Crawl, Walk, Ready-to-Run an ABM Strategy [Cora Systems]

Laura Mattimoe
Laura Mattimoe Posts: 1 ✭
edited May 28 in Inspire 23

@Laura Mattimoe here from Cora Systems' marketing team! Here’s a walkthrough of the session I did at Inspire UK with Susanne Kerins, covering Cora’s transition from a lead generation-focused approach to a true account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. 

Crawl, Walk, Ready-to-Run an ABM Strategy.pdf

Moving on from MQLs 

We came to the realisation that MQLs simply weren't the key metric for marketing. They didn't equate to pipeline. Being in the business of delivering MQLs wasn’t delivering to the bottom line of the business. 

Our inbound also wasn’t aligned to our ICP. It was time to change!

The Transformation 

  • Shift from lead gen to demand gen
  • Focus on ABM
  • Revenue / Pipeline = KPI

Internally, to get the message across, we compared lead generation to a relay race and ABM to a football match – where the entire team is involved in scoring the goal. 

Underpinning all this was a focus on revenue delivered to the pipeline as our key metric. To achieve this approach we had to dig into the buyer journey, personas, our channels, and how we could move buyers towards pipeline.

The Challenges

With a large amount of prospects in our ICP, we needed an extra layer of intelligence to prioritise accounts: 6sense was transformative for our ABM strategy.

But we faced plenty of challenges while implementing our ABM strategy. These included gaining senior management buy-in, managing time-to-value expectations, and ensuring proper training and technology adoption. Education, relationship-building, and continuous iteration were crucial to overcome these challenges. 

The Central Strategy

Our ABM journey is centered on three elements:

  • Who: A defined ICP
  • What: Intent data that gives visibility into your ICP
  • When: Engaging at the right time, with right content

Key Lessons

  1. Be patient! You won’t see success overnight
  2. Understand what’s achievable: Initially, we spread ourselves too thin, going deep with one-to-one messaging only to get no response. You have to be more pragmatic.
  3. Learn and change: We reviewed campaigns, messaging, and email campaigns every two to three months.
  4. Feedback: Listen to sales, explore the data

Achieving success with ABM 

Despite being relatively early in our ABM journey, we’ve achieved some impressive results. 

This includes an increase in website traffic, an increase in time on site, an increase in inbound demo requests, and an increase in deals delivered to the pipeline. 

It’s been a great journey so far and we’re excited to see how these results continue to develop in the coming months!


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