Why Your ABM Might Be Falling Short of Expectations

“I see ABM as a response to inbound marketing. Inbound is great, but you don’t have control over quantity and quality. You also can’t afford to wait until those named account targets happen to find your content and download something.”—Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

An approach to marketing that promises to deliver the benefits of inbound with added account relevance is tough to ignore. And while there’s plenty of evidence that account-based marketing (ABM) works, it’s not like you can just flip a switch and automatically find success.

If you’ve started down the path of ABM but are struggling to generate results, don’t worry. You’re not alone.

To turn things around, you need to figure out what exactly is going wrong. There are many different ways that ABM can fail, but the following three issues might be why your strategy is falling short of expectations.

1. There’s a Gap Between Sales and Marketing

One of the greatest advantages of ABM is that it gives sales and marketing a common language. Instead of having marketers focused on high-volume leads, you put both marketing and sales on the same level by focusing on specific target accounts.

That sounds great in theory but isn’t always so easy in practice. Just because you kick off an ABM strategy doesn’t mean your work is over to get sales and marketing on the same page.

Communication is essential for closing the gap. Instead of keeping operations separated and hoping for the best, set up regular meetings between the two teams to discuss key performance indicators of your ABM strategy. How much pipeline is being created from target accounts? Are marketing qualified leads meeting expectations? What’s the close rate for target accounts?

Going beyond numbers to discuss the “how” and “why” of these KPIs will help sales and marketing work together more effectively and make your ABM strategy more effective.

2. You’re Doing Too Much, Too Fast

Scalability has always been a challenge for marketing strategies. An account-based approach promises some relief from the stresses for scale because you aren’t just focused on stuffing the top of the funnel with more leads. But scale still has to be a consideration if you want ABM to succeed.

When you dig into the details of ABM, things become a lot more complicated than just “focus your marketing efforts on specific target accounts instead of high-volume leads.” You have to build the target account list, prioritize your outreach, build a communications strategy, create personalized content, and continuously follow up with multiple contacts within each buying team. Thinking you can create an ABM strategy and immediately do all of this for dozens of target accounts might be too ambitious.

Instead of diving headfirst into a full-scale ABM strategy, give yourself some room to build momentum. Test out your strategy on a handful of target accounts and work out the issues of the operation before overloading sales and marketing with so many tasks.

3. You’re Working with Bad Data

Account-based marketing works because it is heavily data-driven. Whether you’re just starting to build a target account list or looking for key insights to get an active lead to close, having the right data at your fingertips is essential.

And yet, so many marketers spend their days struggling against bad data. In some cases, you might be working solely with first-party data that creates incomplete account profiles. Other times, you could invest in third-party data that just isn’t trustworthy enough.

When ABM strategies are fueled by bad data, you risk spending all of your marketing and sales resources pursuing accounts that will never convert. They might not be in the market for a new solution. They might buy from a competitor that better understands their specific pain points. Or, they might be the perfect target account and you’re just connecting to the wrong contacts.

In any case, investing in the right intent data will give you the insights necessary to succeed at every stage of ABM. Rather than leaving ABM success to a series of guesses, intent data provides real-time insight into the behavior of individual contacts at your target accounts. And with intent signal scoring, you’ll have the necessary data to prioritize your accounts based on which ones are most likely to convert.