Kate, director of GTM, industry and ABM, kicked off proceedings by asking Christa, head of industry and ABM, the following:
“Given ABM was so new to Capita at the start of this year, for the accounts that you lead on, how did you go about getting things started on a practical basis?”
Christa started by highlighting the real need for immediate traction and results. So, the first thing to do was educate the sales team on what ABM was, and to get their buy-in. Most members hadn’t previously worked as part of an ABM team, and so some were understandably reluctant.
So, how was this done?
The first move was to create an ABM ‘pitch book’. This provided a clear definition of what ABM would look like at Capita. After all, ABM comes in many forms and every organisation must lay out what ABM means to them. In Capita’s case, this meant one-to-one ABM.
This pitch book drew heavily on research from leading industry bodies, clearly showing salespeople that ABM was a clear, evidence-based methodology. Using hard evidence focusing on outcomes and results was key, showing that what sales and marketing were both aiming for was ultimately the same.
The next step was for the sales team to buy into Christa as an individual. This would ensure that the sales team were fully on board with the ABM programme from the offset.
In order to achieve this, Christa had to build credibility with the team, which meant carrying out extensive research and gaining insight on key accounts and individuals. This data would be of real value to the salespeople and wouldn’t go unappreciated. This was challenging, but also the ideal way to get a quick win.
During this research phase, Christa not only looked into competitor positioning, industry trends and so on; she also spent a significant amount of time with sales teams, trying to understand how and why Capita had been successful with accounts in the past.
She undertook stakeholder mapping and customer profiling, helping sales learn how to target not just the company, but the people within it. In addition to this, Christa and the sales teams looked at the objectives of key accounts.
The final thing Christa looked at was how Capita and its key client companies aligned around purpose and values. In other words, Capita looked into the purpose and values of the key accounts they wanted to target, asking:
- What are their CSR objectives?
- What CSR initiatives are they running?
- Where did Capita and the accounts overlap?
This revealed where common ground could be found outside of the traditional sales conversation.
Ultimately, this research provided Capita with the information they needed to engage with key accounts.
Accountability was also important, explained Christa. There was a very real need to deliver tangible business results, not just marketing results. Thus, the research carried out underpinned the development of a full ABM marketing strategy for the key accounts.
Capita took the idea of an ABM pitch book and turned it into an accounts pitch book. This was used as Capita’s ‘source of truth’, against which it could be held accountable.
This book outlined a clear proposition from Capita to the customer, centred around: the aligned agendas and the common ground researched; a clear articulation of the growth objectives of the account; a marketing strategy that aligned to those objectives; and, finally, clear marketing deliverables for the account against which Capita could be clearly measured.
This account pitch book was completely new to Capita, and the response was exceptional.
At the end of this initial stage, sales were on board, loaded with new information, and equipped with the tools to execute an ABM programme.
“How have you gone about everything you’ve spoken about, and started scaling that, given the requests we’re now getting from sales?”
“The challenge we had was we didn’t really have the luxury of maturity before we began to scale,” Christa responded.
With that in mind, Christa claims they had to focus on what they knew to be successful from their initial one-to-one work and needed to be open to the idea of failing fast, because Capita was moving at pace, which meant several hard decisions had to be made about what realistically could and couldn’t be done.
This meant working from a sales enablement perspective, as they did when first implementing the ABM programme. Once again, this meant getting buy-in, credibility and accountability. Despite moving from a one-to-one approach to a one-to-few approach, the core tenets remained the same.
In order to ensure buy-in, a formal contract between sales and marketing was created. This set out what types of ABM programmes both departments were going to deliver and defined exactly what each department would deliver for each type of ABM. From the outset, it was made clear that there was a different level of investment for a one-to-few account compared to a one-to-one account, for instance. The second part of this contract defined what marketing would need from sales in order to deliver this. It was made clear that this would include attribution of pipeline, as marketing had to demonstrate it was delivering business results.
It also made clear that, if sales couldn’t hold up their end of the bargain, then marketing wouldn’t be able to deliver the results promised.
Christa pointed out that “this contact allowed us to have some really open and honest conversations with our sales leads about what they realistically needed to achieve in an account.” Ultimately, this helped Capita achieve clarity and flexibility around objectives.
The next thing Christa looked at was credibility. Data points and evidence are absolutely essential, and so a significant amount of time was spent investing in tools that could provide the data required to target a larger number of accounts, and to automate some of that intelligence when possible.
