Training for sales — You need to set expectations with your sales team about the volume and type of leads that come in from ABM. Each representative should have clear expectations set around what sales activities to engage in, how quickly they should respond, how much longer sales cycles will be, how they should educate leads, etc. Here are suggestions on improvements in sales capabilities to support ABM. The team should be trained and coached to increase capability levels in these three areas.
• Prospecting — reps knowing how to prospect effectively, how to write curiosity based emails/ LI messages that get responses. You need to use psychological frameworks to improve conversion rates.
• Discovery capability — being clear on the value proposition to motivate buyers effectively into the next steps. Campaign effectiveness
• Nurturing — how to effectively nurture enterprise level prospects, both personally and through marketing.
You must ensure your messaging delivers the following structure:
[1] Motivate your prospect to rethink
[2] Make your prospect curious
[3] Give your prospect evidence
[4] Create a ‘next step’ layer
ABM will only work if you run always-on, engaging and strategic campaigns. Do not launch campaigns in siloes. True ABM is a strategic play. Your goal as the ABM leader is to ensure that your vision builds momentum, the narrative to market and the campaign stream is ongoing.
You need to create a lead management, nurture system that ensures you do not lose leads and sales / SDRs are held accountable. Create connected nurture streams in SFDC between sales & marketing.
Implementation of sales certification. Plan to have all team members certified in the company pitch (all com mercial teams, including Marketing) as part of a training process to ensure consistency. Get everyone to learn the pitch via a whiteboard (not slide decks).
Increase the cross-over between new business and cus tomer marketing by placing customers and their stories at the heart of marketing efforts.
Create specific digital marketing strategies for product marketing and have a continuous launch process. Build a product launch framework that integrates with the ABM work-flows.
Build a customer advisory panel, or external customer council to build better relationships with our Tier 1 cus tomers (example here) and create a forum for their voices and feedback to be heard. Build a thought leader ship platform based on research and empirical evidence that gives back to the market.
Optimise Linkedin. Here are some suggestions.
Sales Performance to ABM goals. Help reps understand what good / OK / bad looks like by implementing a RAG system. Here is a template. This is not performance management but it helps to understand what types of activities are required to be successful — you can then monitor weekly.
Organise the team around speed of getting results. • Monday kick-off.
ABM cross-sell & upsell. Organise the team with a focus on cross-selling/ upselling to existing accounts. Order the accounts regarding a) you can solve a new problem in their roadmap and b) relationship to leverage. Build the list in prioritization order. Build a contact list of correct personas in the business. Leverage relationships to approach the right ICP. Put a commercial person in place to look at developing this revenue. Launch a top-cover campaign through marketing to this customer list.
Leveraging events. Events or digi’vents need to be connected to the design of the funnel plan and how the touchpoint is connected to what happens next.
Actions:
Marketing need to plan a workflow to what happen with event leads.
Product marketing. Treat each monthly post campaign as a product launch. Have a strategy of continuous launch. Nobody cares about your product launch. A con tinuous launch helps to address reach.
Create a customer-only ‘Insiders’ newsletter to help cross-sell and upsell. The purpose is to create some thing valuable to current customers. New offerings, events, information and/or product tips that are helpful to the buyer. This will help inbound and account expansion.
Improve opportunity conversions. Create a cadence of “offers” for the sales team to arm them with more effective ways of closing deals. Some ideas:
Improve opportunity conversions. Understand where deals get stuck (research stalled, lost or won deals). Normally deal velocity is a problem when the solution is not compelling enough for immediate action. If you can research buying decisions from previous won or those stalled — why did they not go ahead. You can create a strategy to mitigate. It normally involves aligning customer challenges to incentives and helping them under stand why they need to buy sooner. Linked to incentives.
Need to bucket the deals together at some point to look for commonalities, i.e. industry and size of the deal. Gather the data on each bucket of deal type. Once you have done that, look at the averages in closed-won or those that are stuck. Look at the data as to why it stalled and/ or why it won. Gather information and retro on the deals won and do this for each bucket. You can then start to make assumptions about the factors affecting velocity.
Implement what’s called an Engagement Plan — this is what in the old-days would refer to as a closure plan. But close plans are self-serving to the buyer. The Engagement plan is more focused on creating value in the middle stages of the deal to create a pathway to closing the deal and the customer having a great experience.
This serves two roles:
Create ongoing content that provides thought leader ship on customer objections. This content can be used when deals are stuck. Audit content every month to analyse results. Don’t keep producing more without un derstanding what is working.
Have a rolling offer available to stuck deals (not just about discounting) but get creative. Sign up before this date and get extra stuff or discounts.
Other Ideas. Increase both deal size and speed to close. Create personal relationships with the entire buying unit at our key accounts to uncover potential blockers, advocates and champions. Target in a pincer movement across SDR, Marketing, AE and CSM teams.
Strategy:
[1] Use the MarTech stack and supplier landscape to identify and engage with buyers.
[2] Interview and approach other buyers to take part in thought leadership interviews as a process to engage.
[3] Build the relationships between sales/CS leads and the entire decision-making unit to increase sales velocity and deal sizes. Do custom audience retarget using LI for accounts in the deal process.
Advanced SaaS metrics. Work out deal velocity in the next 6-9 months and CAC; important for SaaS. Work out future data models, insights and attribution to ABM campaigns. You will need data history to get to this next step.
CAC: https://kellblog.com/2013/12/01/the-customer-ac quisition-cost-cac-ratio-another-subtle-saas-metric/
Deal Velocity: Gross Margin Adjusted CAC Payback
Demonstrating the ability to efficiently acquire customers is the fifth aspect of a successful quarter. The metric used to measure this is my second-favourite SaaS metric (behind net revenue retention): Gross Margin Adjusted CAC Payback. It’s a mouthful, but this metric is important because it demonstrates how sustainable a company’s growth is. In theory, any growth rate is possible with an unlimited budget to hire AEs.
However, if these AEs aren’t hitting quota and the OTE (base + commission) you’re paying them doesn’t justify their revenue, your business will burn through money. This is unsustainable. Because of the recurring nature of SaaS revenue, you can afford to have paybacks longer than one year. In fact, this is quite normal.
All that said, Gross Margin Adjusted CAC Payback is relatively simple to calculate. You divide the previous quarter’s S&M expense (fully burdened CAC) by the net new ARR added in the current quarter (new logo ARR + Expansion – Churn – Contraction) multiplied by the gross margin. You then multiply this by 12 to get the number of months it takes to pay back CAC.
(Previous Q S&M) / (Net New ARR x Gross Margin) x 12
A simpler way to calculate net new ARR is by taking the current quarter’s ARR and subtracting the ending ARR from one quarter prior. Like net revenue retention, I’ve built up benchmarks to evaluate private companies’ per formance. I generally classify any payback <12 months as best in class, 12–24 months as good, and anything >24 months as subpar. The public company data for pay back doesn’t match up nicely with my net revenue retention benchmarks.
The primary reason for this is that public companies can afford to have longer paybacks. At $200M+ ARR, businesses have built up a substantial base of recurring revenue streams that have already paid back their initial CAC. Their ongoing revenue can “fund” new logo acquisition and allow the business to operate profitably at paybacks much larger than private companies (with smaller ARR bases) can afford.
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