author: ForgeX

Ready to launch your first ABM program → but have limited resources and aren’t sure where to start?

Unfortunately, not everyone has a Salesforce-sized ABM budget, so you’ll have to get scrappy and work with your existing resources.

What you’ll find below, is mission-critical guidance around the most important things that should be considered while launching ABM on a low budget.

🛠️ 1. Tools & Vendors

Should you purchase an ABM Platform to start?

The unbiased answer? It depends.

But for the majority of organizations? No.

One of the most dangerous misconceptions is the notion that you need to buy a +$150K ABM Platform to build a successful ABM strategy.

An ABM Platform should be perceived as a powerful tool that can help augment your existing strategy, but not as an ABM strategy in its own right.

 

Here is why it isn’t imperative to invest before you’ve launched your ABM pilot:

1. ❌ Implementation Time: It can take 6-months to fully ramp. By the time it’s fully integrated with your other tools, you’ll already be half way through your 1-yr pilot program.
2. ❌ Internal Enablement: Even if your ABM Platform is fully integrated, learning how to make the most of it can and will take time. From getting the keywords right, to reporting. It will take even longer to enable your sales teams and for them to *actually* trust the data.
3. ❌ Intent Data is NOT a Silver Bullet: If you’re simply using intent data from a platform to choose your target account list, you’re not setting your program up for maximum success. It should be used as an input to amplify your dataset when choosing target accounts, not the single source.

 

Here is when you should invest before you’ve launched your ABM pilot:

1. ✅ ABM Reporting Capabilities: If you lack an internal analytics team that can help build out your home-grown reporting infrastructure, or the budget to hire an external consulting firm to do this, an ABM Platform is a great option.
2. ✅ De-anonymization of Website Traffic: The ability to uncover which accounts and contacts are visiting your website is paramount. This first-party intent data will not only be used as a signal for measuring the success of your GTM tactics, but also for building your initial target account list.

Once your pilot program is successfully launched, your internal teams are enabled, and both GTM fundamentals and operational processes are solid, that’s when it’s time to consider bringing on an ABM Platform to help amplify your efforts.

 

💡Spotlight Solution

✨ Got a small budget, but have ambitious ABM goals? Propensity has you covered. It’s the ABM tool built for small B2B growth teams. It provides intent data to automate your account-based marketing campaigns and hand off highly engaged contacts to Sales. The best part? It won’t break the bank (starting at $2K / month).

 

💡 With Propensity you can launch your ABM campaign in as little as one week. Here’s how it works: 

👉 Identify your niche market through intent data. 

👉 Create digital awareness by deploying device-level programmatic ads.

👉 Activate premium channels like direct mail, email, and ads through warm lead generation. 

👉 Create a sales cadence rich with opportunities to strengthen connections across LinkedIn, emails, and calls with your vertical or persona.

👉 Measure outcomes with your very own ABM specialist to discuss all aspects of your ABM campaign from strategy and planning to execution and analysis.

 

📺 Watch this 3-minute demo for the rundown and get started with a free trial. 

🎯 2. Go-to-Market (GTM) Foundations

What is the process to build your first target account list?

First off, here are the most common mistakes that ABM practitioners make during this GTM step.

1. Only Using Intent Data: Leveraging intent data to build your target account list is great, but only if it’s an additional datapoint, not the only source of data. 
2. Just Asking Sales: Scheduling a meeting with your VP of Sales and asking them “what accounts would you like to include in our ABM program” is not only a surefire way to build a poor target account list, but to also lose credibility and trust as you didn’t take the time to conduct research ahead of time. 

To properly build a target account list that will set your program up for success, there are two phases to follow. 

 

Phase #1: Do your homework

Before having a conversation with your sales team, it’s imperative to make sure that you dive into the data. Using the various inputs that you have at your disposal, create a data-driven first pass at what accounts you believe should be included in the list.

Here are a few data sources that we recommend reviewing:

Phase #2: Align & finalize with sales

This is where you’ll come into the meeting with a data-driven first pass at what your analysis has helped to uncover what the target ABM accounts might be.

You’ll review this with the sales leader(s) and/or team, and they will provide their strategic input. 

When you blend your data-driven first pass with the sales team’s insights, you’ll arrive at the best possible target account list.

How should you properly tier the target account list?

If you’re thinking about tiering your target account list, that means you are using the Growth ABM framework. 

Growth ABM is a 1:Many framework, specifically designed for engagement of the entirety of a target account list. This involves scoring and prioritizing accounts, and then segmenting accounts into tiers, often three in number. The assigned tier dictates the extent of personalization and tactical eligibility an account receives, thereby optimizing resource allocation and ensuring the most tailored efforts are made where they matter most.

 

Here is how each tier is defined:

 

Should you really have 3 distinct tiers?

It depends. When you’re on a tight budget and just starting the initial pilot, you most likely won’t have a strong enough distinction across the tactical eligibility, depth of personalization and time that you’ll be allocating to differentiate across 3 tiers. In this case, we would recommend only using 2 tiers.

What’s often overlooked when building out the GTM foundations?

Even if you have a multi-million dollar ABM budget, if you don’t get these two right, your ABM program will miss the mark. These include both your target personas and messaging. 

