ABM Part 1: Account Selection and How To Do It Better
ABM Part 1: Account Selection and How To Do It Better
👋 Hi, it’s Kaylee Edmondson and welcome to Looped In, my weekly newsletter exploring demand gen and growth frameworks in B2B SaaS. Subscribe to join 1k+ readers who get Looped In delivered to their inbox every Sunday.
In B2B, your account list is everything.
Most brands I’ve partnered with, or peers I’ve talked shop with, have a rough idea of who their best customers are. These are the customers that typically have the highest lifetime value (LTV) and/or the highest ACV (annual contract value). Which is a great first step, but that’s normally where the analysis ends.
Pulling these insights through to an informed and agreed-upon account list is typically a more painful process for GTM teams to come together on. So…it just doesn’t happen.
If you’re a demand marketer, this should be the hill you’re ready to die on. Your best customers hold the keys to defining and building your ideal customer profile (ICP). Without this information fueling your demand strategy, you’re spraying and praying, wasting spend and resources. I see it in accounts I audit every single day.
There’s a huge opportunity here to make sure you’re not confusing your TAM with your ICP. Last week I shared this visual that I’ve seen going around LinkedIn 👇
TAM — What is the total opportunity?
SAM — Who can we serve today?
ICP — Who do we serve best today?
And Adam Schoenfeld best defines the concepts as:
TAM (Total Addressable Market) is about sizing your long-term opportunity. It’s perfect for your VC deck.
SAM (Serviceable Available Market) sits in the middle. It reduces your TAM into who you can service currently, usually bound by geography, company size, and industries.
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) defines who you serve best. It drives sales and marketing focus.
And what I see inside of audits more often than not are marketing teams who aren’t working within an ICP and have instead plugged in TAM parameters directly into paid media programs. So much wasted spend.
Marketing teams should start with SAM (not TAM). Think of SAM as your exclusions (things you can’t service or sell to today). For example, maybe you can’t sell into EMEA, or can’t sell into the Healthcare industry, or can’t service companies who aren’t using Salesforce as their CRM, etc. The list goes on and on.
Then layer in your ICP with scoring.
Scoring is best thought of as a tiering system (A-D or something similar). Scoring will be made up of firmographics (ex: company headcount, industry), technographics (ex: what website technology they use), and buying intent (ex: hiring signals, website traffic). And will be both positive and negative.
Start with the positives first for your brand. Remember that note mentioned at the top of this post that most brands have a rough idea of who their best customers are? Let’s start with that. Data in your CRM. And answer the following questions:
We are best for companies in [specific industry].
We are best for companies with [insert scenario here] (e.g. recent funding, 5 sales reps, a compliance department).
We are best for companies [needing to solve this problem] (e.g. increase security posture, increase speed to lead, enable a fully remote team)
Answers to these questions above start to help you narrow in on your signals. And again signals should be both positive and negative. For example, when I was in-house at Chili Piper we knew we were better for companies with at least 5 sales reps. At that point in your growth journey you’re more likely experiencing a lead volume worth building some infrastructure behind to increase your speed to lead. So companies with more than 5 reps was a positive signal. But conversely, brands that were die hard fans of Zoho for their CRM…negative signal. These brands were likely to have a less impactful experience with CP.
An example of what this exercise could look like:
These positives and negatives should also be weighted. We all know all too well that though all positive, sometimes business type (B2B, vs B2C, vs DTC, etc.) matters more than jobs mentioning AI. And same goes for negative signals. Figure out which of those matter most and should be weighted more heavily than others based on lookalikes for your best customers.
That customer data drives signals, and those signals drive your plays.
This exercise will uncover trends in your ICP that will allow you to get specific with the plays you run for your GTM campaigns.
Let’s say we know we see high win rates for rip and replace deals — a.k.a. stealing business away from the competition. This exercise then allows us to build a specific subset of our ICP that meets all of our baseline ICP criteria + uses a friendly neighbor as their current solution. Then, you’ve got a play to run where you can build a dedicated Target Account list from these signals, personalize the messaging based on why you know you win, and deploy a campaign (with a meaningful offer).
Now, this specific approach will likely generate an even more targeted (read: smaller) list, but it’s also a list with higher motivation, awareness, and decisioning power than you might be going after right now. So you should run specific plays in parallel with running more broad-based campaigns against your ICP target accounts.
This is what the account selection process should look like for your company. IMO, this process should be revisited at minimum twice a year, but also in scenario planning that’s more opportunistic. Say your board is asking you to expand growth efforts into EMEA, start with this ICP modeling exercise. Or your CMO has just unlocked funding for you to create fuel for campaigns in the Healthcare space, start with this ICP modeling exercise. Or…honestly, insert almost any scenario that you’re going through here, but this should be your new home base.
Last week I shared there’s a new league entering the ABM space and I couldn’t be more excited. This process outlined above is how I’m building account selection sanity with my clients today and (no, this is not a sponsored post) I’m using Keyplay to make this process 100x easier.
If you feel like you’re wasting effort and resources towards the wrong accounts, would highly recommend you check them out. Genuinely not being paid to say any of this. A big part of starting this newsletter was to drive the function of demand and growth forward and that comes with actually sharing how to GSD. Hope this helps!
In next week’s installment I’m talking about how you should think about Account Engagement—the plays (1:1 / 1:few / 1:many). Let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to see covered!
See ya next week,
Kaylee ✌️