How account-based marketing can be used to reinvent your key client programme
Momentum ITSMA’s Andy Rogerson reflects on a PSMG workshop in which he explored ways to deepen client relationships and deliver revenue growth in professional services through account-based marketing
Andy Rogerson, Head of Professional Services Practice, Momentum ITSMA
andrew.rogerson@momentumitsma.com
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach to designing and executing highly targeted and personalised marketing programmes to drive business growth and impact key clients.
According to our latest report, the ABM benchmark report, 85% of marketing practitioners say adopting ABM has improved active engagement with key target accounts and 74% say it has helped them to drive revenue growth.
ABM clearly works but the principles have yet to be applied rigorously in many professional services firms. In a recent roundtable with senior marketing leaders held by the PSMG in June 2024, we explored three challenges firms have with their key client programmes. This article highlights some of the solutions we’ve seen firms adopt to foster internal alignment, engage C-suite executives, and ensure key client programmes are targeting the right accounts.
Ensuring alignment and buy-in from the partnership
Marketers at many professional services firms have a problem maximising the value from their key client programmes. These are often well established but treading water, a far cry from the global growth engine envisaged at their inception. To drive growth, marketers need to introduce an appreciation for a client-centric approach to marketing, change the practice-first culture, and repair the fee-earner and marketing disconnect.
The first step is to ensure a shared understanding of the problem. One way to do so is to conduct a diagnostic assessment of ABM maturity to understand how all key stakeholders view the programme. Soliciting the views of fee earners, marketing, BD, and the knowledge team enables an open and honest dialogue around the issues, with external facilitation often the key to a cohesive and positive way forward.
The second step is to ensure all processes are mapped, documented, and socialised: from strategic client planning through to measurement and reporting. This will enable the firm to unite around a common vision, collaboratively developing annual roadmaps for the programme and key client playbooks for each of the clients on which they are focusing.
To ensure good governance, firms should think about developing core governance functions such as a Global ABM Council and/or Regional ABM Boards. Public sponsorship and executive presence will reaffirm ABM as a strategic growth initiative. An ABM Charter Statement will codify what all stakeholders sign-up for and enable the team to visibly hold them to account.
Adopting the above initiatives will ensure a consistent and sustained appreciation of ABM’s value while maintaining stakeholder alignment. Open and collaborative stakeholder engagement will maximise impact. Together they will give key client programmes the reboot many so desperately need.
Three lessons:
- Assess your ABM maturity
- Document all your processes
- Develop a global governance programme
“Marketers need to begin a conversation around growth – asking the tough questions such as whether the current client pool and service offering are enough to drive growth. Armed with the answer they can then take a deeper dive into account selection for their key client programme.”
Engaging the C-suite
The second challenge professional services firms raised is the need to get beyond the technical gatekeeper and begin conversations with the C-suite. Engaging the senior executives at key clients can accelerate win rates and drive revenue, but it is not easy to break through the noise and capture their attention.
It is worth reminding partners that engaging with the C-suite is a two-way process, and they clearly need to play their part too. Auditing who they know across the key client portfolio often reveals that current executive engagement is ad-hoc and tactical, with patchy relationships at the CxO level, and no clear strategy for development. Relationship building is a discipline like any other and ensuring a plan for executive engagement around solid thought leadership provides a genuine opportunity to advance.
To make thought leadership highly effective it must be relevant to the C-suite, which requires insights into their specific strategic business objectives. Using research in the form of surveys and qualitative interviews with peers to create a tailored business case, highlighting the opportunities that clients can grab or the risks they can avoid based on a financial model, can be genuine game-changer.
These programmes drive growth when they tackle the client’s primary, strategic tension head on, offer a rationalised point of view, and present a clear, consistent, personalised account narrative. Each communication should read like a story written for, and about, that specific client. Ensuring the communications sound like they are coming directly from the client relationship partner will improve your chance of buy-in.
It may be stating the obvious, but this approach requires a deep knowledge of the client’s sector, their challenges and initiatives, and the key stakeholders involved. It also needs a deep understanding of your value proposition for that client.
Three lessons:
- Audit your executive relationships
- Treat relationship-building as a discipline
- Develop thought leadership programmes aimed at key clients
Selecting the right clients for your key client programme
Account selection was the third problem area our attendees highlighted, revealing marketing strategies can often become disconnected with where growth comes from. Many professional services firms have key client programmes focusing solely on those clients that provide the biggest fee income. This may be correct, but they could be missing out on those clients with the highest potential for the largest fees in the future.
Marketers therefore need to begin a conversation around growth – asking the tough questions such as whether the current client pool and service offering are enough to drive the growth for which the firm is looking. Armed with the answer to that question they can then take a deeper dive into account selection for the key client programme.
This typically involves mapping accounts across opportunity, relationship, and fit, to ideally feed into a single target account scoring model, which all partners buy into so there are no arguments over who is in or out.
These models should be fluid with a continual monitoring of client activity. Technology can help with a range of automated alerts and notifications to advise partners on client events or announcements, with suggestions for engagement and the next best-action the relationship partner can take. Clients can enter or leave the programme depending on pre-agreed triggers, all perfectly transparent to reduce the need for continuous explanations.
Three lessons:
- Understand where your growth comes from
- Agree and codify account selection criteria
- Revisit the make-up of your key client programme on a quarterly basis
Applying these learnings at your firm
We hope you found these tips useful. If you have any questions or would like to know more about how professional services firms do this in practice, get in touch with Andy for a free consultation.