Why ABM Strategies Often Fall Short And How To Fix Them

Summary

MarTech Podcast™ Episode Summary: "Why ABM Strategies Often Fall Short And How To Fix Them"

Release Date: June 9, 2025
Host: Benjamin Shapiro
Guest: Nadia Davis, VP of Marketing at CaliberMind

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Introduction to ABM Challenges

The episode delves into the intricacies of Account-Based Marketing (ABM), a strategic approach that aligns marketing and sales efforts to target high-value accounts. Benjamin Shapiro opens the discussion by highlighting a significant pain point: "42% of businesses say measuring ABM effectiveness is a significant hurdle" (01:15), referencing a Gartner Digital Marketing study. This sets the stage for an in-depth exploration of why ABM strategies often underperform and how to enhance their effectiveness.

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ABM vs. Good Targeting

Nadia Davis clarifies a common misconception by distinguishing ABM from mere good targeting. She states, “Good targeting is a tactic. It can be done through many different ways... but ABM is a Strategic go to market motion” (02:08). Nadia emphasizes that ABM is not just about reaching the right people but creating a comprehensive, personalized engagement strategy that involves both marketing and sales teams.

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Effective Channels for ABM

When discussing the channels relevant for ABM, Nadia outlines a multi-tiered approach:

1. Programmatic Advertising: Acts as "air cover," ensuring your brand remains visible to target accounts (07:35).

2. Mid-Funnel Engagements: Incorporates content marketing, webinars, and events tailored to specific accounts. Nadia shares a practical example: “During live webinars, we would call out their county... it’s about making the connection personal” (07:21).

3. Direct Engagements: Includes personalized dinners and face-to-face interactions at conferences, enhancing the relationship beyond digital touchpoints.

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Evaluating ABM Campaign Success

Nadia Davis outlines a progressive framework for assessing ABM effectiveness:

1. Initial Metrics: Focus on reach and engagement, such as website visits from target accounts and interaction rates.

2. Intermediate Metrics: Evaluate the number of engaged contacts within target accounts, aiming to “multi-thread” and expand the network within each account (09:27).

3. Advanced Metrics: Measure tangible business outcomes like deal sizes, revenue growth, and the efficiency of the sales cycle. Nadia advises, “Define your success metrics upfront” (09:27), underscoring the importance of aligning metrics with business goals from the outset.

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Aligning Sales and Marketing for ABM Success

A critical component of successful ABM is the alignment between sales and marketing teams. Nadia explains that although marketing and sales have distinct metrics—marketing focuses on engagement while sales emphasizes revenue—they must converge at the executive level to ensure cohesive reporting and strategy alignment. She notes, “At the executive level, metrics have to align. Engagement is the leading indicator of revenue” (12:38).

To foster this alignment, Nadia recommends building trust between teams: “Trust in the numbers, trust in the data, trust in each other” (15:49). She highlights the role of Business Development Representatives (BDRs) in bridging this gap, as they are often more receptive to collaborative efforts and open to integrating marketing insights into their sales tactics.

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Steps to Building a Revenue-Generating ABM Program

Nadia provides a strategic roadmap for marketers aiming to transition from basic ABM initiatives to revenue-driven ABM programs:

1. Start Small: Begin with a pilot program targeting a limited number of accounts (10-20) to test and refine ABM strategies without significant resource investment. “Pick a small group of accounts and establish the goals” (18:12).

2. Define Clear Goals: Determine what success looks like for each targeted account, whether it’s engagement, deal size, or accelerated sales cycles.

3. Scalable Reporting Infrastructure: Move beyond spreadsheets by implementing robust tooling that integrates all data sources, ensuring comprehensive and accurate measurement of ABM activities. Nadia emphasizes, “It’s about having a holistic infrastructure that connects all your data” (19:54).

4. Cultural Integration: Encourage a collaborative culture where marketing and sales work as a unified team, sharing insights and strategies to enhance account engagement.

5. Discipline and Clarity: Maintain a consistent focus on the primary goals, whether it’s shortening the sales cycle or increasing customer lifetime value. “Know where your North Star is” (21:43).

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Benjamin Shapiro and Nadia Davis conclude that while executing a successful ABM strategy is complex and requires meticulous planning and collaboration, the rewards in terms of targeted growth and revenue generation are substantial. Nadia reiterates the importance of clarity and discipline in ABM execution: “It's about the strategy and the implementation and the channel mix” (21:36). The episode underscores that effective ABM is not a one-size-fits-all solution but a dynamic, scalable approach tailored to an organization's specific needs and goals.

