Our client is one of the world’s largest providers of IT services, with revenues in excess of $10Bn. It provides infrastructure and technology services, helping organisations modernise their IT infrastructure and accelerate their digital transformation.
The inflexion point
The company had embraced an account-based growth strategy, aligning resources to focus on and grow its most important customers and prospects. ABM was the perfect marketing approach to support this strategy, hence the company set up its field marketing to focus on ABM, working closely with account teams around the world.
In early 2024, the company began to deploy a new account planning methodology, which would be ramped up during the rest of the year and on into 2025. This presented an opportunity to reframe and reinvigorate the ABM programme to complement and align with the new account planning approach. To ensure the success of both programmes, further professional development was needed for the global ABM team.
Our engagement
Inflexion Group was brought in to help reframe the way the company developed its ABM capability to drive account-based growth, building the competence and confidence of the team to support the new account planning methodology. We recommended a customised version of our Advanced ABM Practitioner course. Designed for practitioners who have some experience in the role and want to deepen their skills, it would help the team adopt best practices to increase the impact of their ABM activities.
We agreed the specific learning objectives with our client sponsor and the content of the course, covering the proven five-step process for Strategic and Segment ABM, was customised for our client’s processes, systems and terminology.
To accelerate learning, we designed group exercises to practice the concepts on a live account and segment during the course, with teams building a draft plan together as they worked through the training sessions. At the end of the course, they shared their plans with each other and with senior marketing executives at the company, presenting on a ‘certification webinar’ to achieve their accreditation.
The course delegates worked through eight 120-minute modules in the summer of 2024:
- Introduction, ABM best practices, and your role as an ABM-er
- Prioritising and onboarding accounts
- Building actionable insight
- Designing the right marketing strategy
- Creating your ABM plan: Part one — Content
- Creating your ABM plan: Part two — Communications
- Activating your plan
- Accreditation webinar
Course delegates were selected from around the world to foster a global community of practice. They were put into four teams, with two working on a large retail customer, and two building a plan for a cluster of media and entertainment companies. Our course leaders ran remote mentoring sessions in each team’s time zone to help them design a best practice ABM plan.
To achieve accreditation, each delegate had to:
- Attend all the course sessions and participate in the exercises
- Complete the multiple-choice quiz for each session, achieving a score of 80% or more
- Build a draft ABM plan with their team for their chosen account or segment
- Attend calls with their Inflexion Group mentor while building their team plan
- Present their ABM plan at the accreditation webinar
Two of Inflexion Group’s most experienced instructors designed and led the course, Bev Burgess and Louise Jefferson, who together have trained thousands of marketers during their careers. Senior Consultant and ex-Accenture ABM leader, Catherine Ahern, provided mentoring support to the teams, as they built their plans.
During the accreditation webinar itself, the teams gave four excellent presentations. They were being assessed by Inflexion Group, who were asking:
- Is insight at the heart of this plan?
- Is there a logical flow through the presentation?
- Have the concepts we’ve covered on the course been applied in the plan?
At the same time, the company’s senior marketing executives were considering:
- Is this plan practical?
- Would this plan support the company’s objectives and strategy?
After nine weeks’ intensive work, every single ABM-er who took the course passed. A great result!
Key outcomes
The feedback provided by delegates at the end of the customised course was very encouraging, with 100% saying they would recommend the course to others and top marks given to the instructors. The comments shared emphasised the value delegates took from the course:
‘This was an amazing experience! Thank you for all the support, mentoring and guidance throughout the programme. It was engaging and vibrant, with tons of real-world application that will help not only me but all the participants in our day-to-day work.’
‘The mentoring programme was very helpful in polishing raw ideas and pushing teams to bring unique perspectives to their projects.’
‘Thank you again for sharing your wealth of knowledge and experience to help me advance as an ABM practitioner. It was truly an invaluable experience.’
‘Thank you for this training, I’ve learned lot about ABM and you’ve been amazing instructors and mentors.’
‘The senior marketing executive sponsor was equally delighted.
‘Following the certification webinar, some of the ideas developed by the teams have already been adopted to drive sustainable growth in the retail client and media cluster. The training has inspired our community of practitioners and helped to refresh our ABM programme.’
