Account-Based Marketing

9Scaling Your ABM Efforts:

How to Grow ABM Efforts Swiftly but Prudently

You’ve reached a major milestone: not only did you decide to try ABM, you also built a pilot. You then weathered all the issues and growing pains that are associated with any significant change, and you ran the pilot for enough time to generate data about its usefulness in your company with your type of customers. You also learned what ABM means to your organization, including the nuances that will make it work, given your size, complexity, corporate culture, and business model.

Congratulations, and we mean it: we know firsthand the journey you’ve been through, and just to travel it is worthy of a virtual high five.

You’ve had a chance to digest the pilot results with all the measurements we talked about in Chapter 8, so the big question is: Was it successful?

If the answer is no, then it’s time to dig in and understand why not. Was it the way the target account list was created? If you reread Chapter 4, you may have insights now that you didn’t at the time. Now it may be clear that you bit off too much in regard to a pilot that was too large for your initial ABM capabilities. Then again you may have gone in the opposite direction and used too small of a group of accounts for you to be able to arrive at any meaningful conclusions.

Maybe your target account list was fine, but it was instead a matter of never finding that champion or two who would be patient as you occasionally had a setback or surprise. ...