Marketing

How to Align Your Teams to Maximize Account-Based Marketing

February 14, 2017

I’ll admit it: I’m probably a little too keen on the idea of B2B “smarketing.” What can I say? I love account-based marketing, especially the way it aligns B2B marketing and sales teams to form one smarketing team.

At my own company, Terminus, we have a weekly smarketing meeting to ensure our sales development, sales, and marketing teams are laser-focused on the right activities and tactics to engage the set of best-fit companies that match our ideal customer profile (ICP).

For 2017, we’ve dedicated one marketing team member as a resource to every other department’s function head. By giving the marketing team internal clients, we are truly drinking our own champagne and taking an account-based approach — we’re ensuring each of our marketing functions supports part of the organization that’s driving revenue.

Director of Marketing Operations + Director of Sales Development

To support our SDRs in their activities, our Director of Marketing Operations and her team are helping to align our marketing technology, going beyond calls and emails to engage prospects. Our SDRs are producing personalized videos, using social media, and testing new channels to generate interest and awareness among target accounts.

Director of Product Marketing + VP of Sales

For sales enablement and supporting our team of account executives, our Director of Product Marketing is the one who project manages major initiatives, like creating new pitch decks, launching programs like the ABM Stack Grader, and developing marketing partnerships with the 40+ vendors in the Terminus Cloud for ABM.

Product Marketing Manager + Director of Customer Success

Account-based marketing goes beyond the typical B2B buyer’s journey to create an awesome customer experience. This means marketing needs to dedicate resources for clients. Our Product Marketing Manager’s supplies the Customer Success team with new marketing collateral, such as “how-to” content for product adoption, producing customer testimonial videos, and the monthly email newsletter.

To take this a step further, Terminus hired a Chief Revenue Officer who is working to oversee sales and customer success. By thinking about revenue in terms of existing clients (while also working to bring on new accounts) we can align the organization to create an awesome customer experience and develop “ABM Superheroes!”

Now, I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it rain dollars down on the sales team. Sadly, that’s just not how it works. You have to set realistic expectations for your smarketing team, and convey those expectations to your executive stakeholders, your company’s VP or C-level executive. The term SMART goals applies to account-based marketing.

  • Specific: what will the goal accomplish? For account-based marketing, the goal is to align sales and marketing to become one “smarketing” team which targets the best-fit potential customers to generate revenue, and working with your company to turn your current customers into advocates.
  • Measurable: what metrics will determine if the goal has been reached? For ABM, the main metric is revenue. If smarketing is working together on creating velocity to turn accounts into revenue, the proof will be dollar signs.
  • Achievable: does your new smarketing team have the tools, talent, and resources to meet this goal? From the outset, you will need to determine which roles your sales and marketing team members each will be responsible for. A few examples include who owns creating content, queuing up advertising campaigns to provide air cover for sales, etc.
  • Result: what is the primary benefit of accomplishing this goal? The answer is to generate revenue. It’s why I get up and come to work every day: to make money doing something I’m passionate about. I get so excited when I see my marketing and sales team working together to knock our quota out of the park, plus delight our customers.
  • Timely: how long will it take to achieve this goal? Depending on the size of your company, your account-based marketing efforts may need more time to show results. For example, a small company which doesn’t have a contract to purchase will see the results of ABM much faster than an enterprise organization targeting Fortune 500 companies.

Want to learn more? Join me at Revenue Summit in San Francisco on March 7-8. We’re partnering with Sales Hacker and #FlipMyFunnel for two days of account-based marketing fun. We’ll talk about how to maximize your resources and share the secrets of pipeline acceleration.

In fact, use the code TERMINUS for 20% off your ticket price. Revenue Summit will be the best B2B marketing and sales event of 2017…at least until Dreamforce.

Co-founder and CMO

Sangram Vajre has quickly built a reputation as one of the leading minds in B2B marketing. Before co-founding <a href="http://terminus.com/">Terminus</a>, a SaaS platform for account-based marketing, Sangram led the marketing team at Pardot through its acquisition by ExactTarget and then Salesforce. He’s the author of Account-Based Marketing For Dummies</a> and is the mastermind behind <a href="http://flipmyfunnel.com/">#FlipMyFunnel</a>. Follow Sangram on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/sangramvajre"> @SangramVajre</a>.