 

Target Personas: If you lack a clear understanding of the individuals that you’re trying to reach, no matter how great your creative and tactics are, they’re going to fall flat.

It’s a prerequisite to have a strong understanding of who your target audience consists of from a title perspective, what their strategic imperatives and pain points consist of, what content resonates, and where they go to learn (consider the dark social channels here).

 

Messaging: Just like your target personas, without strong messaging, your GTM tactics will not be effective. The best way to craft messaging that will cut through the noise is by *actually* listening to sales calls and talking to your prospects and customers. This will help you to speak in their language as to why they should partner with your organization to help.

 

📩 3. Campaign Plan: Channels & Tactics

What tactics should be included in your campaign plan?

There is no one-size-fits-all playbook that you can rinse and repeat across various organizations and realize the same levels of success.

Every ABM program is unique, and the tactics and channels that will perform the best will be specific to your objectives and target account list.

 

Consider the sales stage of your accounts:

Your target account list might be focused on varying objectives such as deal generation (top of funnel) or deal acceleration (middle/bottom of funnel). This is vital to consider as you plan out what content and tactics to leverage.

Tailor and repurpose existing content:

If you have existing content that can be tailored to match the characteristics of your target account list, this is a great way to get started - fast. 

Additionally, consider other cost-effective options that have a high degree of repurposability such as virtual events or video podcasts. 

Here is a proven workflow to make the most out of your content:

• Live Video Event → Host the Video Recording as a Podcast → Create Video Clips for Social → Create a Blog Post

• Live Video Event 
  • Zoom Webinar $79 / mo
  • Zoom Pro $15.99 / mo

• Podcast Creation and Hosting
  • DIY (do it yourself)
    • Descript $12 / mo
    • Buzzsprout $12 / mo
  • Outsource to an agency
    • Hatch $3k / mo

Don’t forget about dark social channels:

There are additional cost-effective tactics that may be more challenging to track in terms of engagement signals. To overcome this, include a "How did you hear about us?" field in the forms on your website where contacts express direct interest in learning more. 

These tactics include:

• Organic LinkedIn posts (free)
• Engaging in relevant communities (free or the associated cost of community memberships
  
  

📈 4. Measurement & Reporting

If your leadership is still stuck on MQLs, what should you do?

Making the transition from traditional lead generation to an account-based GTM motion requires the adoption of new metrics and can be uncomfortable for executives. 

You’re most likely using a derivative of the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall (2006 version) which consists of these stages: Inquiry → MQL → SQL → Closed-Won.

Although SiriusDecisions has since been purchased by Forrester, and they have innovated on the model X3 times since its conception, it’s still the standard for most. This is especially the case in high growth, VC-back organizations. 

If you’re having trouble garnering buy-in to transition off of this legacy attribution model, we suggest the following “crawl, walk, run” approach:

1. Crawl: Continue to report on the antiquated MQL metrics, yet augment them with account-based metrics and begin to introduce them as an alternative path to your leadership and sales teams.
2. Walk: As your leadership and sales teams are beginning to gain confidence in your account-based metrics, begin to showcase them as a standard practice. You will still have legacy metrics within the reporting, but they will no longer be seen as the only effective source of measurement.
3. Run: Account-based attribution and reporting have become integral to the organization and are now viewed as standard practice. Your reporting capabilities have expanded throughout the organization, establishing the modernized approach as the sole measurement method, effectively sidelining traditional lead generation. Executives have developed a profound trust in the data, to the extent that they recognize and understand the limitations of the traditional lead generation approach.

The ideal approach is to utilize modern account-based measurement from the start, yet this might not be realistic for some organizations due to their leadership team.

 

🤝 5. Cross-functional Collaboration

How should you position ABM across your internal teams?

The support and collaborative efforts of all go-to-market teams are vital to ensure the success of your ABM program, especially when operating under a tight budget.

Oftentimes, your cross-functional teams might share a preconceived mindset around what’s included in an ABM program.

Here is what you might hear:

• “ABM is just a marketing tactic”
• “It’s an account prioritization exercise”
• “Marketing is just running targeted ads to my accounts”

All three of these are far from the truth. One of the most confusing and misleading parts about Account-Based Marketing is the “Marketing” component in the name.

By positioning the new initiative as an “Account-Based Marketing pilot”, it sounds as if it’s only a marketing motion. This is why we recommend positioning it as “piloting an Account-Based GTM motion”. 

As referenced in our Collaboration Flywheel model below, you are truly working to build an Account-Based GTM motion versus merely running a singular ABM campaign. ABM represents the marketing component of an Account-Based GTM motion.

The future of B2B marketing will entirely entail an Account-Based GTM approach, as marketing and the other revenue functions are now just catching up to sales who have been account-based for 15+ years.

Conclusion

By now, it should be overwhelmingly evident that the most important ingredient to a successful ABM program is its underlying GTM architecture. If you don’t have the fundamentals right, no technology, agency or additional headcount will instantaneously save the day. 

 

Although extremely nuanced, those who adopt an Account-Based GTM approach will not only be setting their organization up for success in the short-term but also for the long term as it becomes the standard GTM practice across all of B2B.

 

And most importantly, you don’t need a massive budget to start!