Do you have what it takes to create a successful growth program?

At a recent member event, we had the pleasure of hosting two ABM industry leaders, Andrea Clatworthy, Global Head of ABM at Fujitsu and David Cotterill, UK Country Head and Marketing Director, Conduent.  

In our panel discussion, we heard all about the best practices that have emerged from their successful ABM programs. We listened to the highs and lows, what worked, what didn’t, and how they managed to evolve, build governance, and nurture talent to achieve true ABM scale and success. 

Here's some of my favourite bits from the discussion. 

How did you scale your ABM program? 

Andrea Clatworthy: “We actually learnt the most from doing it wrong.” 

“We began our ABM journey with 58 accounts, simply because we had 58 people working in marketing: we trained every person and gave them all an account. But don’t do that, it was a disaster. What it really came down to was our account selection – it wasn’t scientific. But we actually learnt the most from doing it wrong. We scaled it right back to the basic methodologies and strategies to uncover our key accounts and then we gradually scaled back up again, by country and then by region.”  

David Cotterill: “We scaled based on three critical success factors.” 

“We started off with a one-to-one campaign, but it soon became clear that account selection had not been done properly. The sales team had free rein and often chose their favourite accounts. So, we did a small pilot with Demandbase to understand our accounts based on three critical success factors: are the accounts in market, are they engaged with us, and are they responding to our campaigns. The data that came back was right on the money. We’ve now scaled this across 26,000 accounts and we can very quickly segment them down into a few hundred that have our laser focus and investment.” 

How do you maintain governance? 

DC: “We had all the wood behind the arrow, now it was just a case of implementing it.” 

“There’s no denying the politics are immense. Everyone has an opinion, so you do need a rigorous model. Our two key sponsors are the Chief Revenue Officer and the Chief Marketing Officer, and both of those two were fully aligned. We had all the wood behind the arrow and then it was just a case of implementing our model and working this down through their team. We reported back KPIs, ROI, and we were able to show the needle moving across the business.” 

AC: “What was quite interesting was the demand for [governance] outstripped our ability to supply.” 

“We didn’t need to continually prove ABM’s value, which meant that our KPIs and reporting were quite loose; a lot of it was anecdotal – how you’ve moved the dial, created relationships, created trust – the things that are quite frankly, difficult to put a number on. This means a lot of our reporting is done on PowerPoint, rather than using lots of data points. It’s funny, we’re all about data-driven marketing but we often don’t have the plumbing in place to do all of that. We can do it on vanity metrics, but when we’re talking about, ‘have you created conversations with the top five stakeholders in your account’, you can’t always just put a number on it.” 

How do you create a continuous stream of actionable insights? 

AC: “The best insights come from conversations with the customer and your sales team.” 

“We have the basic tools for insights and a brilliant market intelligence team, but undeniably the best insights come from having conversations with the customer and sales. They don’t put this information out on social media and intent data engineers won’t pick this up. So, as the ABM-er, having that close relationship with the account team, gathering those insights and making them actionable is our best source of knowledge.” 

How do you nurture the best ABM talent? 

AC: “A lot of it for us comes down to learning on the job.” 

“We have an ABM board at Fujitsu that helps us maintain consistency and share best practice. But we also take our key people through Momentum ITSMA training, run lots of in-house training for sales and marketing and I also coach the team myself, which also helps me forge deeper relationships with my ABM-ers. Some people are naturally great at ABM and some people aren’t and you don’t know really until you get going. One of our best was a data guy, a complete introvert, but a great ABM-er – which is unusual as you often think of marcomms as being more creative.” 

DC: “We’re often the architects, not engineers.” 

“We’ve taken a very different approach; we don’t hire any ABM-ers, everyone in the marketing team has an ABM remit. We have provided our ABM team with a Center of Excellence where we’ve brought all our martech together to create a reporting dashboard. This holds brilliant insights, which can be provided to all the team; they can take these key data points and deliver them directly to the clients. We’re seeing the marketing team get really creative with it and the campaigns are becoming uber-personalized and uber-intelligent.” 

What do you think about As-a-Service and the viability in ABM? 

AC: “I believe only some things can be delivered as a service.” 

“Being that business partner to your account team cannot be delivered as a service. Someone needs to own the ABM plan, orchestrate it, and personalize it based on their objectives.” 

DC: “We can definitely bring the as-a-service piece through tech and scale things across regions and industries.” 

“The creativity and the ability of the marketer to innovate within the ABM model through the COE, that cannot be replicated. Different accounts need different levels of service, and they need different treatments due to their different objectives and market characteristics.”