James Houselander is Director of Global ABM at HPE, where he is building and scaling the company’s ABM strategy from the ground up. With over a decade of account-based marketing experience behind him, James joined the ABM Academy to bring industry best practice and rigour to HPE’s approach — and hasn’t looked back since. We caught up with him to hear about the risks he’s taken, the tools he swears by, and why networking might be the most underrated skill in an ABM-er’s arsenal.
Interview
You’re at a dinner party and someone asks what you do – how do you explain ABM?
It is marketing that specifically targets an account or cluster of accounts with messaging and interactions that are personalised and address the needs and challenges that your stakeholder and the account is facing at that time.
How did you get into ABM? Was it intentional or by accident?
It was a bit of both. All marketeers are doing account based or target account marketing in some form. I first did this over 10 years ago however never got the opportunity to focus or do it properly. The opportunity arose a year ago to build a global ABM strategy for HPE which we are now in the process of rolling out and scaling. The opportunity to do this bubbled up through conversations with our leadership and also timely needs and requests of the business to support with our growth strategy, as well as a requirement to add functionality to our field marketing organisation to deliver additional value to the sales organisation.
For me it’s something that I have always been interested in, as I believe all marketeers are doing ABM in some disguise. I think it was a collection of conversations, speaking to my network and attending events that shifted my thinking about the power of ABM. Some organsiations have been doing ABM for years, could show the impact and as a result they had completely shifted their marketing structure and even what they were calling it. Some changed to an ABM-led strategy, some evolved to a growth marketing one, others built their marketing organisation on ABM.
Over a few months I saw some ABM activity working and some not. There was confusion across marketing about what ABM was. This coincided with our leadership looking at how we did something different to support the business and evolve the role and perception of marketing. Given my passion for ABM, and having dabbled with it in the past, I started to look at how we could do something differently in HPE. When talking to peers in the industry who had built and scaled ABM programmes, one piece of advice was repeatedly shared – do this properly – and it was then that I was introduced to Inflexion Group, who helped me develop the strategy in HPE based upon industry best practice and data.
What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken in your ABM career, and did it pay off?
Moving into the role I am in now, trying to drive change in how we do ABM across HPE. I still don’t know if it has 100% paid off, but it is looking positive currently and we are really starting to get traction.
What was your ‘lightbulb moment’ during the Academy course?
Building a messaging hierarchy as part of the case study exercise. This combined all the process steps, brought to life the theory, and got you really thinking about the customer by focusing on their challenges, goals and how you could help them. This provided the foundations to enable you to build a plan that could target the key stakeholders and got you thinking about the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what and how’.
What’s in your ABM toolkit that you couldn’t live without – and what’s the most overrated thing everyone raves about?
AI tools to aid how we select accounts and then develop insights to help us focus. This has really helped speed up our time to market and keep sales engaged. It has enabled us to start to adapt and build content that is relevant for our accounts and the stakeholders within them.
What everyone raves about? This is a harder one. I suppose that you don’t need everything to be perfect. You need to get something in front of sales and into market to test ideas, then learn and adapt as you move forwards.
Fast-forward five years – what does success look like for you?
We have seen the results of our pilot, and we have scaled our ABM practice across the organisation to support additional regions, accounts and markets. Ultimately the business and the sales organisation see the value ABM brings them and they want more of it.
If you could give aspiring ABM-ers one piece of advice, what would it be?
Network with other ABM-ers and understand what they do, why they do it and how they do it. Then take that learning alongside the theoretical ABM training you can do and build a strategy that aligns to the needs of your business. Continue to engage your network and to learn and adapt new ways of doing ABM. I recommend you use the expertise and training that Inflexion Group has to help you do this.
Final thoughts
James’s journey is a reminder that great ABM rarely happens by accident — it takes curiosity, the right conversations, and a willingness to do things properly from the start. Whether you’re building a programme from scratch or scaling one across a global organisation, his advice is clear: lean on your network, stay close to the customer, and keep learning as you go.
Ready to start your own ABM journey? Get in touch with us or explore our ABM Academy courses and find the programme that’s right for you.
Read our previous Alumni Spotlight where we chatted to Rocío Arrarte Rivière, Demand Generation & Digital Experience Lead at KPMG UK.
Find out more about our Alumni network here.