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Notable Quotes:

• Nadia Davis: “ABM is a Strategic go to market motion... it’s about them feeling like you've grown on them so much that the only answer they can provide is yes.” (02:08)

• Nadia Davis: “Good targeting is just air cover. The last mile... is the sales outreach.” (04:51)

• Nadia Davis: “Define your success metrics upfront... set those expectations early on.” (09:27)

• Nadia Davis: “Trust in the numbers, trust in the data, trust in each other.” (15:49)

• Nadia Davis: “Pick a small group of accounts and establish the goals.” (18:12)

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This episode of the MarTech Podcast™ provides valuable insights into optimizing ABM strategies, emphasizing the necessity of strategic alignment, precise measurement, and collaborative execution between marketing and sales teams to drive substantial business growth.

Transcript

[Benjamin Shapiro]

The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.

From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising. Typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.

Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. In this podcast you'll hear the stories of world class marketers use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech podcast. Benjamin Shapiro.

42% of businesses say measuring ABM effectiveness is a significant hurdle. According to a recent study by Gartner Digital Marketing while the value of a performant ABM engine is unquestionable, if you can't see what's working, you can't optimize. And if you can't optimize, you can't improve. ABM requires clean unified data. So how can you fix your ABM measurement? I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Nadia Davis, the VP of marketing at CaliberMind, which is a multi touch attribution and go to market intelligence platform. And today Nadia is going to explain how to transform your failing ABM program into a revenue generating dream machine. Nadia, welcome to the Martech Podcast.

[Nadia Davis]

Thank you Benjamin, great to be here.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Excited to have you on the show. Excited to talk a little bit about abm. And let's start off with the fund fundamental question, what's the difference between ABM and just good targeting?

[Nadia Davis]

I think that's the question that ABM platforms try to answer by bringing their services to the general public saying that we are giving you good targeting, therefore you can now do abm. But ultimately good targeting is a tactic. It can be done through many different ways. I mean six Sense does a great job, demand based does a great job, but so do many other tools like Thin has targeting, right? That you can go down to the contact level, roles and affinities and audiences and you can actually do ABM just running stuff the programmatic side of it on LinkedIn. Right? But when you think about ABM in general, like it's a Strategic go to market motion, right? It defines how you go to market, how you engage the accounts, and how do you make it all about them, where they feel like you've grown on them so much that the only answer that they can provide to your marketing outreach and the engagement tactics that you put in front of them is yes. And ABM is newer or newish just because the technology became available, like right around 2016, 2017. I mean, I remember the heydays of Terminus. I'm here in Atlanta. They were right down the street from us. And once they came into the office, we're talking the days when everybody was in person, right? They came into the office and they pitched to us. And I thought it was the best thing out there for marketers. So easy. Push the button and go. That was the platform that provided good targeting. And at the time, there was no other option. So of course you say yes, even though you had to upload a CSV spreadsheet in there. Nothing was integrated. But good ABM goes way beyond just the programmatic arm of what you do, just putting your ads in front of accounts, right? It goes way beyond the divide between marketing and sales, because without the sales counterparts, you cannot do abm, no matter what others tell you. It's not an exercise that the marketing team can do all on their own own soup to nuts and then report on a nice dashboard. But that's the part where it's less sexy, it's less talked about. You know, the ABM platforms tell you the story of what marketers can do and how you can strap on your superhero cape and say, you did all this wonderful stuff and you got receipts, therefore you should get credit. But I think it's just a flawed understanding of what it is. And there are many people out there, there are many boutique agencies that popped up that talk about doing abm, like getting down to the roots, researching accounts, really understanding what's going on. Got a new head of sales. Got a new head of marketing. If you're selling sales tech martech, right? Which is my world. Got new people hired. What company did they come from? What did they use over there? And then you show up to the beating, and they feel like you know everything about them. Now, that is true personalization, but that's not something that you can accomplish with Good Target.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I think fundamentally there's this question, and I guess the answer that you're saying is good targeting is a part of abm, and then there's a programmatic ad campaign, so you're omnipresent and then there's also the personalization and the private touch, and all sorts of different things go into an effective ABM campaign. So maybe what I should say instead of how is ABM different than good targeting? How is ABM different than good marketing? You're selecting key accounts, you're making sure that you're staying in front of them. You're making sure that you have personalized campaigns. This just seems like ABM is just doing a good job as a marketer and being focused. And I know that there are ABM platforms, but aren't they just facilitating good marketing?

