Build a Revenue Team for Account-Based Marketing Success

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a big undertaking—as many marketers who have kicked off pilot programs will tell you.  Among other things, it involves leveraging data to gain account insights, using paid media to conduct contact discovery, and making cross-channel engagement a priority. 

But to ensure your ABM strategy is successful, there’s one thing you need above all else: a revenue team. This should be a group composed of sales, marketing, and other professionals who regularly interact with prospects and customers to create consistent, meaningful experiences. 

After all, delivering exceptional experiences over the lifetime of a prospect or customer, throughout the buyer’s journey, is what modern marketing is all about. 

And by building a strong revenue team, you can create better experiences that turn prospects into customers and customers into powerful brand advocates. 

Here are three valuable tips to help you build a revenue team and bolster your ABM strategy: 

1. Agree On Everything Up Front

The most important part of any relationship is communication. So, when you’re trying to align sales and marketing, make your expectations and boundaries clear from the start. 

Before you do anything, get your stakeholders together to decide on the rules of the game: What qualifies as a lead? What determines account engagement? How do you share information? Where should you invest resources? 

Nail down these guidelines early and you’ll find it much easier to get your once-disparate departments headed in the same direction. 

2. Ensure Fluid, Continuous Handovers

So, marketing and sales are no longer at opposite ends of the dancehall. Instead, they’re dance partners. But how do you decide who takes the lead?

Business is no longer a straightforward affair, where marketing drums up interest and hands off leads to sales, and then sales closes deals. Rather, today’s prospects move back and forth between different stages of the funnel. 

This means your sales and marketing departments need to get used to seamlessly switching roles and must reach a consensus on who’s driving the relationship at any given time. To make this easier, it’s crucial that you provide everybody on your revenue team with complete visibility of the entire customer journey. Of course, for that to happen, you need quality data. 

3. Consolidate Your Tech And Step Up Your Data Game

For your marketing and sales groups to form a truly strong and effective revenue team, you must ensure your data is accurate, up to date, and seamlessly integrated. 

Everyone on your revenue team should be on the same page from day one by pulling from a common database that combines marketing behavior and sales data. A customer data platform is key, but you also need unified data to provide a holistic view to make customer-driven decisions. To make the most of your centralized data repository, you need to educate each department on what your data means. 

Make sure marketing intimately understands the sales process and how sales uses data to close deals. And see to it that sales knows how marketing measures awareness, acquisition, scoring, and qualification. 

Shared Pipeline. Shared Responsibility. Shared Success. 

The structure of marketing and sales functions each owning separate portions of revenue is outdated and impractical. Marketing can never truly drive revenue without sales. And selling without marketing support, although doable, is incredibly painful. 

These two departments have always been reliant on each other. By bringing them together as a unified revenue team, you’re empowering them to perform at their best. 

And don’t feel pressured to craft your team solely of individuals from sales and marketing. Adding support, development, and other siloed departments to the mix can only help to enhance the experiences you deliver to prospects and customers.