By Emily Salus, Head of Professional Services, Openprise

If ABM is the next thing on the agenda at your company, you’re either deeply involved in the selection of accounts for the initiative or you’re waiting to hear what those accounts will be.

While many would expect the hard parts to be selecting the accounts and then creating the campaigns, there’s a large project between those two efforts: making sure you have the right contacts in your database, and their accurate information, so you can actually reach them with those snazzy campaigns. If you can’t reach the right people, your ABM initiatives will not be successful.

Gathering your resources

Assessing the state of your database is key. If you know what buying groups looks like at your key accounts and which roles and titles are involved you’re way ahead. Otherwise you’ll need to understand past opportunities and create a model to determine the people you need involved in each opportunity. Then you’ll need to analyze your existing database for the ABM target accounts to determine if you have the contacts you need to execute your campaigns.

Most companies will start by asking the sales team who’s been involved in past opportunities or analyzing their Sales Operations Platform for who’s attached to the recent closed won opportunities that look like your ABM target accounts. Usually this is done manually, as often the contacts aren’t attached to the opportunities in the Sales Operations Platform and a bit of Q&A is needed to find out who was really involved.

With those people identified, someone will need to look at the roles and titles across those opportunities to see if inferences can be made. For example, you might determine that at a minimum you need someone in IT at director or above, someone in Marketing at VP or above, and a C-level executive from any department in order to successfully close an opportunity. Then you’ll need to examine the ABM target accounts that have been selected and see if you’ve got those people in your database for each of those roles and levels.

Enriching your data

Once you’ve completed the white space analysis for those accounts, you know who you’re missing in the database and can determine how to acquire them, whether that’s via personal introductions, marketing campaigns, or a combination of the two. You’ll also need their titles, emails, mailing addresses, and other pertinent information in order to properly target them with your ABM campaigns.

Launching your campaigns

With a completed matrix of roles and levels for each of your ABM accounts you’ll be far more effective in launching campaigns that have the desired goal: to get the attention of those key accounts, create opportunities, and close deals.

Sound like too much to do manually? You can automate all this using Openprise. Read the ABM datasheet.