[Nadia Davis]

Oh, absolutely. And when you think about it, all of the programmatic advertising, in the way I've always called it, that's air cover, is just to stay out there. It's a reminder. It's never that driver that will make someone want to buy. I mean, may bring them to your website. However, it's the last mile that makes or breaks the game. And that last mile is the sales outreach. Right? Did you research the person that you're talking to? The deck that you showed them during your disco call, did that align with what they got going on? Did you research the person that you're talking to? Did you research all the other people that this person has relationships with? Did you maybe pick up on any cues of the balance of powers within the organization? What challenges within different teams people are trying to solve way beyond your typical driving efficiencies or saving money or driving revenue or digital transformation, whatever those buzzwords are, Right? What is really keeping people up at night? That is the in the weeds work. This is what AES used to do back in the day when you had your top 10 top 20 accounts and you would just go learn everything you can from the newspaper, from Wall Street Journal, you would collect your notes and then you would go do your research and start pounding the pavement. I feel like that piece got lost because marketing just took on ownership of ABM because the tools were there, making it available and accessible and very equitable in a way where multiple players within the marketing team now had access to being a part of abm. But it goes way beyond one team. If anything, it's a collaborative effort in itself.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Tell me a little bit about some of the channels that are relevant for ABM today. You mentioned programmatic using advertising to stay in front of your consumers. What are some of the other ways successful marketing is happening with abm and where does that marketing get delivered?

[Nadia Davis]

If we think about the program within itself, like the ABM motion, the way we think about A marketing funnel. And I'm totally aware that there are many voices that are proclaiming that amongst all the other things that are dead. I saw ChatGPT is dead on LinkedIn, by the way.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It just launched.

[Nadia Davis]

Just launched. Somebody already proclaimed it dead. I mean, we're moving fast, right? Kicking butt and taking names, if you think about ABM that way. So at the top you have your programmatic stuff, right? Can I reach these accounts? Can I deliver my ads to those accounts? Are they engaging? Then you have stuff that now you can serve to them that's more mid funnel, whether it's your content, whether it's your attendance of events, your webinars, whatever that might be with a message that's relevant to them. And then finally you get to dinners, you get to events that they're going to, that somehow you picked up that they're gonna be at this conference. So I gotta make sure I get to that event, right? But I think it's that personalization level where you take a tactic that's geared for many. But you know, your target accounts within your ABM program will be there and doing something that they can relate to on that webinar that perceptually is a very public for all, not specifically nuanced for that one account. I'll give you an example. So I was in a govtech space and we knew that accounts that were in the pipeline would come to webinars live. They would never watch them on demand. They would make sure they made time to come to webinars live. So during those live webinars, we would call out their county, because we're talking governments, right? We would call out their county and comment on something and maybe bring the person who is covering that county, like the csm, right? So that they could relate, they could see who the human is behind this company. Then we would cut that out and the on demand version of that same webinar would not have that. Because now it's just out there in the cyberspace for everyone. But it's that level of personalization and being able to do that where somebody says, oh, it's about me, because that's the type of connection that you're looking for.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Let's talk a little bit about the evaluation of a successful ABM campaign. How do the metrics that companies should focus on to gauge their ABM effectiveness change over time?

[Nadia Davis]

I think the metrics conversation is always so hard because you're absolutely right, it's evolving. It's never the same, I think at first. And it's the exciting moment when you bring in new tech, you build it, you sell it to your org. Now you just got borrowed trust, you feel rich, you were given the blank check to go build it and start running it. So you're measuring reach, you are measuring engagement, you're measuring how many of these accounts came to your website, right? So it's like very digital, very clicks related. And then the important pieces at this early stage to get the sales of the BDRs involved and to get them to recognize the accounts that they know they're working, being within your marketing programming. And when they do, they're like, oh, this is working. They feel like they're so engaged. So the trust is built at that point and it's important because you will be leveraging that trust for the next stage because you will eventually get to the point where everything is running, everything is serving, people are engaging. Now usually this is year two, the leadership will start asking, and then what? So we spent all this money, we're serving ads, and then what? Now you want to show that you're reaching more people within the account. So we had three engaged people last year, now we get four, five or we got six. So we're multi threading, we're casting a broader net. Then you will start looking at the deal sizes. Are the deal sizes bigger than they were before we had the ABM program? And then ultimately you would say, how long does it take for the opportunity to go through the cycle with or without abm? And it's very different from company to company what those success metrics are. But it is so important to define them upfront. And it's actually Andrei Zenkiewicz who I've talked to, he runs a full funnel ABM consultancy company and they're really, really good, separating the noise from substance. And their approach is very much decide and agree on what you're going to measure early on, set those expectations. Because if you're deciding what you're going to measure after your ABM platform started showing you all the numbers and you might get lost because there are so many things, but the minute you utter that to whatever other team that you're working with, they will decide that that's the metric that you're going to go by. Maybe it shouldn't be, maybe it's not something that will show you progression and up into the right trend. But you already blurted that out early on because you did not think about it. So that strategic architectural approach to how you're going to go about it, in my mind is so important.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Early on, what I'm hearing from you is first you start with reach, you're trying to figure out volume and can you have access and get your message in front of the right people. Then you're thinking about engagement. What's the effectiveness of your message? You're thinking about deal size, so value. And then lastly you're thinking about efficiency, your time to value. How quickly can you close? So over time you're changing the benchmarks that you're looking for first, does it work? Is the message effective? Are we generating value? How quickly can we generate value? And then once you have that sort of cycle, you've got a repeatable motion that you could get into. Let me move on and ask how should companies align sales and marketing? KPIs for ABM success, Are the metrics the same across both sales and marketing?

