What happens when you put marketers with decades of account-based marketing and event experience in a room together?
You get an endless amount of practical, day-to-day strategies to bring the highest-converting marketing channel to your highest-intent accounts.
Splash CMO Kate Hammitt and experiential marketer Haley Kaplan recently sat down with Mandy Hanson, Director of Global ABM at Lacework, and Aria Radke, Global Director of ABM, at Darktrace to chat about ABM programs and events.
Here are the top five tips we learned.
Mandy and Aria have a combined 10+ years of experience launching and optimizing ABM programs — which means they’ve worked a lot of strategies and have their fair share of stories to tell.
Mandy explained that true ABM is about customizing every single touchpoint in a prospect’s journey. But Mandy and Aria both confessed that’s not a reality for every company, which is why everyone approaches ABM differently.
Regardless of how you approach ABM, Mandy and Aria agree the first step is getting sponsorship from the top.
Talk with your executive team to get buy-in and work together to set goals around your business metrics and objectives. Look at your sales cycle, company size, and team bandwidth to define how custom of an ABM approach your team can take.
Is a one-to-one ABM strategy more effective for your business model? Or would something more scalable like a vertical-specific (e.g. industry, use case, ICP, etc.) approach be more beneficial?
Aria explained that ABM can often be viewed as a fix-all from everyone, including leadership, but impact isn’t instant. When setting goals with your exec team, make sure to set realistic and honest expectations, too. This is especially important when it comes to playing the long game for the high-value accounts on every company’s list.
Watch this clip for her advice on how to approach your exec team.
Mandy seconded executive support as a required first step, adding, “[Execs] push the sales team to either get onboard or move to other accounts if they’re not going to support the program.”
Mandy and Aria have the same suggestion for anyone starting an ABM program: start small.
The best way to do this is by launching a simple pilot program. Aria suggests using the opportunity to pick one tactic, one sales rep, and one target account.
If you need to take a smaller first step, she suggests starting with a targeted advertising program like targeted emails or other personalized content like custom whitepapers.
Mandy added that across every industry there are marketers who have deployed ABM strategies for years. Like Aria and herself, they’ve learned different tactics, mistakes to avoid, and how to build successful programs from the ground up.
She suggests finding the ABM experts in your industry, following their work, and asking for mentorship when possible.
Few things are more challenging than selling to a seller.
But as Mandy explained, “ABM won’t be successful without sellers being involved.”
To get buy-in and create trust with her sales team, she hosts account planning sessions for each seller’s target accounts with details on how she can support their outreach.
Watch this clip to get a peek into what her sessions include.
Aria agreed with the need for open communication with sales and holds meetings with leaders every other week, either one-on-one or in a group setting.
“The sales team is also our customers when we think about it, especially if you’re in a regional marketer role or field marketing role. If you’re not creating stuff that the sales team cares about, it’s going to fail. So that’s why I say you always want to get that alignment up front.”
If you’re struggling to get sales buy-in, Aria recommends leaning into the start small approach. She suggests creating a small group of sales and CSM stakeholders to run ABM tests and then showcase the impact to the larger team. Once they see the results, they’ll be all-in.
She added that marketers should act as strategic partners for sales. Marketing teams have a unique toolset that can identify high-intent accounts and should use these to guide sales to the specific accounts most likely to close.
Mandy shared that a majority of her ABM efforts are focused on creating custom, one-to-one programs. The rest of her time is focused on creating one-to-few or one-to-many campaigns for specific verticals, personas, and use cases.
She explained that regardless of your ABM strategy, there’s no shortage of tactics to take.
In this clip, Mandy talks about how she approaches custom campaigns and events at Lacework.
The ABM approach at Darktrace, on the other hand, looks a little different for Aria and her team. Her company is in the very early stages of their ABM journey, as they recently transitioned from a sales pool model to account assignments.
For now, they are taking a more account-centric marketing strategy and are focusing on scalability rather than custom one-to-one experiences.
Aria shared that her team has been using Demandbase to identify their high-intent accounts and understand who’s engaging with their brand. This allows her team to prioritize prospects who are most likely to convert, meet their ICP, and are in their target account list.
Aria explained that once the team becomes more comfortable with account assignments, they’ll take more tactical approaches towards building an ABM strategy. For example, proper targeting and outreach for events and marketing campaigns and bringing a multi-channel approach to different regions.
Events are a key component in Mandy’s and Aria’s ABM strategies.
For Mandy, her top-of-funnel event strategy is all about generating interest with her target audience, while her down-funnel events are intimate, in-person experiences used to collect information and pain points from decision-makers.
She then provides notes from these events to her sales team so they can send follow-ups with relevant content and solutions.
Watch Mandy discuss how she approaches her ABM event strategy.
Meanwhile, Aria’s account-centric strategy has her team investing in third-party events her key accounts are attending.
Watch this clip to learn about her 40% rule for attending events with target accounts.
These are only a handful of the non-stop tips Mandy and Aria shared about ABM best practices, event playbooks, and more throughout our hour-long discussion.
Check out our full conversation to get all their expertise for bringing events into your ABM strategy.
