How Internal Alignment Creates Successful Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Account Based Marketing is a B2B marketing strategy in which sales and marketing teams identify and target the most valuable accounts.

Matt Heinz, founder and president of Heinz Marketing, walks us through internal alignment around Account Based Marketing (ABM).

Matt discusses that when rolling out an ABM strategy, companies should move beyond strategic alignment between sales and marketing. Sales and marketing need an integrated approach toward prospects at different stages of the buying cycle.

Learn about Account-Based Marketing fundamentals:

Visit us at:

Subscribe to this channel:

TRANSCRIPT

Hi. My name is Matt Heinz, founder and president of Heinz Marketing, ABM evangelist.

I'm not just the president of the Hair Club for Men, I'm also a client, and that we help a lot of our companies do ABM, but we actually do it ourselves, as well.

One of the reasons why ABM programs fail in a lot of organizations is people treat it like a marketing campaign. ABM is not an email you send next Tuesday. I think a lot of companies think ABM is what's-- let's narrow our target account lists, and send out some direct mail. That's not ABM, either.

Think about the traditional funnel, where you've got marketing that owns the top of the funnel, and sales owns the bottom of the funnel. With ABM, instead of separating the funnel horizontally, you're really separating the funnel vertically.

At every stage of the buying journey, and every stage of the sales process, you've got sales and marketing working together. It's that integrated approach that's required to make ABM successful in your organization.

Now, what that means is, you need to have more than just marketing bought off. It's more than just sales nodding their head and says yes, marketing, we'd like to work with you on this. It's more than just strategic alignment on what are our objectives and who are we targeting together.

You've got to move from a strategic alignment to operational alignment. You have to have organizations that are working on a daily and weekly basis, together, on a set of integrated plays, an integrated approach to prospects at different stages of the buying journey.

So, I think it's really important that you understand the different people inside your organization, what they care about, what their objectives are, what they're trying to achieve, and position ABM as a way for everybody to achieve greater results together in your organization.