Richa Pande on the Foundational Aspects of ABM Success

In this episode of Real ABM our guest is Brandon Redlinger, Senior Director of Product Marketing at ringDNA. Brandon covers the importance of starting out by focusing on alignment. Building around alignment means adopting the same metrics across the board, as well as compensation for success. In order for this to work, you have to have buy-in from the top down. Alignment also comes from marketing intentionally creating a client list that will ensure sales has the maximum opportunity to make clients happy.Once you focus and nail down alignment, work on a specific target audience that won’t overwhelm the team but will be enough to get the feel for it and be able to grow and expand from there. That brings up the conversation of demand generation, which takes looking at the industry and what is currently working and build off of that. Brandon talks about ways to incorporate personal touches that differentiate you from your competition and gifting at every stage in the funnel.

In this episode of Real ABM our guest is Richa Pande, the Head of Global ABM Programs at HP. Richa covers the foundational aspects of success with ABM. One aspect of success is the functions of the marketing team: ensuring rich customer insight to enable you to identify and build your personas, as well as your customer journey. Richa also covers identifying accounts: the importance of planning rather than letting sales fend for themselves, outlining firmographics, cutting the account list to ensure maximum efficiency.Tactically, the gems of knowledge lie within the customer journey. Creating dialogue within the customer journey enables droves of feedback and adds a personal touch. Richa has found that creating peer-to-peer environments for customers brings about a more diverse set of customers, creates room to hear and solve problems, and allows time to build relationships. Also, making experts in the field available adds another layer of service for customers. Measuring success with ABM reflects on components such as the quality of engagement, strategic alignment, incrementality to personas, and softer metrics.

In this episode of Real ABM our guest is Jen Leaver, the Senior Global ABM Director at Bazaarvoice. Jen talks through her journey of creating interest and influence for ABM at Bazaarvoice. Jen starts by talking through how ABM as a strategy is worth pursuing because of its effectiveness. Once the success was seen, Jen took time to reeducate teams through stage-based campaigns to help look at accounts through a different lens. Her next step was focusing on strategic, one to few and one to one campaigns to hone in on the real needs and wants of the clients.Jen talks about ABM not being a one size fits all approach. You have to take time to listen and understand what the clients are looking for, what the shareholders are looking for, and trying to find that middle ground that lets you operate in a sustainable place of success and backing from the company. Measuring success in ABM looks like part marketing source, part feedback. The reason ABM is so successful as a strategy is creating personalized experiences throughout the sales journey. And never forget to look back and celebrate your wins, even the ones early on.

In this episode of Real ABM our guest is the Director of Growth at Metadata.io, Mark Huber. Mark flips the script when it comes to ABM and views ABM as a tool for the bigger picture of generating demand. Mark believes in the crawl, walk, run method, but creates custom tactics for a more personalized and premium feel. Mark believes the difference in his approach is to show the customer not just how they can be a client of Metadata, but how Metadata can actually help them.Mark spends time talking about variables of success for marketing and advertising, identifying potential clients, and creating higher contract value in the funnel. Mark also covers the real value of direct mail, and how to maximize the success of it. Mark also hints at the untapped potential of ABM through Youtube.

In this episode of Real ABM our guest is the ABM Manager at Decreed, Amber Bogie. Amber started as a team of one, and has worked her way to grow her team and grow her influence. One of the most difficult stages of growing your team when starting from a team of one is sales enablement. When you get to a point where you can start to bring other people in, teaching them to fish is the key to success and scalability.During her time, she has discovered the importance of viewing ABM as an arm of sales through collaboration and common language understanding.  It is critical for the marketing team to understand the sales process at your organization. Never forget to be more human through the process. Amber has found it effective to run ABM light rather than only focusing on 1 to 1 because it is more scalable. On the flip side of that, trying to do everything at once prevents scaling as well. Amber also learned early on how to review past success, and from that set realistic goals for both short and long term that lead to growth. Learn how to put the pieces in place so it takes on a life of its own and drives itself. The ABM strategy can be difficult, but you learn a lot of things on the way that help you succeed. 

In this episode of Real ABM our guest is the author, speaker and current Head of Marketing at CRMNEXT, James Gilbert. James provides insight on redefining success in ABM. Delving beyond the standard ABM strategy, James takes time to analyze ways to improve and rethink ABM. What if ABM was seen through the lens of GTM? What would happen if a niche target audience was the goal rather than a broad target audience? James consistently challenges the standard and moves the needle forward through constant innovation. This episode talks about how to increase the velocity of the funnel, what does the intent cake do to influence your process and how to create out-of-the-box strategies that develop a cycle of ingenuity. As you process through what James has to say, take time to reflect on your current strategy and structure. What would happen if you added multiple data points for reference? How can you improve communication between sellers and buyers? Rethink the ABM strategy for ways to create an experience for the customer with multiple touch points along the way. How can you highlight and engage the community? How can you create synergy between sales and buyers? Is your current strategy just spray and pray? How can you create opportunities for sales to get a foot in the door? What about SDR’s? What resources are you using and to what extent? All this and more: this week on Real ABM.