It’s been six years since BT began ABM and faced the common strain of sales alignment. It’s Head of Global ABM Marketing, Adrian Hardy, tells Molly Raycraft how he and sales went from cats and dogs, to a harmonious pack.
When Adrian started his ABM initiative six years ago, sales saw him as a different breed – and one that was trying to suck up their time. Driven by a desire to help sales rather than deliver results, his initial efforts fell flat. Here Adrian explains how he used personality profiling together with ABM techniques to win over his sales team and deliver 20%-30% higher conversion rate.
The bad times
When Adrian joined the newly formed ABM team, he was placed with good sales people. They were hard-nosed, aggressive and aimed for billion pound pipelines. “The team I went into were some of the scariest people I’ve ever worked with. Their personal circumstances relied on bringing in enough sales to hit their bonuses, so they didn’t suffer fools lightly. You tended to get one chance with them and that was your lot,” says Adrian.
Collectively, that team had more than 100 years’ of sales experience. But being good at sales didn’t mean they would easily transition to ABM – which for them, was an unnatural way of working.
“We had our first team meeting. I said we needed to be doing ABM in some accounts. It had a hostile reaction,” says Adrian. “The common reaction was ‘I don’t have the time’.”
It was clear that time was the most valuable commodity to the sales team, and if Adrian didn’t help them meet their targets, they weren’t going to give any of it to him.
To resolve this Adrian began tailoring generic assets, finding new contacts, tweaking marketing strategies for sales, facilitating customer engagement and ensuring presentations carried a consistent brand. But after six months, he realised he’d made a mistake.
“I was being helpful, not successful. I was in the bottom of the sales funnel doing field-based marketing. They didn’t get ABM and I wasn’t selling it to them. So I did an ABM plan to deliver ABM to the sales team,” explains Adrian.
Becoming fluent in ‘Sale-ish’
Adrian used ABM techniques to market the project to sales, and with knowledge of what they valued, he could translate his idea into their language. “I was still speaking marketing, I needed to learn to speak sales,” says Adrian.
To achieve this, he used the same approach as he would an external account-based marketing campaign. He researched his target accounts, looking at Myers Briggs to uncover their personality traits. He also deciphered the traits of his marketing team, making him able to compare the similarities and differences that would determine his next step.
From this research Adrian came to a few conclusions about the differences between sales and marketing:
- Sales are thinking, marketing is feeling.
- Sales like objective principles, marketing like causes and motivation.
- Sales like facts, judging and pre-empting, marketing like being flexible and creative.
"I was being helpful, not successful. I was in the bottom of the sales funnel doing field-based marketing. They didn’t get ABM and I wasn’t selling it to them. So I did an ABM plan to deliver ABM to the sales team."
Making changes that sales listen to
The fundamentals of what Adrian was trying to achieve with sales had always been correct however, his new-found insight meant he could alter his delivery of these fundamentals in a way that sales would be receptive to. This change saw Adrian’s activity transform from what had become field marketing to solid ABM. In turn, marketing went from being a supporting facet to an equal partner.
The bigger changes came to strategy. When comparing the differences between the two teams, it was clear marketing was still working to its own targets and sales to theirs. Adrian designed a strategy that would meet sales’ targets. He also incorporated the sales team’s ‘all-about-the-now’ attitude by focusing on what needed to be done in the short-term, rather than setting emphasis on the long-term.
“The sales team were focusing on big revenue targets in EMEA, and I was focusing on the number of new contacts and opportunities created. They were in a similar line, and you could see how they would lead to the same conclusion, but I wasn’t talking in the same language by putting the numbers first,” explains Adrian.
“I got an email from the Head of the Sales saying ‘congratulations you’re no longer the colouring in department. You’re the lighting up department'.”
Adrian also placed himself at the top of the sales funnel. He spoke to customers and hosted customer engagement to facilitate opportunities for the sales team and build relationships face-to-face.
Even still, he found that ABM was bumped from team meetings being told that time had run short. To counter this, Adrian pushed ABM to the top of meeting agendas so it was set as the first focal point for discussion.
Adrian plugged away at this for a year before finally getting the recognition he deserved. “I got an email from John (the Head of the Sales) saying ‘congratulations you’re no longer the colouring in department. You’re the lighting up department,” says Adrian.
This aligned approach saw conversion rates increase by around 20%-30%. “It was a significant shift,” says Adrian, who also noticed a transition in the sales team’s approach. “The quality of the conversations we had improved. Even though I began talking about the sales side of things, they began talking about the softer targets they experienced, like having repeat conversations.” As momentum grew off , more people of seniority began attending the ABM meetings. Adrian went from the add-on in the sales meeting, to the ABM guru people want to listen to.
Adrian’s tips on working with sales for the first time:Get recommended by a sales person. Get an existing sales colleague to send an email to the new team outlining you and your idea in terms of sales outcomes.Go to sales meetings prepared. Book an hour, write your agenda and research the accounts. Show them insights they don’t already haveStart small. Identify one simple thing you can impact. Aim for doing a solid 10% of your ABM activities well. Show examples of where you’ve done this before successfully.
Type of ABM
When BT started ABM it conducted one-to-one campaigns to attract new business. However its’ now expanded to apply one-to-one ABM on established realtionships and carries out a one-to-few approach.
The maturity of BT’s ABM
BT’s ABM programme is at a delivering stage (stage 3 of B2B Marketing’s ABM Competency Model), and the team are working on the challenges involved in upscaling (and reaching stage 4 of the Competency Model).
The main challenge they are working through is gaining insight on their prospects;they currently only use 20% of the information given to them. To improve this, rather than asking the sales team for as much information on an account as possible, Adrian and the ABMers now only ask for information on specific areas of the account.
The team and accounts
BT has around 15 ABMers working on approximately 150 accounts.
The team target global multinational corporates. These are brands that have multiple divisions across numerous continents, across which internal processes and politics can differ. This is often a source of difficulty for their prospect, but it’s also something BT can help with, making them a great prospect. “They buy different IT from different suppliers and hope things will come together. BT can help them become more agile,” explains Adrian.
Technology
BT uses a number of technologies in its ABM programme. These includes:
- Tech Target
- Agent 3
- Eloqua
- Plus a lot of internal systems
