ABM Challenges
Look around and you’ll see a large number of B2B marketers actively following ABM. And yet, because of the challenges in ABM, their results are widely different.Â
So what are the challenges in ABM? What can stop you from making ABM the revenue-machine it is supposed to be?Â
Consider alignment of teams, for instance. Businesses organizations that have a strong alignment between their sales and marketing teams enjoy a 38% higher sales win rate (Source: MarketingProfs).Â
If your sales teams aren’t able to convert a majority of the leads that your marketing teams generate, or if your marketing teams churn out content that’s of little use to your sales teams, you have a clear lack of sales and marketing alignment.Â
That’s just one way your ABM can fall short. Here we look at the 5 most common challenges in account-based marketing, and discuss expert tips on how to overcome them.
Challenge 1: Aligning sales and marketing teams
ABM brings you enormous benefits, but you’ll need the good old hard work to make it click. So aligning your sales and marketing teams is critical.
But what do you mean by sales and marketing alignment?
You want the two teams to:
- Speak the same ‘language’Â
- Agree on what accounts to chase, and
- Use common data to report and measure performance
Identifying. reaching, and engaging accounts at their best possible times takes a lot of resources. That, in turn, directly decides how resource-efficient your processes will turn out to be. One of the principal challenges with ABM is achieving this efficiency.
Next, you want the two teams to align because you want to develop processes that are efficiently scalable. With that, you’ll be able to not only avoid effort duplication but also reach agreement upon which big-ticket accounts to chase. This alignment will bring you performance visibility and valuable insights.
The core function of marketing teams is to target and bring in the right prospects. Sales teams then take over and begin engaging the prospects.Â
For this to happen, your sales teams need to constantly generate and share intelligence that tell marketing teams what kind of prospects are most likely to convert. A strong alignment will make sure all vital decisions are taken jointly. Because nothing bleeds resources like unilateral decisions that don’t have the buy-in or conviction of the other team.
Dealing with this challenge
While the solution to aligning sales and marketing looks obvious, its implementation isn’t. Central to this task is the alignment of roles and goals, as well as that of processes and tools. You want them to realize how the role of one team complements that of the other.
Sales teams, for instance, need to understand that their cold emails will have very low response rates if their prospects have no idea who they are or what their brands stand for. That means your marketing would need to lay out the branding groundwork before sales teams can create an impact.
Against that, your marketing teams need to understand from the sales teams what kind of prospects actually convert. There’d be little point building brand awareness in front of the wrong audience.
Finally, be sure to clearly define roles within each team. Who will qualify a lead and rate it as worthy of pursuit? Who will be responsible to pass on the leads? Who will receive the leads? Who will provide the support to nurture the leads?
If you’ve answered such questions clearly and comprehensively, you’re all sorted with one of the most widely known challenges in ABM.
Challenge 2: Working with siloed data - and tools
If you were to ask marketers ‘What is the hardest part of ABM?’, their answer might surprise you. While sales and marketing alignment or engaging key stakeholders is certainly a daunting challenge, the tricky part is probably tons of data – and tools. Without the correct experts overseeing the entire ABM chain, your data will very quickly become both disparate and humongous.Â
Novice marketers will be first happy to see they have mounds of data, but soon they’ll be overwhelmed. That’s because once it goes out of hand, connecting the dots proves very expensive (and hugely discouraging).Â
Data that’s not well stitched and organized will also make reporting and measurement difficult and mostly inaccurate. But there’s an associated challenge.
Early on, your teams will be flooded with too many tools, most claiming to be the best fit for your requirements. You want to build a technology stack that’s efficient and lean, but a few wrong choices in the initial stages can leave you with tools that neither work together nor optimize your processes.
The end goal of marketing tools and data is to provide you with a single source of truth. You should be able to strike the right conversations and meaningfully engage your prospects using that data. But you want to keep clear of ABM technology challenges, and not let your choices descend into being a handicap.
Dealing with this challenge
The foremost thing to remember is that while technology is very important, you must have a clear strategy in place. Without strategy, technology stacks can be a liability. So be sure to start out with a clear strategy on how you’d be using technology and leveraging data to crack the ABM puzzle.
Next, you want consistency in seemingly simple things. Take naming conventions, for instance. Be sure to maintain a clear policy and soon you’ll be thanking yourself.
Finally, you want to be sure how you’ll be using data to prepare ICPs. When you have the right tools that help you build the right ICP, you have already won half the battle.
Challenge 3: Engaging the right stakeholders
Focus and personalization are at the heart of ABM. Research by Gartner suggests that there are an average of 6 to 10 decision-makers for purchase of relatively complex B2B solutions. Can you imagine the resources you’d be wasting if your teams were, by mistake, engaging an entirely different set of people?