So, when beginning to operate a one-to-few model, Capita continued its clusters along industry lines, so that it could continue to build credibility with individuals on the basis of Capita having essential in-depth industry knowledge.
Capita also looked at tools that would:
- Enable them to automate parts of their research, especially in terms of weekly updates into what was going on in their key accounts.
- Allow them to map relationships.
- Allow them to look at how to map personas.
- Allow them to get an in-depth insight into the end-customers’ perspective.
All of these were set up and automated, so that reports would come into their inboxes, and then could be quickly shared and disseminated. Capita’s martech stack was also used to deliver personalised experiences through web and content.
As ever, accountability was also important in ensuring the success of the scale-up operation. In order to achieve this, Christa helped create clear frameworks, so that the same approach could be taken as in the one-to-one programme, but applied to multiple accounts.
These measurement metrics were standardised, so that for each account, Capita were measured against the same outcomes. Being clear about the definitive ROI was crucial.
“You briefly touched on personalisation. How have you seen it work in the case studies that we’ve done, and the pilot example that you mentioned?”
In response to this question, Christa referenced a recent ABM campaign that Capita ran with huge success.
In this campaign, Capita sought to engage with a certain individual, who, for the purposes of this article, we will refer to as ‘Joe’.
Joe works in HR in a global IT and telecoms company, and was coming to market with a substantial outsource deal. Capita knew the company well, but was seen as a tactical player, and not as a strategic player capable of delivering a long-term outsource.
Christa said: “Ironically, we had a really good relationship with Joe’s boss, but we didn’t have a relationship with Joe. So this was one of those unusual situations where, actually, we needed to do the relationship building down the ladder, rather than up the ladder.”
So how could Capita engage Joe?
Christa explained that, as always, this had to start with research. Specifically, this research looked into the problems faced by HR departments, as well as problems faced specifically by Joe. One particular challenge that emerged was around reskilling the workforce. With so much change in the industry, it can be difficult to know what skills your workforce will need in the coming years. This concern was not specific to Joe either, and resonated across several industries.
With this in mind, Capita built an entire campaign centred around the issue. Part of this campaign included a roundtable on ‘the future of learning’, hosted by Capita’s growth officer, and attended by people across all industries – not just IT and telecoms. Joe, of course, was sent a highly personalised invitation to join the roundtable, and he accepted. It was made sure that Capita’s own account director was there, so that the two could begin to build a relationship afterwards.
Following the roundtable, the account director fed back and reported that Joe’s perception of Capita following the roundtable had totally changed. As a result, he was now much more willing to engage.
The learnings from this roundtable were then written up into a white paper. Crucially, this white paper ‘heroed’ Joe’s contribution to the roundtable, bringing his voice to forefront of the content, including direct quotes, for instance. Once complete, this white paper was sent to Joe, his colleagues and his boss, and ‘heroed’ him amongst his colleagues.
The result? Joe consequentially decided to run a webinar with Capita to present the findings of the roundtable to his wider team. In the end, Capita ended up delivering the webinar to 48 HR leaders, all of whom who received a copy of the whitepaper, heroing Joe against his peers.
This culminated in Capita’s own executive officer of people solutions being invited to address their global HR conference to over 200 HR leaders for the organisation, again covering the ‘reskilling revolution’ story.
The bid has now come out, and Capita holds pipeline attribution for a multimillion-pound deal. Ultimately, a very small investment has reaped huge dividends.
Final question: what are your top tips for either implementing ABM or scaling programmes?
Rounding off the presentation, Christa kept this short and to the point, drilling home the keys to a successful campaign:
- Set out the contract. “You need to be clear about what you deliver and what you need in return, because it is a different relationship, and it is a different way of working with sales,” Christa said. When sales begin to understand the importance of ABM and how it works, it becomes a completely different dialogue you’re having, and one that’s mutually beneficial. “It’s just a lot more fun!” Christa added.
- Take time over your clusters. “Industry works for us because we’re targeting whole organisations, and it resonates where we are as a company and our overarching strategy. But I know that there are other forms of clustering that work, and I think you really need to understand the common ground that you’re talking to your customers about. Industry is not the only way to do it; there are a number of ways, and it’s worth getting that right so you can really create relevant content at scale.”
