ABM within account-based growth strategy

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the fifth edition of The ABM-er, a newsletter set up to share research, insights, trends, and advice to help you keep up with the evolution of ABM best practices. As a reminder, here’s what you can expect each month:

• Excerpts from my new book Account-Based Marketing: The definitive handbook for B2B marketers, published in March 2025
• Actionable tips: ABM how-to guides, frameworks, and checklists
• Real world examples and perspectives from global companies successfully using ABM
• Industry research, insights and trends and my take on their implications for ABM-ers

In this edition…

This month, I’m looking at the business perspective for ABM, drawing on the second chapter in my book, Account-Based Marketing: The definitive handbook for B2B marketers.

In this edition, we’ll look at the importance of the 80/20 rule – or Pareto principle – as the business context for both an account-based growth strategy and ABM as the appropriate marketing strategy.

I’ll share a real-world example from Huawei, exploring the way the company manages key customer relationships to drive long term growth.

I’ll also share some highlights from an interview with PwC ’s global CMO, Antonia Wade ade. A fellow Kogan Page Publishing author and award-winning CMO, Antonia shares her views on the business case for ABM and how it fits in your wider marketing strategy.

I hope you like this month’s edition. Do let me know if you have any comments or questions.

If you enjoy this newsletter, please subscribe to receive future editions: https://bit.ly/43FJ3Cb

Many thanks,

Bev.

ABM in the context of an account-based growth strategy

ABM can’t be successful if it isn’t aligned with a company’s overall business goals and strategy. Put another way, the best ABM programmes are part of an integrated account-based growth initiative, led by the CEO and their leadership team. This approach to growth demands alignment across teams within the business and a shared, laser-like focus on the accounts that will determine its future success.

There is clear logic for adopting an account-based growth strategy, particularly in more established companies. The 80/20 rule, or Pareto principle, is a naturally occurring phenomenon that in itself provides the business case for a clear focus on your top customers, since it predicts that 20% of inputs will always be responsible for 80% of outputs. The interesting fact for us is that, most likely, 20% of your customers will give you 80% of your profitable revenues. But, that’s not all, because the 80/20 rule is fractal — a mathematical pattern that repeats itself.  So, if 20% of customers account for 80% of revenues, then 20% of that top 20% (just 4% of customers) will equate to 80% of the top 80% (equivalent to 64% of revenues). And so on, until it all ends in tiers, as shown in the figure below.

The implications of the 80/20 rule for tiers of accounts

What does this mean for your business, and for ABM? Well, the upside is that you can focus on helping customers in the top tiers grow, and grow with them, or take share of wallet from your competitors in these, your most strategic accounts. But it’s not all about the upside. On the downside, if you lose just one customer from your top tier, it will take 256 from the bottom tier to replace it, or 64 from tier three, or 16 from tier two. And that definitely makes your top tier of customers worth defending.

In effect, this is the business case for an account-based growth strategy. Treating your accounts as a portfolio and making sure you defend and grow your top customers, while managing the rest of your accounts for profitability and looking for the existing customers — or new prospects — that could join your top tier. It means aligning your best people to your most important customers and prospects; including your marketers. And the natural way to achieve this alignment is through ABM.

Managing key customer relationships at Huawei

Founded in 1987, Huawei operates through multiple divisions offering a wide variety of products. One of its principal areas is the carrier market, encompassing world-class companies such as Vodafone, Deutsche Telecom and BT, which is characterised by high levels of expenditure and order values. There are 1,000 or so carrier companies in the world, and probably the same number again of alternative providers — companies selling communications services but not as national networks. The market is substantial. Of the 180-200 countries around the world, most have between two and four operators.

According to Tim Watkins, former Executive Vice President of Western Europe and now a Senior Advisor to the company, the 80/20 rule operates in this big carrier market for Huawei. Top customers are vitally important to the company not only because of their big budgets, and hence growth opportunities, but because of the influence they have on the spending of the smaller, alternative carriers.

