ABM Unwrapped

Personalising engagement at scale

Why it’s
important:

Prioritise by growth opportunity

Personalising your marketing at scale is a challenge. Despite multiple data sources, getting hyper-personalisation right in the diverse APAC region is time-consuming and expensive.
You need to balance personalised campaigns for individual customers with achieving broad audience outreach.
To engage effectively with a diverse audience, you need to find innovative strategies.

What you
should do:

Prioritise accounts by the size of the opportunity before segmentation. This will help you determine the level of attention and resources you need to allocate.

We try to balance that focus on a scale with markets where you don’t have to invest too many resources localising, then select other non-English markets where you can drive a larger revenue impact.

Deepak Jhakal

Director of Global Strategic Digital Programs and ABM, Pure Storage

Why it’s
important:

Tailor your approach

ABM requires you to stay in for the long term. Depending on the size of the opportunity, segmentation should be granular and tailored.

What you
should do:

Invest more of your time, focus, and budget on high-value accounts.
Assign standardised interactions to lower-value accounts.

ABM is a long-term strategy and requires long-term goals to drive penetration through always-on engagement with your accounts. This needs a different kind of measurement framework but not every organisation is ready, so it requires a lot of change management.

Deepak Jhakal

Director of Global Strategic Digital Programs and ABM, Pure Storage

Fostering collaboration between Sales, Marketing, and C-suite

Why it’s
important:

Start having more conversations with Sales

Successful ABM programmes hinge on aligning Sales and Marketing. This requires a mindset shift toward genuine collaboration
Sales should understand the need for a deep partnership with Marketing beyond seeking assistance.

What you
should do:

Make sure the C-suite understands the resource implications and the revenue potential—to mitigate any resistance.
Secure C-suite buy-in for ABM, as it represents a concerted focus on specific accounts with personalised experiences.

Every year, we go through a fairly extensive review process of which accounts are in or outside of ABM. We always start with sales-oriented metrics, and then look at software metrics like engagement. But apart from getting traction with our customers, we ask if we are getting traction with our internal sales team—because it’s one thing to have the best marketing ideas on the planet, but if Sales is resistant [to ABM] we are not going to get very far.

Todd Bates

Director of Enterprise & Vertical Marketing, APAC, Red Hat

Why it’s
important:

Take the lead on setting expectations of responsibility

ABM is proven to enhance the value of sales, but your teams won’t be fully aware of the effort it requires.

What you
should do:

Establish transparent resource expectations. It will alleviate tensions among Marketing, Sales, and senior executives when it comes to justifying ABM investments.

Marketers support multiple accounts, especially in larger sales organisations and it may not be possible to apply ABM to every single account. We must do a reality check with Sales and the leadership team to determine if ABM is a nice-to-have for the accounts or a must-have.

Christine Law

Director, Head of ABM and Executive Marketing, Asia Pacific and Japan, ServiceNow

Building resilience in the face of change

Why it’s
important:

Effectively engage employees

Prioritising technology investments is crucial to staying ahead of any potential skills crisis—and to making sure your ABM operations are resilient. Upskilling and retaining your best talent are equally crucial.
ABM means shifting from chasing quick wins to fostering sustainable account growth. It’s a strategic approach that extends over the long term and requires a high degree of adaptability to stay effective and relevant in a constantly evolving landscape.

What you
should do:

Set long-term goals so you establish a strong engagement with your target accounts.
Think about how you manage the change ABM brings. Being flexible and persistent will unlock ABM’s full potential.
Motivate your marketing team and make sure they’re aligned with the ABM strategy.
Make sure you set out clear career paths and skill development opportunities.

One of the biggest challenges is to find a specific salesperson in an organisation that is willing to go along this journey for an account. Especially with factors like staff turnover and account rotation, it’s difficult for marketers to discuss account strategy if the salesperson isn’t there to see through to the end.

Christine Law

Director, Head of ABM and Executive Marketing, Asia Pacific and Japan, ServiceNow

Why it’s
important:

Realistic resource allocation

You’re dealing with tight budgets, crafting regionally diverse strategies, aligning sales and marketing teams, and tailoring content to linguistic and cultural variations.
Despite deal sizes being smaller, you’re under pressure to deliver high-level support to Sales, so your ABM approach needs to be scalable.
Managing multiple accounts or full verticals underscores the multifaceted nature of ABM implementation in APAC.

What you
should do:

Use data to support resource allocation. This will help you understand where to allocate resources for maximum impact—whether it’s technology, data, or human resources.
Implement the FIRE framework—Fit, Intent, Relationship, and Engagement. This allows you to concentrate on the most promising prospects, so your campaigns have maximum impact.
To empower sales in ABM, provide them with essential resources like persona insights, adaptable content assets, and battle cards, designed to facilitate meaningful interactions with their target accounts and sustain momentum.

Some companies are going all in on ABM with 70-80% of their demand and revenue generation coming from ABM. It’s either going to be very risky or profitable, but you really need systems, people, content, and account selection to work in this beautiful orchestration for it to succeed.

Dara Such

VP Customer Enablement and Data Strategy, TechTarget

Diving into data and using it effectively

Why it’s
important:

Take a process-driven approach to technology and data

With most marketers having six or more tools to work with, tech stacks often don’t get used effectively.
To ensure data compliance, you need to integrate the right technologies across your whole stack.

What you
should do:

Forming a durable foundation for your ABM programmes requires the right data. Begin by reviewing your existing technology, as well as your people and processes.

Driving successful adoption and integration of a marketing tech strategy requires strong alignment between the right internal and external partners to ensure we are effectively using what we have today.

Jason Zaman

Global Digital ABX Manager, North America, Workday

Why it’s
important:

Leverage data throughout the customer journey

Being effective means doing more than simply using data to understand your customers’ challenges and needs. Your data needs to help both Sales and Marketing build a common understanding of your whole customer journey.
ABM’s success relies on the quality and availability of the data for insight-led planning and engagement. The right data helps better understand target accounts and more accurately measure the campaigns.

What you
should do:

Use tools such as intent data, marketing automation, predictive analytics, and purpose-built ABM platforms to capture and measure behavioural data of both accounts and personas.

More ABM programmes are using a power combo of account and contact-level intent data to achieve scale and stronger results. Scale is often associated with automation and AI but how you use those tools and with what data is so important. Applying data at the account and buyer levels improves what you get out of ABM tactics from even the simplest cadence to the most complex propensity model.

Dara Such

VP Customer Enablement and Data Strategy, TechTarget

ABM Unwrapped

Tips for opening up new opportunities with account-based marketing.

Personalising engagement at scale

Fostering collaboration between Sales, Marketing, and C-suite

Building resilience in the face of change

Diving into data and using it effectively