Once you have taken a data-driven, collaborative approach to prioritising your top accounts, and have decided how sales, marketing, customer success or service and your own executives will support each tier, it’s time to confirm each prioritised account is ready for ABM.
Your prioritisation model should ideally be based on how attractive the accounts are to you (see an explanation here ), and how strong you will be against your competitors in each one. It won’t have addressed internal factors like how willing your account director is to work with you on ABM, or the level of ambition they have for their account. So, before you start investing marketers’ time and money into the account, you should check that these foundational elements are in place – that it’s ABM ready.
An illustrative checklist is shown in the table below, demonstrating how you might score prioritised accounts across some readiness criteria.
Flex the criteria and scores to suit your organisation, ideally in discussion with the internal sponsors of your ABM programme. Then, agree your cut off score, below which you won’t deploy ABM resources into an account. Over time, the best programme leaders make ABM an aspirational additional investment that account directors want to leverage to help them achieve their goals, meaning that they will endeavour to meet your criteria.
With this exercise complete, you can confirm your ABM strategy (which for most people is now a blend of different types allowing them to cover more of their most important customers and prospects), the actual accounts you will cover, and the resources you will deploy for each one.
And the good news is that some of the information you’ve already gathered in your prioritisation exercise and the readiness assessment will help you build a baseline for your account to measure against and demonstrate your progress.
See our previous toolkit articles on using a heat map to cluster accounts, and using a decision support tool to prioritise accounts.
