Driving strategic growth

In this section: marketing priorities
for FY25 and getting the best
from your ABM program

The Momentum ITSMA Account-Based Marketing Adoption Framework provides a structured approach to help your organization elevate its ABM strategies and overcome common challenges. This framework outlines key areas of focus and offers practical recommendations to enhance the effectiveness of ABM initiatives. It serves as the basis for our FY25 recommendations.

Strategy and alignment

1.

Establish a clear vision for ABM that aligns with your overall business goals. Educate your leadership on the value of ABM using internal success stories and best practices.

2.

If not already in place, implement a defined account planning process that requires sales and marketing to map out shared priorities and initiatives at the account level. Use this opportunity to build in best practices for more complete and actionable data and for establishing clear roles and responsibilities between sales and marketing.

3.

Expand your client-led strategies, assess your cross-functional readiness to surface potential obstacles, and lock in commitment and support to drive necessary improvements.

53^%

of marketers are held back by a lack of alignment with customer-facing functions

Objectives and metrics

1.

Review feedback from your accounts through a structured ‘voice of the client’ study that identifies where the friction points are and use this as the basis for setting clear program objectives.

2.

Adopt a Three R approach (reputation, relationships, and revenue) to create shared business objectives that drive both near- and long-term growth. This creates a consistent approach to how success is evaluated. Be specific about the goals that marketing can and should support, moving beyond just engagement and leads.

3.

Begin to integrate advanced analytics to enable data-driven decision-making and continuous program improvement. See here for more advice on data and insights.

23^%

say shared goals, metrics, and strategies between marketing and sales is a top challenge

For more tips on how to bridge the gap between sales and marketing, read our report The art of sales and marketing alignment: Three ways to level the GTM playing field, featuring advice from CMOs and senior marketing leaders.

Account selection
and segmentation

1.

Implement a dynamic and flexible selection process that aligns with your ideal customer profile (ICP) and leverages both quantitative and qualitative data (e.g. intent and engagement) to identify target accounts and evolve as the market and opportunities shift.

2.

With only a quarter of marketers fully leveraging first- and third-party intent data, prioritize training on your tools. Leverage your solution provider’s customer relationship managers to help you get more from your tech.

3.

Ensure your accounts are segmented in support of your objectives – an account-based marketing strategy shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. You could also adopt a consistent model for account selection at the ABM program level and across your marketing segments. This consistency will ensure accounts are effectively covered and engaged.

36^%

of laggards struggle to identify the right accounts and define the criteria for account selection

Program operations and resources

1.

Create a central ABM capability to establish strategy, investment, and resource requirements, as well as governance and processes for different deployment models. Regular “strategy sessions” with critical stakeholders can drive alignment and ensure ABM practices are supported across the business, such as existing key account programs and customer success initiatives.

2.

Audit critical processes (e.g. campaign orchestration, content creation, sales enablement, etc.) to identify potential gaps that impact performance. Use the findings to develop an enablement strategy to systematically address skill gaps both at global and field levels.

3.

As ABM success requires healthy collaboration across the marketing ecosystem, form cross-functional task groups to improve ecosystem management and drive stronger alignment and clear job roles.

74^%

of marketers agree organizational issues have restricted their progress and success

Find out about our learning and development offerings here.

Content and campaigns

1.

Conduct an audit of your existing content based on stages in the buying journey and for relevance, quality, tone and style, and visual appeal. Use this audit to establish a roadmap for new content as well as for what content to keep, update, repurpose, or remove. Experiment with and leverage generative AI to accelerate this process.

2.

Our 2024 Thought Leadership Benchmark Report revealed that marketers often struggle with activation. Create a repeatable, scalable content planning methodology that is informed by account intelligence and audience insights, messaging, campaign themes, engagement objectives, and analytics.

3.

Ensure you’re meeting the needs of your accounts and addressing challenges in today’s buying processes, such as supporting business cases and highlighting new ideas, insights, and innovation. Your content strategy should support the types of accounts and the revenue profile you’re seeking to grow.

24^%

of laggards are just scratching the surface of content personalization

Top tip: clients are demanding innovation and new ideas. Strengthen the integration of your thought leadership
content with content for
account engagement and campaigns. Find out more about our thought leadership services.

Data, analytics, and insights

1.

Establish basic data collection processes to gather initial insights for your strategy refinement, providing a foundation for more sophisticated analytics efforts.

2.

Leverage the Momentum ITSMA Seven-Step Account Development Process to identify opportunities to deploy generative AI and prioritize the most beneficial use cases.

3.

Work with your shared services, RevOps, research, and IT teams to establish joint tools such as common CRM, ABM, sales enablement and content management platforms. This is the starting point for building more advanced analytics platforms to derive actionable insights and optimize performance, enabling data-driven decision-making and continuous program improvement.

50^%

of marketers use generative AI to generate insights into the needs of our strategic accounts

Need help identifying use cases or scaling generative AI for ABM? Contact us to schedule a generative AI insights workshop.

Technology infrastructure

1.

Rationalize your martech stack to identify cross-over capabilities, under-utilized functionality, and integration opportunities to ensure core channels are connected and coordinated.

2.

Prioritize insights; customer data platforms and account intelligence are weak spots for laggards. These will help you aggregate and manage data from multiple sources and deliver more personalized engagements.

3.

Develop a roadmap to capitalize on your existing technology stack and generative AI tooling. Training and enablement are often overlooked aspects of the technology pillar. Invest in adequate upskilling initiatives, leveraging internal expertise if available and/or leaning heavily on your solution providers for support.