Account Based Marketing, GrowthMaster Training Workshop, and Optimizing Your Growth Process (Review)

Week 10 of a 12 Week Series on Growth Marketing

Each week for 12 weeks, I am writing about what I am learning through the Growth Marketing Mini-Degree from the CXL Institute. This week, I worked through the last course in Module 5 and two courses in Module 6: Account Based Marketing, GrowthMaster Training Workshop, and Optimizing Your Growth Process.

In Account Based Marketing or “ABM”, it truly is a game of “chess not checkers” because when you’re running an ABM campaign, the true leaders think many moves ahead. It is not a path to instantaneous results, rather it bears fruit by taking a strategic, coordinated, and sustained approach to identifying, engaging, closing, and growing the accounts that we know we should win. In order to truly be effective, it is a collaborative effort by both the Sales and the Marketing Team, along with Executives who should also be steering.

One of the advantages of ABM is that it’s a process that is totally within our control. Unlike inbound marketing, success depends upon honing in on the right accounts. In other words, they are multi-threaded, multi-channel, multi-touch, and highly targeted. The end goal is to have a targeted, efficient sales pipeline.

Three Types Of ABM

1. Strategic ABM: Usually focused on expanding existing individual accounts and the deals are typically +$250k.
2. ABM Lite: Made up of a mix of accounts that we hope to land or grow, focusing on lightly customized programs for clusters of accounts with deal sizes of typically less than $30k.
3. Programmatic ABM: A less targeted approach using technology, focused on many accounts, with deal sizes less than $10k.

Why is ABM important? Creating personalized buying experiences for your high-value accounts that are your perfect fit sets you up to dazzle those accounts with your service, your product’s experience, and your overall follow-through, acting as a potentially powerful way to get faster results and with more “ease” because you are essentially so aligned with the accounts that you target. Expanding business through account relationships is a long-term strategy that pays off in a world where acquisition is generally more expensive than retention.

A few things to keep in mind when choosing your high-value accounts: make sure that sales and marketing are collaborating on creating a list. Avoid looking at places like the Fortune 500 lists in sourcing companies, those are rarely the right fit. Simply put, this list needs to be based on data + experience, not just a wish list. It’s tempting to rush building your list, but don’t try to do too much too soon. Mistakes made in the list building phase are long-lasting throughout the rest of the process. There are various approaches to building your account list so your best approach is dependent on your market size, deal size and complexity, and your sales team size, among other things. Your ideal high-value account may not equal your current ideal customer and you may discover new and hot markets using ABM.

In the GrowthMaster Training Workshop, we learned about the key growth fundamentals that help accelerate growth. This was a lecture-style course and covered the growth process, how to create a growth team, honing our unique growth process, and how to hold and format the weekly growth meeting that we (should) have. All of these processes add to outputting something we call the North Star Metric. Your North Star Metric reflects the value that is delivered to users. It is also used as the lens to evaluate tests and monitor processes. For example, AirBNB’s North Star Metric is ‘nights booked’. Facebook’s is Monthly Active Users (MUAs). So being able to look at your aggregation of value over time is important simply because value at its core is the thing that ultimately drives retention, referral, and sustainable revenue.

Once you understand your North Star Metric and the variables, then the next step is to test. There are two ways to test:

1. testing to discover (pings) — trying something new to see what works about it.
2. testing to optimize (A vs. B). Improving and optimizing your current approach

At every level of the sales process, the growth team can assist in accelerating the process. For example, at the referral stage, there’s a natural referral loop that happens when a customer has a good experience with a product, but there are also a number of things that we can do to accelerate growth using incentives that help enable your happy customers to share their experience with others.

Who are great candidates for a Growth Team? Look for individuals who are skilled in entrepreneurship (the willingness to take risk and accountability), self-discipline in being able to follow a process, the mindset of wanting to continually grow and improve, the ability to be analytical and base decisions off of data, not just gut, and lastly, leadership: they help keep people engaged and motivated to be part of the team. The “growth master” should be able to run the weekly growth meeting, help the team generate ideas, and dive into the data to create new opportunities. As time goes on, experience will help inform your future growth meetings, and you will find the process becomes easier in finding new ideas, and improving the growth meeting itself.

In the short course Optimizing Your Growth Process, we covered how to ensure your team has a strong cross-functional presence when experimenting and running tests. A few tips I found helpful:

• Do regular checkins to look back on past experiments to see why it worked or didn’t work. Set aside time for learning every day.
• Prioritize the quality of the experiment over the speed. If you aren’t designing the right experiments first, speed is pretty much irrelevant. Once you hone your quality, then you can dive into how to speed it up! Find efficiency at every stage of the process!
• Bulk-plan experiments to perform. This helps eliminate friction, and streamlines your idea process. Create a weekly meeting where you come up with high quality experiments you can implement for the whole week ahead, and you will end up testing a lot more.
• Usually before a company builds out a growth team, the team starts out as the people who are working on acquisition and engagement. How to find good candidates to help you build out this function? Focus on individuals who are marketing generalists and are eager to grow and learn, and can be both strategic (creative) and analytical (data-driven). Like the qualities found in an effective “growth master”, it’s important to find leaders who can help you align your team and resources to continually be building a better growth process.

See you next week!