In our first blog around successful account based marketing strategies, we looked at brutal alignment around your core ICP for your customer-facing teams.
Next, let’s talk about your tech stack. There’s no way to get around it: A successful ABM strategy, and the tactics within it, requires a healthy, integrated tech stack.
You’ll need to align your processes and technologies to focus on accounts rather than individual leads, and ensure tight integration between your marketing and sales tools to make sure every component is working as it’s supposed to for accurate reporting, forecasting, and day-to-day processes.
Luckily, I spend my day working with clients and seeing my team tackle these challenges day in and day out. If you don’t have anyone that’s equipped to evaluate your tech stack on your team, we can sub in as needed.
Making sure you’ve got alignment across your tech stack can help you save time and money (no need to fix things if they’re not broken, right?) and what’s more, it will greatly enhance the effectiveness of your ABM efforts.
We’ve already spoken about the importance of data in defining your ICP, being able to see things like what deals closed the fastest, what kinds of organizations bring in the most revenue, etc. That all comes from having a well-oiled technology foundation whose inputs you feel secure about.
Remember, the outputs of your data is only as good as the inputs. So you can’t rely on reports that use dirty data!
Look for gaps in how your infrastructure is configured, particularly at your marketing automation or your overall CRM.
Questions to Ask:
- How would you rate the health of your marketing automation system and CRM?
- Do you have tight integration between your marketing automation and sales tools?
- Are your lead-gen processes aligned to focus on accounts?
- Do you leverage intent or predictive analytics tools for account targeting?
- Are you satisfied with your CMS and sales productivity tools?
Once you’ve asked yourself the right questions around what your tech stack might be missing or what could be improved, create a technology blueprint and a roadmap for implementation. Think of this like you’re building a house.
You wouldn’t want to start building the house without a detailed plan, or else the structure won’t hold. The same thing goes for your technology. You want to create the map so you can spot gaps and opportunities before you even start building.
This is also where you can incorporate AI. While we would never recommend you forget about the human touch (especially in ABM!), AI capabilities are becoming more and more important for speed, precision, and personalization in the world we live in.
The Value of an Integrated Tech Stack
One of our clients, Teamwork.com, greatly improved their sales productivity and effectiveness by consolidating their technology stack and implementing advanced CRM solutions. The enterprise project management platform was experiencing exponential growth, surging from 30 to more than 300 employees in a short time period, which led to the great ‘issue’ of deal volume and pipeline.
The team was facing several challenges, including an overly inadequate CRM system, limited sales visibility and reporting, and inefficiencies in deal management. These factors also slowed down the team’s ability to hone in one specific target accounts and level-up to an ABM strategy.
After migrating from Marketo to HubSpot, the team saw improved sales reporting and pipeline visibility, notably with a 50% increase in sales team efficiency through automation, and an 11% increase in win rate.
With the right foundational systems in place, Teamwork.com is well-positioned to implement an ABM strategy as they have more visibility and confidence in defining their target accounts.
In our next blog, we’ll look at the last piece of ABM success, which is all about crushing your content creation.
