Defining your ideal customer profile (ICP) comes first. Use your best customers as a blueprint and don't be afraid to make hypotheses or use proxies if you don't have concrete data. It's important to recognize there might be multiple ICPs even for the same solutions, let alone the organization as a whole.

During this process you must identify the right firmographics. You can't control the opportunities you uncover, but you can control where you go looking for them. Aligning your resources and effort to the accounts most likely to experience the problems you solve, at a scale of impact that makes sense of their likely investment to solve the problem and your investment to acquire them, is critical.

Your value potential tiering

Most organizations tier based on level of current spend, but a programme of this nature should focus on where the highest potential value can be unlocked. The highest potential, most under-penetrated accounts likely share all the characteristics of a Tier 1 account, but could be hidden in your Tier 3 if tiering on the basis of current spend. Find the under-penetrated, high-potential accounts. Tier 1 accounts are best suited to 1:1 and 1:few ABM.

What about intent?

Some organizations lean heavily on intent, but it tells only a small part of the story. Determining a person or organization's true intentions is, by nature, an imprecise activity. A brilliant ABM programme should also tap into the (usually much larger proportion) of those 'not looking.'

In one of our recent 1:few ABM programmes, only three accounts were showing intent signals at the start of planning. Six months later we secured millions in pipeline within 13 accounts, and none of these were the three showing initial intent. Intent can be useful if acted on quickly, but it shouldn't be taken as gospel.

One of the most critical questions around research is, "How much energy, effort and expense is the right amount for us to expend to differentiate ourselves?" The short answer: there's no one-size-fits-all. What it takes to penetrate a global, fragmented, complex multinational bank for a \$35 million multi-year contract is going to look very different from targeting a centralized US-only retailer for a \$200,000 ARR solution.

Agreeing an evidence-based hypothesis as a starting point is the aim of your research. What might these people be saying and thinking if we'd talked to them already? What language (industry, role, seniority, account-specific) might they use to describe the challenges they're facing? How can our messages best illustrate these to them and guide them toward engagement with us?

The key isn't to come up with a perfect hypothesis, but a credible one. By formulating your ideas and showing your rationale, you stand out from your competitors. Most sales and marketing approaches tend to be solution or capability-centric. They don't give insight into the evidence behind their strategy. But that evidence is critical in showing not only that you have different capabilities to offer, but that your approach to engaging is differentiated and focused on their challenges.

Once you've formulated a hypothesis, get moving fast, while the research is relevant and timely. Test and refine using business and sales development resources that are capable, equipped and compensated on driving a small number of high-value engagements rather than scheduling lots of meetings. These engagements can be top-down or bottom-up within the contact hierarchy and should run in parallel with the creation of assets, events and other parts of the ABM outreach.

Ultimately, the deeper the research, the more informed your messaging and creative will be.

Strategic messaging is integral to communicating the essence of your brand to prospects. The key to ABGTM messaging is uncovering your core thought or single-minded proposition, which forms the basis for creative development. This common thread runs through all of your campaign assets, so it's paramount that the message is easy to understand and, ideally, memorable and engaging.

Look at the research phase as the groundwork for messaging. While the campaign creative may communicate a central thought, everything uncovered during research creates fuel for longer-form content and assets for sales outreach and enablement. It also provides a platform for experimentation to discover what is and isn't resonating.

The goal is to create a messaging house: articulating the concept at its highest level, down to more granular messaging by solution, persona, industry or account. A 1:1 approach requires a full messaging house for each account that speaks directly to the account's specific objectives and challenges. 1:few uses common themes across a group of accounts and more broadly addresses how your proposition demonstrates success for accounts with those characteristics.

It's all about timing

Timing is critical in all GTM activities. The recognition that an account might be a great fit but not have a live project, buying cycle or budget should impact how you engage. Some prospects might be entirely unaware that a solution like yours exists. Others might think the situation they're facing is just "how things are" and not realise there could be a better way.

The conversation with someone already "in market" is completely different. The emphasis shifts to ensuring you have a good picture of why they've recognized the need to change, why they've decided they need to act now, and how all the roles within the prospect organization see and talk about the issue. The tone, pace and content of your messages should reflect where the prospect is on their journey.

A creative, consistent approach

Once strategic messaging has been established, creative influencing comes into play. This stage is about ideation: concepting a campaign theme that will be applied across all campaign assets and deliverables. The creative needs to bring to life the central thought, and then be woven into the fabric of every piece of communication, harnessing your core messaging and bringing your brand to life.

Experience shows that campaigns with a clear, central, consistent idea work better. They resonate more, they improve recall, and they help to deliver sometimes challenging messages with simplicity. The heart of creative influencing is defining your conceptual approach and turning that into something the audience will love.

Campaign execution decisions

It's also time to decide how the campaign will run. Choices about which channels to use, overcoming challenges with channel oversaturation, and determining when to activate. You cannot know a prospect's preferred channels, so multi-channel always wins.

Once you've decided an execution plan and created assets, it's essential for all parties to review and understand the campaign's creative and asset suite. This part is non-negotiable. Sales holds responsibility for bringing the campaign to life in their communications and following up on engagements generated. They need to know their subject.

Now it's time to put the campaign's wheels in motion. Warming accounts and prospects is recommended to ensure campaign deliverables don't land cold, so blend digital awareness and sales development tactics to gain interest through soft engagement. Examples include traditional always-on brand awareness delivered into the campaign target account list (TAL) or sales reps connecting on LinkedIn and engaging with posts.

This is also where you start outreach to tactical personas within the accounts, working towards gaining insight and buy-in higher up the decision-making ladder. This stage is vital to give your sales motion the greatest possible chance to convert.

It's then time to deliver on the execution plan, generating engagement with decision-makers through marketing activities and sales outreach. While it might be tempting to create a rigid sequence of events, which has its place for certain deliverables like physical mail, this isn't always our recommended approach. A looser grip can be more effective.

Instead of communicating a precise order of events or cadence, you might be better served by spending time together as a team. Be clear on the experience you want to create, the tools and assets available, and what can be flexible. Give more control to those closest to the prospect to decide when to deploy and what channel. Sales and marketing must work in tandem.

Your campaign is live. At this point, you should be starting to see engagement across activities, generating conversations, leads, decision-maker interest and meetings. Once an opportunity is defined enough to be worked on by an account executive (AE), it's time to transition from business development to sales, with marketing supporting throughout. The handover should be seamless from the prospect's perspective, ideally through a meeting that both the business or sales development representative (B/SDR) and AE attend.

Sales enablement is a key part of the handover from SDR to AE. To have the best chance of connecting successfully with prospects, all account information must be communicated: company intelligence, market insight, the account plan, and engagement to date. Even the smallest detail about the account or contacts engaged could be useful to the sales process. This is also the perfect time to gather and apply learnings to other accounts higher in the funnel.

Once the AE has taken over the reins, they can refine the opportunity and start planning the business case development and close. With a fresh pair of eyes and new perspective, it's a great chance to make any adjustments to your engagement approach that will help get the deal across the line.