine is built from multiple custom workflows that activate intent signals and targeted accounts and target segments.

So always treat it as something you're building from scratch and optimizing and they're always going to live and it's going to be expanded and scaled up, not as a one off cool campaign that you can show on a slide, the end hands on meetings on a Friday.

And with that I want to thank you all for watching this presentation and I hope to see you at the next one.

Thank you.