While the top 20 per cent have different profiles and properties, there are some fundamental principles and structures underlying these top relationships for Huawei:

• Each of these big accounts will have dedicated senior leaders within the company, but will also be managed by local account leaders, who will be very senior executives in their respective geographies.
• The top 20 have a board-level sponsor as well. So, the likes of Vodafone and Deutsche Telecom will have direct contact with senior board members up to and including the chairman.
• The objectives for each account are typically set from the top of the company. There will be a good understanding at the board level of what is going on with customers, and targets are set in terms of breakthroughs of specific products, revenues or whatever the latest priorities might be.
• Key relationships are mapped through careful observation of the customer’s management structure to determine the power base, where the key responsibilities lie, how decision-making takes place, and who the influencers are for those decision-makers.
• Every six months there will be a face-to-face meeting for everyone concerned with the biggest customers, which can involve hundreds of people spending two to three days sharing information and discussing priorities.
• Every contact, interaction and relevant piece of information is logged in to give everyone the same view of the accounts. AI is increasingly being exploited for spotting trends and suggesting options for different accounts, while the company is busy building its own AI products.

Marketing specialists have a crucial role to play in the account management teams, offering insights and intelligence about customers in terms of markets, priorities and messaging, while building relationships with the customers’ own product managers. According to Watkins, “Marketing is not just about developing the right products and strategies but also understanding how a customer wants to be seen. Alignment around every aspect of the customer’s own marketing strategy helps us to determine our own strategy and priorities.”He points to the growing number of charitable investments big customers like Vodafone are making, such as education programmes in Africa, and where Huawei helps with the execution, and is also making donations of products like phones and tablets. Both Huawei and Vodafone are sending out joint messaging on becoming carbon neutral, Watkins explains: “One area we are very proud of is that we are leading the pack in being able to reduce power usage by up to 30-40% in our different products. That’s also something that companies like Vodafone are very much focused on as well so we are getting that joint message out to the market.”

An interview with Antonia Wade, Global CMO, PwC

What in your view are the business drivers behind the decision to recommend using ABM?

Most mature B2B companies, particularly in professional services and technology where they are selling big, high-order programmes or services, already work with many of the clients that they would want to serve. But when you look at the percentage of your services that a client could buy from you that they are actually buying, it’s often lower than you would expect. So, the opportunity to grow your share of wallet with some of your best, most loyal and biggest clients seems like a really smart move as you’re trying to grow.

What do you think are the key elements of the business case for ABM?

A good area to focus on is whether your sales teams are having all the conversations that you need to be having within accounts to be able to sell the breadth of the business. Who have you struggled to get in front of? You probably don’t need much marketing support where you’re already doing a phenomenal job. But you do need it to be able to expand the breadth of people that you speak to in accounts. This links with the point I made before, which is how many of our services do people actually buy, or are least considering buying?

The other focus is about increasing opportunities and accelerating deals with people you already know. This is about driving brand loyalty and advocacy.

Where do you think ABM should sit in a B2B CMO’s priorities and why?

It really depends on the CMO remit and the business priorities. If you are in a reasonably mature business, then your greatest growth comes from your biggest customers. That is your business plan and your strategy. If you are in a much smaller or newer business where you’re focusing on growing new market share, ABM will probably not be a priority.

How do you decide on the relative staffing and funding to allocate for ABM?

What I’ve done it in the past is to resource it from the client team’s funds rather than from marketing. That’s because I don’t think people value what they don’t pay for. And, when you link people funded by marketing with programmes funded by client teams tightly, you then get your sales or account teams advocating for those resources to be ringfenced for ABM.

This protects the investment, because marketing is always an attractive place to start to cut budgets, but that happens less when it is closely linked to client teams’ priorities. It also pushes you towards more joint accountability around metrics and targets. You as CMO and the head of the sales or the client teams should be jointly going to your executive for the funding.

How do you make the ABM team work effectively with other parts of marketing, particularly other centres of excellence?

I think that joint planning across ABM and campaign teams is really important because your ABM-ers are basically taking those campaigns and tailoring them for individual clients. It’s also an important feedback loop from the client teams back into the overall campaign team, in terms of what’s working well and what isn’t. Often, in our campaign portfolio, we might have something where we work collectively to figure out ‘what does that actually mean for the clients who are in the ABM programme’, and ‘how do we create interest in the content we already have?’

There is inevitably a level of tension, particularly between brand teams and ABM-ers, especially where you’re trying to use your brand alongside your client’s brand. Having highly relevant, highly personalised marketing means that we need to think differently at a brand level about what it means to put our logo alongside our client’s. And, by the way, it’s the same with an alliance or partner programme, where you have two brands trying to work side by side.

That said, if you think about the four key pillars of a successful brand — awareness, high regard, relevance and differentiation — the last two are best achieved through ABM, so these things are synergistic.