A little yoga makes for a lot better ABM: How to design in flexibility to unleash agility

Recently, while sitting in an airport departure lounge, I was thinking about how insights into prospect purchase intent were changing sales and marketing’s internal behaviors, when a fellow traveler rolled out a mat practically at my feet and launched into a set of gravity-defying yoga asanas.

At this moment, something clicked for me: More and more, I’m hearing successful Account-Based Marketing practitioners ascribe their rapid progress to new levels of collaboration. They say they’re winning by becoming more “agile” — i.e., more flexible and responsive.

To help more of us get started on this path, I’ve mashed up some recent learnings as three sets of “ABM yoga” tips for you to consider.

1. Designing in more flexibility at the start

While I don’t think you’ll ever catch me in a yoga class, my wife assures me I’d experience a diverse mix of folks. What they share in common, however, is that they all go in to do yoga with a similar purpose, and they do, in fact, come out feeling very good. So we could say that they’re aligned in both process and outcome. And that’s what we see from ABM clients, too.

Before doing ABM, smart marketers align by making sure they connect with like-minded sales collaborators. Aligned project leaders make commitments to each other and to the process to work together toward their shared objectives.

Here are some of the concepts they use to nurture this collaboration:

• Flexibility by design: Teams agree to treat the effort as a learning initiative relevant to both sales and marketing roles. They model the flexibility necessary to take mutual responsibility for shared outcomes.
• Flexibility in targeting: They establish an explicit process for creating the ABM list, including how to modify it opportunistically. Flexibility is embedded right into their targeting concept.
• Flexibility in KPIs: They design a combination of both shorter-term guideline KPIs specific to each discipline (examples: account scoring rules, next-action SLAs or service level agreements) and longer-term strategic KPIs that they will share — thus replacing typical KPI shortsightedness with hybrid models able to more flexibly support both short-term realities and longer-term aspirations.
• Flexibility in management process: They commit to meet on a regular basis, with specific expectations for these sessions, as well as a method for handling ad hoc exceptions. Built-in collaboration processes enable the ABM program to evolve because the team can be more adaptive as a coherent whole.

2. Achieving ABM agility

Once I was on the plane, my mind started making more connections between yoga and what we all do for a living. I could see that while flexibility gets you started out right, effectively converting this into action is what grows your momentum.

This got me thinking about athleticism and agility­ — which spurred thoughts about agile development and agile marketing. (Check out the “Agile Marketing Manifesto,” the work of Jim Ewel and McKinsey’s step-by-step guide.)

Then, I felt a second piece click into place: Agile practices are now being talked about all across the corporate value chain. So sales and marketing are now truly talking the same language on multiple fronts. Not surprisingly, that’s what clients are showing really works best when pursuing ABM.

The agile movement arose because classic software development processes were too inflexible. Early converts believed there had to be a way to deliver value to customers faster. Now, marketing and sales are understanding that they need to solve similar challenges in their own worlds. And because both are really about the customer, they need to behave as one team to solve things holistically.

While the relevant pieces of agile will differ depending on your particular ABM situation, several principles clearly apply practically everywhere:

• Fail fast: When you start out, there’s a whole lot you’ll be unsure about. Working agilely as an explicitly collaborative sales and marketing team puts you in a much better position to agree on necessary changes, make them more quickly and move forward together.
• Use iterative development: Instead of spending time creating bulky comprehensive campaigns, in ABM, you should start with a few strong, simple plays. You should organize to be able to deliver iterative enhancements to this as you go.
• Think structured “release”: When a new change or addition is ready, make sure both marketing and sales are entirely on board and prepared for what each will have to do. In agile software development, a release is scheduled when a group of features is truly customer-ready. In ABM, a release should be when all the pieces are in place and each player is ready to act as required.
• “Product” backlog: No team is going to have the resources to act on everything it learns instantaneously. By documenting ideas as they come up and adding them to a living, evolving ABM plan — a backlog — teams can stay focused on what’s working now and evolve the “product” at a pace that the organization as a whole can effectively support.

3. ABM agility requires some core functionality before it can deliver more functionality

Agile software development aims to get functionality to users as quickly as possible. The analog to this in marketing and sales is to provide better help to prospects as they look to solve their business problems. In ABM, we need to support that by providing better information and interactions. Expecting to do this without making any real changes to your standard M.O. feels like Einstein’s definition of insanity.

But real ABM agility does not only depend on new attitudes — you must, at a minimum, look for new data sources and content development processes. Knowing this, successful ABM practitioners are making sure to be up-front with stakeholders early on. They’ve recognized they need to make significant toolkit improvements before they can commit substantive ROI. Here are four areas where we see this in action:

Unlike in classical demand gen, where marketing and sales are in many ways separate and distinct, in ABM, they’re unified into a collaborative team of diverse strengths. In practically any ABM case study you’ll find, ABM success is coming from an intense sales and marketing collaboration.

In our world of enterprise tech, by designing in flexibility and organizing for and investing in agility, we’re seeing teams leverage this to succeed at a higher level. While I’ll be the first to admit that this kind of yoga is not easy, its benefits are proving abundantly clear.