Hi Michelle,
Well, 3 months later for a response...how's THAT for timing? Anyway, I just saw your question pop up in my Feb Community update and thought I would share some feedback.
Most of our clients who are in the process of adopting/implementing a ABM strategy are focusing around 5 common areas of ABM:
1. Culture
2. Data
3. Process
4. Content
5. Metrics
These are big buckets and are in order of importance. Digital Pi has developed an ABS Recommendations Assessment that may be helpful to you. Btw, we refer to it as "account-based strategy," because we've seen more success when companies acknowledge that marketing is only one aspect of the overall implementation.
Culture:
- Who is driving the ABS initiative for the company?
- Is there an agreed-upon definition of ABS within the org? If so, what is it?
- Is there alignment between marketing and sales executives on the definition of ABS?
- What is the expected impact of ABS on the organization?
- What is the expected timeframe to shift the organization to ABS?
Data
- Duplicates
- What is the percent of duplicates in your data?
- Is there a process in place to prevent duplicates?
- Do you use external software and/or a process to address duplicates?
- Data Cleanliness
- Is your critical firmographic and demographic data normalized?
- Do you use external systems to append data? If yes, what systems?
- What type of ABS strategy do you plan to deploy?
- Named Accounts
- Large Accounts
- Vertical-based
- Role-based
- Do you have buyer personas or target audience segments?
- If you are using SFDC, are Contact Roles on the Account or Opportunity object defined and in use?
- How will you define your audiences (targets) and do you have the necessary data to support it (i.e. if you are defining your audience by industry, what percentage of your records have this data?)
Process
- For SFDC users, is there established Lead to Contact conversion criteria?
- For SFDC users, is there an agreed-upon conversion Lead to Contact process (i.e. is sales required to open an opportunity at conversion)?
- Are contact roles on the Opportunity Object defined and in use?
- For SFDC users, do you currently use both the lead and contact objects?
- For SFDC users, are you planning to continue using both the lead and contact object after implementing ABS?
Content
- Do you have content that is aligned to buyer roles as they relate to the organization and/or opportunities?
- Do you have a multi-channel content strategy? In other words, for a whitepaper, do you also have a corresponding slideshow, infographic and/or topically-related webinar?
Metrics
- What metrics do you currently use to measure marketing effectiveness, success, contribution to revenue?
- What metrics do you currently use to measure sales effectiveness, pipeline, and revenue?
- Have you determined any metrics for measuring the impact of an account-based strategy?
In addition to this, Digital Pi is also a member of the Alliance for ABM Success. This is a fairly new organization that brings together many industry experts who will be formulating recommended best practices, providing guidance on technologies that support ABM/ABS and producing research and studies on effectiveness of account-based strategies in organizations around the world. We will be delivering much more information in the coming months and would encourage you and any others seeing this thread to bookmark this site and check back in periodically.
In the meantime, if you have further questions or need help with ABM/ABS, please don't hesitate to shoot me an email (john@digitalpi.com) and I will see what we can do to help.
Hope this was helpful too. 🙂 Happy Friday!
John Muehling
Sr. Director, Client Services
ABS Practice Lead
.png)