ABM Fast Track: Part 1 – Roles and Responsibilities of Great ABM Teams

It’s a new year, and many B2B marketers are looking to start 2018 with a bang. However, starting an ABM initiative can seem like a daunting endeavor. There’s a lot of moving parts to manage.

That’s why we’re writing this ABM Fast Track blog series. This is your roadmap to getting up and running with ABM in record time.

We’ll cover plug-and-play tools, checklists, and worksheets that take a lot of the guesswork out of planning.

So start your engines and prepare to get up and running with ABM, fast.

ABM Roles and Responsibilities

With this new go-to-market strategy, come new roles and responsibilities.

We know you’re not going to be able to build a team overnight. In fact, building a solid team can take quite some time.

Depending on where you are in your ABM maturity will determine where you should start.

The way we think of it is there are three different phases of building your ABM team. First, begin with leveraging your current team. Next, get cross-departmental collaboration. Finally, build out your full ABM team.

Start with Leveraging Your Current Team

We recommend starting with leveraging your current team and drawing on their expertise, as you get your ABM program up and running. A lot of the work they’re already doing can be focused on a smaller, select set of people and accounts.

In other words, transitioning your current marketing team into an ABM team doesn’t mean radically reinvesting the way they work.

Here are some members of your team that you can call on:

• Corporate marketing
• Product marketing
• Revenue marketing
• Field marketing
• Events
• Marketing operations

Get Your Entire Organization Involved

After you’ve figured out how to leverage your current team to get your efforts off the ground, it’s time to get cross-departmental collaboration. The truth is if only marketing is involved, you’re doomed to fail.

Even though the word “marketing” is in ABM, it’s not something that only marketing is involved with. As Rob Leavitt of ITSMA states, “ABM is a strategic business initiative.” Therefore, we must get support and alignment from other departments outside of just marketing.

This is going to look different for each organization, but when building your team, here are some other important players that you want to include in planning and executing your ABM program.

• Sales
• Operations
• Marketing

But it doesn’t stop there. Those are the key players that need to be brought in during the planning process, but there are other players that need to be brought into the mix when you’re executing your ABM campaign.

It could look something like this:

• Executive management provides vision and contributes at crucial times
• Marketing finds and nurtures the leads, and delivers powerful insights
• Sales development qualifies and sets the stage
• Sales consulting gives a great demo
• Account executives negotiate and close the business
• Customer success onboards and trains

Build Your ABM Team

Now it’s time to build out your full ABM team.

There are a few different ways to approach this. You can build your team from entirely scratch, move around your current team and fill in the gaps, or shuffle your organization around, so you don’t have to hire new personnel.

Whichever the case, here is the core of what your ABM roles and responsibilities should cover.

• ABM lead/Director of ABM
• Product marketing
• Marketing manager
• Marketing ops/sales ops
• Strategic account manager
• Executive sponsor

While you’re building your ABM team, the next component to think about it is completing your account entitlements.

Account entitlements answer the question, “What is the right amount of time, money and resources dedicated to each tier of target accounts?”

This is crucial before starting your account selection.

In part 2 of our ABM Fast Track blog series, we’ll cover how we think about account entitlements. We’ll also give you a brand new worksheet for you to plug-and-play to nail down your entitlements.

For a more detailed look at their roles in your ABM initiative, download our ABM Roles and Responsibilities worksheet.