ABM
Why ABM stalls at the buying committee
One champion isn't a deal. ABM programs that stop at the champion lose to the rest of the committee.
What most teams get wrong
Most ABM programs are measured the way lead gen is: sourced pipeline and first touch. So the team optimizes for the first person who raises a hand.
That person becomes the champion. Then the program stalls. The CFO, the IT lead and the business owner make up their minds without ever hearing from you.
Where I learned it
At Automation Anywhere, my 59-person global team was measured on sourced pipeline and first-touch attribution. Full-funnel programs were slow to roll out, because nothing in the scorecard rewarded them.
But the data told a different story. I saw it on a Zoom call with my EMEA marketing lead, going through the numbers together. Accounts that engaged with marketing two, three or four times closed more often, and for bigger deals.
And during the pandemic, we hit a second wall. Customers didn't want to talk to us at all.
What we did
- Changed what the team was measured on. We gave marketing an influence target: the share of open opportunities responding to a marketing program. That asked the team to care about deals they didn't source.
- Put peers in front of peers. When prospects stopped taking our calls, we started "coffee with" sessions. Each paired two of our own leaders: the CIO who implemented the solution, and the business leader who had the problem. We matched them to prospects in the same roles, so they could share tips with peers. We promoted the sessions on social.
- Gave SDRs a reason to call each role. We built buyer journeys by persona and industry, so every role on the committee heard about the problem it owned.
What happened
- The number of opportunities engaging with marketing doubled quarter over quarter.
- Marketing-engaged opportunities closed at 2.5X the rate of those that didn't, with 2X larger deals and 15% faster velocity.
- The peer-to-peer sessions generated $800K in pipeline on $0 spend. They became our #1 pipeline-converting program and were rolled out globally.
- SDR connect rates rose about 3X with the new buyer journeys.
The peer-to-peer play is now a standard part of my playbook. At Forcepoint, it powered the AI Data Security Tour and our monthly webinars.
The team pushed back. All of them. It was a big change in how they'd been measured, and it took real change management. I kept coming back to the why: the deals that closed bigger and faster were the ones marketing touched more than once.
Not everything worked. At first, we forgot to filter out the regulars: people who came to every session for the education and never bought. We had to take them out to see which engagement actually moved deals.
Count buyers, not attendees.
What I'd do now
- Map the committee on every target account. Name the economic buyer, the technical buyer, the business owner and the champion. AI agents can now do the first pass in minutes.
- Give every role a reason to engage. Each one gets its own problem, its own content and, where possible, a peer who has solved it.
- Measure open opportunities, not form fills. Track how many people on each deal are engaging, and review it weekly with sales.
- Let customers do the selling. A peer in the same seat reaches the people your champion can't.
How many people on the buying committee does your team actually reach?