Targeting the wrong people can turn into one of the most expensive disadvantages of ABM. In absence of insights on how the decision-making works at your target account, ABM wouldn’t carry you far.Â
And that’s not all. Stakeholders may exhibit different behaviors across different channels. On a professional network (think LinkedIn), they’d be focussed more on features, while on microblogging sites (think Twitter), they might care only for overall problem highlighting.Â
In your ABM campaigns, a multichannel approach will be vital to your success in engaging them.
Dealing with this challenge
Research is the good old answer. Find as much as you can about the decision dynamics within your target accounts. Learn about roles, responsibilities, hierarchies, and even the behavior of decision-makers when they interact with vendors.
In particular, you want to understand the expectations each stakeholder has. Are they looking for a niche solution? Would they rate an enterprise-sized vendor higher? Is post-sales support an ongoing concern for them?
Based on such information, you would develop a close understanding of how best to position your solution.
Challenge 4: Crafting personalized content
So here’s one of the most well-known challenges of ABM. You have aligned the teams, organized your data, and identified the decision-makers in the organization. What next?
Personalized content is synonymous with ABM. Problem-solving can wait; you want to convince your prospects that you understand their challenges. So why is this difficult?
Lack of trust plays the spoilsport.
A study revealed that only 18% of buyers trust sales teams. And without personalized content that clearly talks about the challenges your prospects are grappling with, this isn’t going to change.
Personalized content isn’t just about the specific challenges. As your prospects move from TOFU (Top Of the Funnel) to, say, MOFU (Middle Of the Funnel), you want your content to reflect that journey.Â
Besides, you want to grab the attention of your prospects right from the word go. In an over-communicated world where your prospects are literally flooded with sales pitches, if you haven’t personalized your message, you’ve lost even before you started your ABM.Â
And that’s quite difficult to achieve.Â
Dealing with this challenge
Sometimes – though not always – the problem isn’t that you don’t have the content. The problem is you are sending the wrong content. So before you get into the race to create that next ebook or that next video, stop for a moment and look around.
You want to scale, and yet you don’t want to lose out on the grounds of inadequate personalization. Therefore, try and see if you can repurpose some content and get the results you’re looking for.
No matter whether you create new content or repurpose existing content, never forget this golden advice: Your communication should be about them, not you.
Don’t talk of the tons of awards you’ve won last year, talk about how you’ve helped customers solve problems. Don’t talk about what a wonderful product you have, show how it will solve your prospects’ problems. Remember, the first rule of account-based marketing is to always make it about them.
Challenge 5: Measuring ABM outcomes
If you have tried ABM and found that the benefits of ABM take too long to show or the results aren’t easy to measure, you’re not alone.
Without a clear ABM strategy at the start, the reporting challenges of ABM will only aggravate. They’d be skewed and unreliable, and will ultimately turn counter-productive.
ABM can trick inexperienced marketers into looking at the wrong optics. A lot of time and resources would have been wasted before your teams would realize the account you were chasing was irrelevant or low-value.
There’s another very important metric that a traditional marketer would not think of when measuring ABM outcomes: span of engagement.Â
Sure, conversion is an extremely important metric, but did you optimize engagement at all the touchpoints for the accounts you were eager to win? Was your engagement empowering enough for sales teams? These things are either completely forgotten or measured inadequately, and that can become an issue with ABM.
Dealing with this challenge
Prioritize who needs to see what and measure what. Your senior executives don’t have to wade through a 79-page report to learn if you converted the next big prospect. On the other hand, at the operational level, you don’t always have to be looking at the 5-year growth plans of your organization. Each level has a unique need.
Moreover, ABM must lay a different emphasis on quantity. Number of leads doesn’t count that highly, because you will soon be focusing on a small list of targeted accounts anyway. Or take how sales cycles change with ABM. A good indicator that your ABM is working is a shortened sales cycle.
You want to be ruthless in measuring stakeholder engagement. If you aren’t reaching the decision-makers, your ABM is seriously flawed. And finally, the overall outcome will reflect how ABM-ready you are as an organization, and what kind of help you’d need going forward.
Getting ahead with ABM
It’s obvious that despite some serious challenges that ABM throws up, marketers are willing to go ahead and implement ABM. That’s because of the ROI ABM offers. So the question is how you’ll tackle the challenges of ABM, rather than if.
The turning point could be what kind of resources you’d be committing to combat these challenges. Use a small number of resources and you won’t be able to overcome the challenges; use too many resources and you draw a poor ROI.Â
Which is why you want to trust in-house specialists. They may know a thing or two about dealing with these challenges. And in all likelihood they will account for all this early on.Â
Better still, you can reach out to ABM marketing consultants. Their deep and wide experience will stand you in good stead. Either way, you want to make sure you overcome the challenges and enjoy the benefits of ABM.
