Zack McAuley is the Sr. Manager, Enterprise Account Based Marketing here at Seismic. He spends his days living the life of an ABM practitioner. ABM continues to grow in popularity and the Sales and Marketing world is going to be seeing a lot more people dedicated to ABM full-time.
There’s lots of talk about what ABM means from a high-level; how the strategy affects different departments, where resources need to be shifter, and what to expect in terms of revenue. But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of talk about what actual people do on a day-to-day basis. With that in mind we sat down with Zack to get a sense of a day in the life of an account based marketer.
What’s the first thing on your mind every day you come into the office?
Similar to a sales leader, the first thing on my mind each day is thinking about where we are against our number and how we can beat it. Based on our orchestration across both the sales and marketing teams, our ABM team has a monthly quota based on sales accepted opportunities and an annual closed business quota.
How much of your day is planned vs. how much of your day is dealing with situations that come up?
It’s 50/50. With the number of teams across sales, marketing, and customer success that we collaborate with, a good amount of the day is planned for us because a large part of our job is around orchestration. The half that’s unplanned is the fun part: tracking target account news and updating value props accordingly, working with sales to position for the next meeting, etc. The key to winning each unplanned situation is to have taken the time to have prepared ahead of time.
How do you stay organized around all of the different engagements that are ongoing?
Process before technology – and each ABM Manager on my team has their own process. For technology, I’ve found that three tools are critical for organization: MS Office—particularly OneNote, SFDC, and Seismic.
What needs to happen for you to consider your day a success?
We know more about our accounts today than we did yesterday, and that expertise is demonstrated through content, communication & collaboration with sales, and campaign ideas.
As a manager, how are you setting your team up for success throughout the day?
Spend time with your team’s customers—sales, demand gen, and product marketing—so that the time you spend coaching and developing your team is filled with feedback from those teams rather than solely your own vision.
What makes the life of an ABM practitioner different from that of the life of a marketing practitioner?
There are a lot of similarities—we want to measure many of the same things: segment awareness, engagement, MQLs, content usage, content performance, content ROI, etc. —but we spend more time on the front lines of the sales pit trying to make all of those metrics come to fruition.
What makes the life of an ABM practitioner different from that of the life of a sales professional?
The ABM team is on the front lines with sales researching account, planning account strategies, and preparing for meetings, but we then use that knowledge to create account-specific content and campaigns rather than hold client-facing meetings or execute the selling process.
What’s one piece of advice you have for those who are looking to transition to ABM roles?
Be empathetic. In working with so many teams, the key is to understand their day-to-day and work with them with that context.
What’s your favorite part of the day-to-day of being in an ABM role?
No day is the same. Some days you are strictly a product marketer, some days you’re an inside sales manager, and some days you are a demand generation strategist. It’s an excellent way to elevate your general skill set while making a large impact on the business.
