Marketing Operations faces a unique challenge in accommodating the latest shift in marketing frameworks: Account Based Everything (or ABM or ABS). As a marketing technologist, I’ve struggled with the conceptual shift because everything marketers (and sales) does is related to People (read: Leads). The deeper I work on an Account view, the more flaws I see in the how we market; flaws in the lead only approach; and flaws in how sales teams are leveraging sales automation tools. Ultimately, there is a lack of understanding in businesses on what Account Based means. In speaking with the CEO of one vendor, I learned quite a few people out there agree there is no single consensus on how to do ABM yet.

That may be a good thing because it’s time to shake up marketing again.

Here are some of the steps I see firms should take to begin their journey in an Account Based World. It’s 2007 again and we’re back to Sales-Marketing Alignment.

Marketing Strategy Must Embrace ABM

First and foremost, an Account Based strategy, must be that – a Strategy. Please stop trying to build “pilots” or think that purchasing an “ABM tool” will mean you are doing Account Based Anything. An Account Based approach to business means not just an entire shift in thinking, but entirely new business processes, language, and new alignment between Sales and Marketing.

Target Account selection is only one aspect of an Account Based organization. If one team is deciding on Target Accounts without the others, then this is not really an ABM or Account plan. There’s nothing wrong with a target account team or target account choices, but it’s not the same as a unified Account Based Strategy. Do not confuse Target Accounts as a strategy; it is a tactic.

Enough people have written about the Strategy behind ABM, so let’s discuss the next steps.

Sales and Marketing Must Re-Align

And I do mean start over. The next step is to ensure that Sales and Marketing achieve a new level of alignment on what each does in an Account Based world. I wrote about this a year ago, but now refined my thinking as I’ve spoken to teams around the country about their work. At a minimum, embracing the Account based world, means a re-division of labor and expectations between our two friends: Marketing and Sales. This re-alignment can mean a lot of different things. Today, we’ll explore two key areas: the Relationship Team and the Overall Division of Labor.

Account Based Sales: the Relationship Team

One solution that some firms take is to build a “Tiger Team” that picks up Tier 1 (Fortune 500) Accounts and figures out how to swarm them with the right people and messaging. I personally prefer the idea of a “Relationship Team” that is just as focused, but works to build the relationships necessary to close a deal. Of course, if your leaders don’t get how to organize this team or demand quarterly results from 12+ month sales cycles, maybe it’s time to find a different team.

For our “new” Account Based approach, here’s what I see happening in your organization. There is a shift from a lead flow to a Relationship Team. Yes, you can still have a lead flow, but your focus is on building Coverage and then having Relationship Builders (sales) work the people in those Accounts. I strongly advise against aggressive outbound, cold calling of every person at every Account. Please stop that. Please stop doing that by email only. It’s not helpful. Sure, it works some percent of the time, but it also annoys 99% of the time, ruining chances for cold calls or creating a hidden hurdle. eg:

“Hey Bob, I’m going to have a call with Company X tomorrow, would you join us?

“Cathy, there’s no way I’m going to be in a call with those jackasses. Did you see how they sent 22 year old BDRs after the rest of the team? I don’t trust them.”

I can tell you that a certain martech vendor sent several cold emails until I relented. They did a better job on the intro than some, but once on the call, I was waiting for the pitch and all they could do was tell me how great they were. Sound familiar?

This Relationship Team structure is about changing the workflow. A true ABM program will combine a marketer or “Message Master” with an Appointment Getter, Relationship Builder, Technical Sales, and Onboarder. I even added a special Playmaker or Content Creator if one is affordable.

This entire team should work on assigned accounts for at least nine months before marking them for deferral. The Coach or Leader should work with the Message Master to craft plays from Anonymous to Customer. I added Customer Success here because it’s a mistake to fumble the handoff. Customers who’ve learned to trust you and your team are loath to be handed to an unknown “Customer Success” person who knows little about them. The last thing a client wants is to have to repeat their story 20 times to the same firm. And even if the Closer isn’t involved much after the Close, I would strongly urge firms to keep them involved. I know not every person can be both hunter and farmer, however, if you want to close super large deals, you can’t walk away after the signing. You know your success depends upon milestones and the ability of the rest of the team to keep working for the client.

• Relationship Leader/Coach – builds plays with Messaging Master; helps shepherd deals.
• Messaging Master/ABM Marketer – keeps team on message, breaks up content and tests play cadences. This role interfaces with the larger marketing organization as well as field marketing.
• Account Executive/Relationship Builder – Tier 1 deal closer; skilled at building relationships and bringing together problems and solutions.
• Technical Expert – understands the solution and how to help the details.
• Customer Success – solution builder, consultant, relationship builder.
• Content Creator – this person helps the Messaging Master craft new or refine content for the Accounts.

Account Based Marketing Means Redrawing the Division of Labor

Now you have seen how the Relationship Team can be built. With or without such a team, Marketing Ops needs to lead the adjustment of the boundaries of lead handoff and technology ownership. The challenge I’ve seen is that with the new sales automation tools like Salesloft, Outreach, and Yesware, is that Sales takes back some of the pre-MQL and post-MQL nurturing Marketing has done since 2008. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with more personalization, there is conflict in which team “owns” the relationship.

