Viv Richards and the late Shane Warne. One could take a bowling attack apart and the other could make a batsman question everything he thought he knew about the next delivery. Richards brought the firepower and Warne brought the variations. Both legends gave spectators plenty to talk about.
In cricket, you can keep hitting boundaries and still struggle to chase down a win, and you can continue bowling deliveries and never take the elusive wicket you need. Which brings me to account reviews. The right people are engaging, meetings are happening, and content is being consumed. The dashboard looks magnificent, but then someone asks: “So, what's actually changed for the customer?”
Stunned silence. Usually followed by another slide.
I’m a huge cricket fan, and Viv is my all-time favourite player. But the lesson I take into account-based marketing is that individual brilliance needs to contribute to a result. An enthusiastic champion, a brilliant campaign or a packed executive dinner can help. None of this in isolation tells us whether the customer is closer to making a decision.
That’s why I want to see a shift from account-based marketing to account-based growth – characterised by a better understanding of what makes an account move, and a coordinated effort to help it happen.
Don't mistake a logo for the buying committee
An account can look wonderfully tidy in a CRM. One company name, a single account owner and perhaps a reassuring amount of green signals. Often though, inside the business, it’s considerably messier.
Technology wants simpler infrastructure, operations wants fewer delays, while finance wants a return it can defend. On top, the executive sponsor wants to know whether any of this meaningfully advances the strategy. The same proposition needs to flex to four different conversations.
A list of job titles won’t tell you how those conversations connect. Who trusts whom? Whose concerns can stop the investment? Who has to make the thing work after everyone else has celebrated the signature?
Your champion might love the proposition and still be unable to get it funded, while someone who has never clicked your content might hold the deciding vote.
“A stakeholder can love your proposition without being able to move it forward.”
That sentiment should make us a little less comfortable with the engagement score.
Value has to travel
When I talk about “how value moves”, I mean something quite practical.
Let's say that a team uses your solution and saves time. Their manager sees more capacity, finance considers the chance to avoid additional cost, and an executive mulls over the use case for a wider transformation programme. Those connections between stakeholders can make an investment really compelling, but they won’t necessarily form themselves.
Someone needs to demonstrate the result, explain what it means and establish whether it can be repeated elsewhere. Otherwise, a useful improvement simply stays a useful improvement in one discrete corner of the business.
The same applies before a purchase. Recognising a problem is the beginning, but validating the solution, agreeing the priority and approving the financial outlay all require something different.
This is often where a pursuit stalls, because the person experiencing the benefit can’t give the person approving the investment enough of a compelling reason to act.
“Value becomes commercially powerful when those who experience the benefit can help those who authorise the investment to see why it matters so much.”
Another campaign won’t automatically fix that, but a credible business case just might.
Stop sending the same delivery
Warne’s variations offer a useful way to think about a stuck account. If the response isn’t changing, what are we learning and what should we change next?
In ABM, it’s tempting to answer a stalled opportunity with more of whatever we already do. More content, outreach and invitations. Surely something will land. No. On the contrary, it's better to give proper consideration to what's actually holding up the next decision.
Technical validation? An operational owner who hasn’t been consulted? Evidence for finance? Agreement about who carries the implementation risk? These are all very different obstacles and they need bespoke responses.
A technically strong proposal can stall because nobody has involved the people expected to deliver it, an executive sponsor can support an initiative without securing budget, while a pilot can succeed but remain in limbo because nobody ever made the case for expansion.
Broader coverage helps us find these gaps, but progress comes from addressing them. The account plan should always tell us what needs to happen next, who needs to be involved and what they need from us to act.
Everyone’s busy, but playing in isolation
We should ask the same type of questions inside our own organisations.
Marketing knows the customer’s strategic ambition, sales has a good handle on the commercial constraints, customer success knows whether adoption is working, product knows whether the next use case is feasible, and RevOps can help bring those perspectives together.
On paper, that’s a pretty handy team but, in reality, they might all be playing different games.
Customer success is trying to rescue adoption while sales prepares an expansion proposal and marketing is promoting a priority the customer abandoned three months ago. Worse still, an executive turns up for a conversation without knowing what the account team heard last week.
The customer gets to join the dots. Lucky them.
In the largest pursuits I’ve been part of, a shared understanding of the account, the people shaping the decision and the value we could create was central to our approach.
That shared view has to change what people do. Insight sitting in a system, or in someone’s head, helps nobody if it misses the next important conversation.
“An account strategy is only as good as how well customer insight travels through our own organisation.”
Account-based growth needs go-to-market teams to make decisions together, using what each knows about the customer.
A healthy dashboard can hide a stuck deal
Engagement metrics have a job to do – they show where interest exists and where we should investigate. But an account review needs to go much further.
Can the customer explain the outcome they want? Have the relevant stakeholders agreed that it matters? Is there credible evidence behind our proposition? Are the people responsible for implementation involved?
In the case of existing customers – are we delivering what they bought us to achieve?
I find it useful to consider three measures in unison:
- Commercial impact: pipeline, new business, retention and expansion.
- Stakeholder progression: agreement being built, concerns being resolved and the steps towards a decision being taken.
- Value realised: outcomes the customer is achieving, and whether those outcomes justify further investment.
“Engagement shows interest. Progression shows whether the customer is closer to a decision. Realised value gives them a reason to continue the relationship.”
A meeting is activity, agreement on a funded priority is progress, while a delivered outcome is evidence the customer can use to make the next investment decision. If all we can report is the activity, then we have a lot more work to do.
AI can spot the pattern, but someone still has to read the game
AI can make fragmented account information easier to use by surfacing recurring priorities, highlighting missing evidence and presenting signs that momentum has stalled.
That matters when useful information is scattered across systems, meeting notes and individual account teams.
But, let's not forget, spotting a pattern doesn’t tell you what it means or what you should do.
Has engagement dropped because the budget disappeared, a new leader changed the priorities, or because we've left an awkward question to linger?
Each of these scenarios warrants a different response, and someone still needs to investigate, apply judgement and decide what to do about it.
“Technology can inform those conversations. It cannot establish the relationship on our behalf.”
Senior relationships depend on people earning trust with people. AI can improve the preparation, but it can’t get you through that final gruelling mile.
Play for the result
Richards offers us a memorable image of impact and Warne reminds us about the importance of variation. The useful question for ABM is how we can collectively turn our own capabilities into customer progress.
Before the next account review, I’d be asking three questions:
- Can we explain how this customer makes a decision, beyond the org chart?
- Do our teams share a view of what’s moving, what’s stuck and what needs to happen moving forward?
- Can we show what the customer is gaining from the relationship?
If the answers are vague, another burst of activity is unlikely to clear things up.
We need to understand how a need becomes a priority, how evidence builds confidence and how people reach agreement. Then we need to deliver outcomes that give the customer a reason to invest again. That’s account-based growth in a nutshell.
The next account review needs an answer to, “what has changed for the customer?” before moving on to the next slide.