[Nadia Davis]

That is actually a different question to answer because when you think about it, the business suite, the Go to market team, speaks the language of revenue. Sales measures success in dollars, Finance decides roi. Operating again in the units of dollars. Marketing on the other side, let's be honest, we drive engagement, we are the one to many function. If you look at psychologists and sociologists, marketing are very much the psychologist function, looking at the entire market, trying to distill it down, drive engagement, get them to the point where they're ready for a conversation. And at this point the psychologists in this metaphor get plugged in and now it's a one to one relationship building and one to one problem solving. So in my mind the metrics have to be different, but they have to be different internally. Now when it's reported out at the executive level, that's where the metrics have to align. So that engagement, that marketing is driving that are the leading indicators of what's going to happen next. Has to have a proxy to be translated into dollars into revenue. And I feel like a lot of ABM platforms figured out that easy way of tapping into your salesforce and getting the total opportunity size and then mapping it back to the account. As long as you have the website, the domain field filled out and that's how they would connect that. But then you run into the challenge, which was my previous life. There could be multiple opportunities on one account. There could be like all of these nuances of marketing over reporting. And this is where the revenue challenge comes in of how should I report out that revenue? The revenue generated by marketing, can I split it to pre opportunity and post opportunity revenue? Which definitely should be one of those metrics. Right? So you start with engagement the marketing metric is how many MQAs have we generated? Can we set those expectations for the sales team so that the sales team can maybe figure out how many accounts each rep will be working? Maybe they will decide hiring, do we need to bring in additional BDR now? Then the sales team would start working those accounts. And the metric is completely different. The metrics could be days to value with marketing helping and driving that engagement after the opportunity got opened, the deal size, and then maybe you're looking at customer lifetime value after that. If you have AB emotions to existing accounts and you upsell, you cross sell, whatever that might be. But once it gets reported out again, elevate those metrics to what matters for the business. At that point, it may not be the MQA versus number of opportunities with ABM touches open. Right. It could be revenue generated from ABM campaigns. But before you report that out, you better make sure that the number that you're about to say out in the open in the executive suite matches what the sales counterpart will say as the size of the pipeline.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I hear what you're saying in the sense of marketing's goal is different than sales goal. And each part of the organization has their own responsibilities, but there's a handshake in between the two of them. And when you have different goals for marketing and sales, when you're not measuring everything by dollars, then it leads into this ongoing sales versus marketing culture that we've always seen as a problem. If you have different KPIs between sales and marketing, how do you drive alignment between the two organizations?

[Nadia Davis]

That's actually a super valid question, and I think you're absolutely right. It's a joint effort. It's never one team against the other. It starts with building trust. Trust in the numbers, trust in the data, trust in you. Knowing that I will bring you intel if I see it in any of my marketing tools that you may not notice in a dashboard where you're looking. In my experience, I've started with building that trust with BDRs when it comes to AB emotions because they're usually the hungriest. They're usually willing to go an extra mile. They're early in their career and they want to prove themselves and their value to the business. Right? And they're very willing to learn where to look. One extra dashboard, no problem. Should I pay attention to this email that gets to my inbox? Should I go and do research on LinkedIn? They're really, really good about it. They're very coachable. So that's where marketing can build that trust. And then BDRs will help sell the ABM idea and ABM motion and the value that marketing brings and the fact that it matches whatever it is that they did on the phone or the accounts that they talk to at events to the AES. So once you have that trust within the two teams and again it's such a cliche to say that, but it's so important for you all to be part of the same go to market team when it comes to account based marketing because you're trying to cover these accounts with love and attention, multiple touches, the message that has to sound the same no matter where it's coming from. And it takes a lot for this alignment internally for communication channels to be open for people to know what to say, how to say and how to present the value prop. Right. And the handoff being an mqa, that's a handoff that both teams in my experience have always been open to. Yeah, we understand this account is qualified, you said that it's ready for us to prospect. We will take that on. But the ultimate deliverable within this exercise is always revenue. Because every marketing leader gets hired on the revenue that marketing can bring to the table. The question is what proxy should you use and how can you use that proxy to convert everything that marketing does day to day? All of the IC goals, all of the MQLs that fold into MQAs, all of the touches and engagement touch points into the currency of revenue. But as far as what should that ultimate metric be, it's absolutely revenue because that's how ROI is defined.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