If Marketing Operations takes a backseat at this point, there are risks that the demand generation machine you built will begin to crumble. Sales is under pressure to use these new tools and take control of their part of the process. That’s ok! Marketing Ops, though, should lead the realignment to ensure technical and regulatory compliance. Here are a few steps on how to approach this:

1. View the funnel from the customer perspective.
2. Each Stage has a Goal – one for you, one for Sales, and one for the customer.
3. The Owner of the Stage is one group: Marketing, BDR/SDR, AEs, etc…each team is assigned the Goal
4. Cadence or Plays – each Stage can have various “plays” designed by and for that Goal and Customer level.

Now, marketing can, and should, help build all plays, but Marketing’s influence will wane as the relationship between your firm and their firm deepens. In essence, the key re-alignment is ownership.

In this example grid, we can see that the redefined funnel stages are from the Lead’s point of view. This instantly changes how you think of content and the funnel. Now you say “We have 10,000 records learning about us, how can we get them to better define their needs using our materials?”

Each stage has a Goal – to get to the next stage! Each Stage has an Owner responsible for helping leads and Accounts reach that next step. And within that stage, the Owner can build a nurture track or set of plays designed to that. From a marketing ops perspective, this helps ensure clear definitions for reporting as well as workflows within the marketing automation platform. This grid also helps define the rules of engagement for Sales and Marketing as you re-align on Accounts and the latest tool for each team. Marketing ops and content creators may only need to tweak MQL nurturing, rather than rebuilding.

The New SLA: Account Based Marketing Metrics

In last week’s post, I wrote about not overdoing it on the metrics, because you’ll create a lot of useless reports that will never guide useful decisions. As part of your ABM realignment with Sales, you will require new service level agreements. Your goal now is less about the conversion rate of Leads or Accounts (still useful), but about Coverage and Engagement of those Accounts. At some firms, I see Sales pressuring marketing and data vendors on the number of matching titles to Personas. I agree this is a key metric as long as Sales understands that:

• You will never have 100% coverage. Ever.
• Failure to achieve 100% coverage does not mean Sales or SalesOps should take back this work.
• Coverage is not necessarily intended to help BDRs do ever more outbound calls.
• You may need to supply better Sales tools like LinkedIn or new data sources that provide more context to Sales.

As a marketer, your goals shift a bit because you are looking at things like:

• Coverage Percent of Buyer Personas by Account
• Percent of Accounts with at least 50% Coverage
• Percent of Accounts with at least 30% Engagement

Engagio’s Charlie Liang and I spoke about some of these metrics at the Marketo Summit in 2016. What I want impress upon you is that this is a real thing now. If you are in a TOFU role, you should be measured on these new ABM metrics. There’s no point bringing in 500 net new leads and 50 MQLs if it barely moves your Coverage or Engagement rates. The leaders in ABM are now looking at campaigns designed to increase both Coverage and Engagement for their chosen Accounts. What types of campaigns should you do?

If you want to learn more, here is a deck describing many of these topics. Much, much more is coming, so be sure to subscribe to get updates on how marketing operations works in an Account based world.

When marketers discuss reports, I often see confusion instead of clarity. It is too easy to build reports and those reports are often tactical or worse, misused. Let’s discuss the differences between Strategy, Tactics, and Operations. From a marketing operations perspective, the tools should always be chosen to support the overall strategy.

Here is my understanding, notwithstanding the dictionary definition:

• Strategy: the larger plan and goal. The set of tactics to achieve a larger scale goal. (where the spear is aimed and how often).
• Tactics: individual actions or small team efforts to achieve a goal that is part of a larger plan. (Tip of the spear)
• Logistics: the science of movement; management of materials; detailed planning and organization of a complex operation. (Delivering the spear to the right place).

And while I do like to have marketers forget war metaphors in our jobs, it is interesting to note that many of the top military commanders of the past 300 years boil down their work to logistics:

“Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.” – Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC 1980 (attributed)

More and more I see marketing’s challenges resolved through logistical – that is, Operational – methods, for our workflow and deployment of messaging. You can create the perfect messaging for an audience, but if you cannot deploy it to the places that audience will be receptive to it, then what’s the point? Constant, rapid testing is the key to knowing if the message and the medium are right. But if you’ve been around the block a few times, you know that few firms actively test their message or medium. (See: channel-offer method).

The other challenge when looking at Strategy vs. Tactics is that many marketers are so focused on “Which webinar had the most registrants” that teams lose sight of driving pipeline or revenue. Yes, it’s helpful to know that webinars related to a narrow topic tend to have lower attendance than webinars with a more general topic. But are those webinars helping attendees decide your team are experts at Solution X and should receive deeper consideration? Is it driving pipeline? Is there a perception in Sales that this helps?

What should you focus on? What should you build for when you run a martech stack?

Let’s take a look at how different tactical marketing, strategic marketing, and logistical marketing really are.

