At Ampfactor we think about ABM programs much like building a house. You could do it on your own, but oftentimes it’s easier with outside help.
ABM consultants at an ABM agency are going to be experts at delivering an ABM program that matches an ABM blueprint that’s been market validated already. If your goal is ABM success, then the ABM campaigns and ABM platforms you’ll use to win should originate with an ABM agency as a launchpad for your new growth.
Fortunately for you, with the right ABM agency you don’t have to choose between build vs. buy, or the business results you want now vs. much later. Here are 10 reasons to hire an ABM agency:
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- Speed to business value from an ABM initiative
- Immediately scalable execution
- Fully integrated tech stack, ready to deploy today with experts at the helm
- Buys time for internal sales and marketing transformation
- A great catalyst for a leadership mindset shift
- Access to rich communal knowledge from other ABM programs
- Significantly reduced learning curve for what’s effective and what’s not
- Expanding what’s possible today in a wider portfolio of ABM strategies to deploy
- Eliminates or delays change management for integrated data, teams, & processes in your GTM
- It’s fun to build, but there’s risk in complexity, and ABM requires complex orchestration
Speed to business value from an ABM initiative
First things first, every executive in your business has heard something about ABM strategy and they probably associate it with delayed results and increased investment. We can’t blame them. They’ve been conditioned to buy marketing a certain way because they don’t understand how to tell a good marketing strategy for one that’s simply going to be a waste.
So if you’re goal is to leverage ABM strategy in your go to market for growth, you’re going to need an easy way to get in-market in a relatively short amount of time. Think 0-45 days versus 18 months to have a fully capable and robust ABM capability in-house.
Immediately scalable execution
Whether you’re already running an ABM internally or not, you know that it takes specialization. It’s hard to recruit a team of specialists that are high-quality practitioners of ABM, not just digital marketers who sometimes do ABM campaigns.
At Ampfactor we spend an inordinate amount of time over-indexing on hiring slowly and sourcing the very best talent for each of our roles. Because everyone’s success, including our clients, is interdependent on each person’s performance.
Fully integrated tech stack, ready to deploy today with experts at the helm
Depending on how you came up as a marketer, ABM is going to mean different things to you.
If you came up as a content marketer it might mean customized blogs, landing pages, and downloadable content from content hubs so it means using Hushly, Folloze boards, Uberflip, or Path factory.
If you grew up as a performance marketer, ABM might mean Terminus or Demandbase campaigns for 1:1 ads.
At Ampfactor it means all those things as well as account-based sales development (yup, we have account development reps sitting in marketing).
If you haven’t yet, go through one of their sales qualification processes, you’ll find that you need somewhere around $200,000 to $300,000 in ABM SaaS tech that you’ll have to buy at an annual or quarterly rate before you’ve ever gotten a single word in-market. At Ampfactor, you’re essentially renting our stack and bodies to get started today at a fraction of that investment.
Now we’re not saying you should never build your own stack. You should. But it takes time to build an internal ABM agency. Why not partner with a team that does it for a living to help you avoid the pitfalls, get to results today, and execute brilliantly while you build?
Buys time for internal sales and marketing transformation
Running ABM campaigns with an agency gives you the opportunity to be taught how to measure progress and success and how not to. That’s critical for an ABM program’s success politically within your peer group and leadership team. It takes time to change the lenses through which you see the work at hand.
A great catalyst for a leadership mindset shift
ABM is an incredibly focused approach. Leaders who have a distant understanding of marketing’s role in enterprise growth will need to be counseled and educated on what it is and is not.
They will be excited by the fact that there’s waste elimination, a focus on target accounts, more supported sales teams, but they will be skeptical of this as “just another marketing campaign.”
With information from a trusted third party, they’re going to be more likely to listen to the change in how they should be judging success on the way to new revenue. As an executive, there are very different leading indicators of the lagging indicator, revenue.
Access to rich communal knowledge from other ABM programs
An account-based marketing agency is running campaigns at every edge of the market, a wide variety of segments within industries, and to many, many buyer personas. Tapping into that knowledge of how they react to an ABM approach vs. traditional marketing is crucial for expectations and decision-making.
Significantly reduced learning curve for what’s effective and what’s not
Along with the communal knowledge of different approaches and investment behaviors, you get the benefit of seeing what’s working as it changes in the market. At one point personalized experiences were the rage and then within 18 months, they became all but deplorable. At the time of writing this, we’re seeing a sharp spike in highly curated and intimate in-person or hybrid events as a tactic. Aside from what’s current, there are fundamental building choices that need to revolve around people, process, and technology, and in what order to add which. We’ve seen it and done it all already.
Expanding what’s possible today in a wider portfolio of ABM strategies to deploy
If you were to put in your own ABM stack you still need to hire for all the variety of things that go along with it. By using an agency you can run any amalgamation of 1:1, 1:some, and programmatic ABM campaigns at a variety of target prospects in high-value accounts. The point here is that the variety of ABM plays in ABM campaigns matters. Being a one-trick pony in marketing is a recipe for certain failure.
Eliminates or delays change management for integrated data, teams, & processes in your GTM
You’re probably seeing a theme here. If you don’t use an agency concurrently while you prepare and build, then you are biting off a lot of change management and a lot more delayed results. Using an agency gets you in-motion and in-market while you learn and do the things required to shift the execution back internally if you choose to.
It’s fun to build, but there’s risk in complexity, and ABM requires complex orchestration
Multi-channel orchestration is complex. Complexity means the potential for mistakes and delays. Being slow to market is almost as bad as not being there at all, maybe even worse because you paid for that speed. Take your time in the comfort, guidance, and confidence of ABM operators, and let’s build as a team.
At Ampfactor we design ABM programs that are standalone and operational externally today, or they are designed to gradually shift technologies and execution back into your organization over a 24 month period.
Final word
As you consider using an account based marketing agency to launch account-based marketing programs, think about the optimization and buyer journey you’ll be able to orchestrate for your target audience in a matter of months.
All the account based marketing automation tools, intent data, high degree of personalization, and relevancy in landing pages and content hubs in a single campaign for different business outcomes.
If that sounds like something worth exploring, we’d love to show you why Ampfactor can help you get in market with a full ABM stack approach within 90 days or less.
