Establishing a global ABM programme from scratch in a large professional services firm as part of an ambitious key client programme.
The inflexion point
In 2021, a large professional services firm launched an ambitious key client programme to deliver double-digit growth across its most iconic global accounts. The scale of many of these clients, together with their changing expectations of relationships with their strategic suppliers and trusted advisors around the world, meant that delivering a differentiated and compelling experience and building long-term, mutual value with them was a strategic priority for the firm. The global CMO realised that ABM could play a key role in this programme and appointed an experienced leader to design, build and run it for the benefit of the firm worldwide.
Our engagement
When the new leader took up their role as a team of one, they quickly began to understand the weight of expectation from the firm. So, they reached out to Inflexion Group to effectively become their team, accelerating the programme design and build, until an internal team could be established.
We conducted research to understand competitive approaches to these iconic accounts, while understanding the firm’s current approach to engagement, before collaborating to design a vision and multi-year roadmap for the global ABM programme. With clear objectives and 66 deliverables across five workstreams, the programme spanned alignment with other parts of the firm, account selection and ABM strategy, pilot activation and client experience design, infrastructure requirements, and capability build through a global community of practice.
Specific deliverables included:
- Set up of a governance model and participation in a global steering group, meeting monthly to oversee the design and build of the ABM programme and ratify key decisions.
- Development of an account selection, readiness and onboarding approach and a transition process for moving from one type of ABM support to another when necessary.
- Designing and standardising ABM processes and templates to interlock with relationship partners, account managers, industry specialists and territory marketers, and to help scale ABM consistently and quickly.
- Baselining the current technology infrastructure and how it can be used for ABM before defining the art of the possible and identifying new tools, including generativeAI, to leverage for the programme.
- Creation of a structured onboarding experience for ABM-ers with individual mentoring, providing access to over 30 shared tools and resources, as well as their own professional development framework with courses to build skills from beginners to experienced ABM practitioners.
- Design of a new measurement and reporting dashboard.
- Establishment of a risk register and mitigating actions to minimise challenges and reduce the number of roadblocks as the programme became established.
Key outcomes
Since the ABM programme launched, over one hundred million dollars of pipeline has been supported and closed with priority global clients. The firm has seen a significant increase in both the number of relationships with these key clients, and the proportion rating them as a ‘trusted advisor.’
Beyond the global programme, over 100 marketers in the community of practice across the firm are extending the ABM approach into local priority clients.
The ABM programme leader said, “I love working with Inflexion Group, you genuinely feel like an extended part of our team,” while their manager observed that “The ABM programme has achieved more than we expected in the first few months, having started with nothing.” The head of the key account programme commented that “The structure you have brought to the programme is compelling and disciplined.”
The relationship partners responsible for these iconic clients are impressed. Internal reviews with those supported by the programme revealed that 100% would recommend ABM to their colleagues. Even better, some of the clients themselves have commented on how the experience delivered through ABM differentiates the firm from its peers.