Tactical Marketing and ROI – are we in the right places?

Tactical marketing is composed of campaigns, emails, and specific assets or offers. This is the email designed to bring in 50 registrants to a webinar. This is the email you want 10% CTR on. This is the advertising campaign on LinkedIn that drives in 20 leads a day.

Most marketers are familiar with the metrics that drive such tactical programs.

• Delivery Percent
• Click Through Rate (CTR)
• Page Visits
• Form Fill Conversion Rate
• Ad CTR
• Ad Impressions
• Number of Net New Leads

and so on. There is nothing inherently wrong with tracking these metrics at the tactical level. You should do so and you should seek to improve these metrics with AB testing methods and segmentation by behavior.

Tactics might be thought of as finding the right fishing holes, the right bait, and then offering the fish a better place to swim. If you are looking for statistical significance though, you do need to run data over time and enough of it. The difficulty, of course, is did you structure your data analysis to look across Channels and Offers in a clear way? One firm I worked with tested Live Demo invitations. The original invitation list was pulled separately from a list of pretty much anyone who may have engaged (or not) in the past year. The CTR and registrations were trailing after several months. Then we tested adding the same emails to nurturing streams; that didn’t work so well either. But how would we know where to go after that? Is the email written poorly? Is the Offer and Audience not matched? Do people just not want to do a Live Demo, and which people? I can make guesses and keep testing…

What if my Strategy is just wrong? Will I know when to stop a tactic or reconsider the strategy?

Strategic Marketing and ROI – Revenue Improvement

We can spend all day discussing just what “strategy” is in marketing. The strategy should be set with the goal in mind, and the goal is revenue improvement. A different firm I worked with used Marketo’s Revenue Cycle Explorer to prove that when marketing touched an Opportunity, on average, the deal size was 50% larger than if sales went alone. WOW. If that’s not enough to get marketing to the revenue table, what is?

I consider marketing strategy as answers to a series of questions:

• Who are we as a company?
• Why do we do this thing we do?
• What kind of people would be interested in us?
• How can we attract more of those people and identify them faster?
• How can we help those people choose us?

Attracting more people who tend to buy means describing the story of the company, the solution statement, and then finding the right tactical mix to attract the leads. The leaders should design the marketing department workflow to deliver that strategy down to the operational level. The story you want to present higher up is about driving Opportunities and Revenue, not driving a higher percentage of clicks.

And before creating anything, one must ask the right questions, leading to metrics like:

• Opportunities Created
• Opportunities Influenced by Marketing
• Opps Won
• Opps Won %
• Revenue Won

Then look back at the program mix involved to achieve Revenue Won. Does a particular combination lead to Opp Won? Can you say certain Programs brought in a high number of net new leads that became opps? Certain types of Programs? How consistent is this?

Remember that marketing automation platforms do not spit out these numbers out magically. It requires a lot of work at the marketing operations level to ensure the reports are right.

Marketing Operations – Creating the Delivery and Reporting Chain

This is where most companies seem to have the challenge: how to track and attribute pipeline and revenue to the set of tactics and strategy chosen. Marketers often get the tactic or strategy correct, but find it hard to execute effectively. Execution is the logistical end, creating the delivery mechanism for the message as much as knowing if the message was effective. I’ve written about how firms should consider the Martech Maturity Model™ as a roadmap. To go further though, the marketing operations team has to consider the above metrics as their goal. Which tools and data collection points help us understand the Strategic Questions. It isn’t enough to automate a few things like CTR and registrations vs. attendance.

When considering how to implement a strategy, I work to answer questions about the possible reports. It’s easy to generate hundreds of reports, but very few are helpful at a strategic level or even at a Channel level. Questions to ask about reports include:

• Is this answering a Strategic or Tactical Question?
• What is the Question we want an answer to?
• Over what time period will we ask the question?
• What decision will be made based on this data?
• Is there a known time-series average or variance whose boundaries we should use as part of the decision?
• Is there a known (or suspected) seasonal variance we should consider in the decision?

The decision part is where most of us fail. We create reports that look like great reports or charts, but never really make a call. Now, it’s hard to make a call if we don’t have a historical average or sense of what we want. At the same time, someone needs to say, “We’re not generating enough pipeline from this Channel-Offer set, let’s test other Offers, or other Channels.”

Here’s an example of how to craft and use the right report:

• Question: Are we generating enough pipeline influence from LinkedIn with Offers ABC?
• Goal or Threshold: We will know this because our goal is 10% of pipeline should be influenced this way.
• What we will decide based on the data:
  • If we are under 10%, then we should test Offers DEF vs. ABC for 2 months.
  • If we are over 10%, then we should keep the best Offers and test D vs. the worst Offer.

Let’s be honest, most of us in B2B rarely do this consistently.

Ultimately, as Marketing Ops professionals, we should ensure our work is addressing the Strategic choices of the organization and push back when the martech stack is not supporting the Strategy just as much as we should push back if there isn’t much of a strategy in the first place. It’s easy for executives to blame the delivery mechanism instead of muddled thinking.