So what are the three immediate steps that marketers can take to move past the ABM starting gates into building their ABM revenue engineering?

[Nadia Davis]

If we take a step back and not start with the traditional build your account list, pick the best accounts, align with the sales team. Should it be 1200 or 1500 if you take a step back, if this is the first time you're deploying an ABM motion, regardless of whether you're a big company or small company, and you pick a subset of accounts and you start a small program and it's a pilot program and the goal of that program is A, to kind of figure out what you do within this ABM realm and B to train the muscle within the business of what you do. When you see these leading indicators of success. Right. So two goals here. Figure out whether it will work for your industry or for your segment. And two, for the business to know, for all these teams to know what to do with it once it lands in their court. So you pick the small group of accounts, whether it's 10 or 20, and you establish the goals. What do we want for this account to do or what do we want to happen with them? If we know that this motion is effective and it's working the way we should. So you have not invested crazy money just yet. You are just testing it. You define those goals and if you see that that is working, then it's scalable at that point because all the boots on the ground are trained what to do. You know how to prioritize accounts. You don't have to convince anyone there's no fomo, that somebody out there might be in the buying cycle, but you just don't know when. You did not include them in the list. And from that point you start scaling. So thinking about those two is extremely important. And the third one, that would be the reporting piece, because I've been to some events ran by large ABM platforms. I'm not going to say whose event it was. And they're closing the session with measurement. How do you measure abm? And I kid you not, spreadsheets were presented. Spreadsheets that you pull multiple things from multiple places within the platform and you bring it together.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

You can do amazing things with Excel.

[Nadia Davis]

I love Excel. I grew up on Excel. The data tool pack is my friend. But when you're talking about a lot of stuff happening when you're sleeping, multiple geographies, multiple countries, multiple product lines, multiple stakeholders in the buying groups, you can just spend your days living in those spreadsheets. I think, thinking about tooling and figuring out what do I need a brain for this infrastructure that I have to be holistic, to be connected for all of the data to match? Because let's face it, CRMs were built for people, not for accounts. They were just not ABM platforms were built for accounts, but struggle with people. How do we bring all of this together and all of the interactions that are happening offline? And how do we train people to remember to put the name into Salesforce? Wink, wink. Why do you need to put that name? It's in my pocket. I got the name in my pocket or in my phone. It's important and you can absolutely create that culture. But everybody has to understand what the ultimate goal is. And again, you train BDRs, you train your AES, you don't have to start with the leadership and make it a mandate for them to bring down on everyone. You can just create that relationship, whether you're head of marketing or your Marketing manager driving this program. People are really receptive when you say, hey, let's do this together. This is what I'm going to do, this is what you're going to do, and this is the result that we're going to have at the end. And that becomes an organic exercise. Is it easy? No. Is it easy to talk about it? For sure, because you can talk about frameworks all day long, but it's just the discipline and the daily grind and just knowing where your North Star is, like, where are you going? What's the ultimate goal of this all? Shorter deal cycle or shorter path to engagement? Great. That's what you're measuring. So everything that you're doing is against that one goal. And then you scale and it's two goals, it's three goals. But clarity is what's important.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Fundamentally, it's hard to distill how to execute an ABM campaign in three steps.

[Nadia Davis]

There's never one size fits all.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Find your targets, figure out your media mix, evaluate. It's never that simple. And like anything that is of quality, it requires attention, and in this case, attention between sales and marketing consistency. And so understanding your goals and understanding the strategy and the implementation and the channel mix, going into the execution of an ABM campaign is what helps you drive it to be successful over time. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Nadia Davis, the VP of marketing at CaliberMind. And if you'd like to get in touch with Nadia, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com or you can visit her company's website, which is calibermind.com if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or find us on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers customers happy.

Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.