How Teams Are Leaving Buyers Hanging Halfway Through Their Journey

During an ABM Done Right Podcast on Rebooting Content to Support ABM & Sales, Cassandra Jowett (PathFactory’s Senior Director of Marketing) mentioned that she likes to compare the buyer’s journey to the “floor is lava” game that kids play. This kids game also became a popular Netflix game show. 

Just like the game show you have all these jumping points to get buyers to the safe harbor and you want to make sure they don’t fall into the lava halfway through their journey. You want buyers to jump from one rock to the next one and so on and you want to lay out the path to revenue in a very clear way.

The problem is….Most GTM teams do not lay out the path. They focus on getting accounts into the pipeline and put little attention to what happens afterward…putting the blame on sales for not closing the account.

In this podcast, Kristina shares:

1. How there’s often no thought about the content that’s needed to drive the selling conversations that need to happen to create the a-ha moment and to influence the internal conversations that are happening without sales and marketing being invited into the room.

2. How most teams are missing a middle layer that lies between marketing, sales and customer success teams. A layer that we call account-based enablement.

3. Why teams need account profiles for their tier 1 must wins and the intelligence that most GTM teams do not have on their target accounts.  

4. Opportunities for teams to demonstrate greater relevance across all channels

5. How teams need content that meets specific buyer expectations - Brandon Redlinger recently posted that 78% of executive buyers claim the quantity of content provided does not meet expectations.

6.  How teams need content for Specific Selling Conversations and the Internal Conversations That Sales Is Not Privy Too. In most cases, content is designed to support campaigns vs. the “selling conversations” and “interactions” sales need to close accounts. We're leaving sales to their own devices.

7. How teams need account-specific buyer messaging - Richa Pande (Global Head of ABM and Content Strategy for HP) says that sales, marketing and revenue teams need greater customer obsession. The messaging should be customer-led. This means value props should be designed for specific customer needs, not what's available in solution stable to sell. Value props should be custom designed to the unique opportunity in each account. 

8. How teams need account-based conversation support - In many cases, teams are providing the wrong training. Growth problem? Our reps must not understand the product well enough. Trouble scheduling meetings with the decision-maker? Our reps must not be explaining the value of our solution well enough. Losing on price? Our reps must not be showing why our product is better than the competition. All too often, we throw product training at the problem and wonder why we don't see results. All too often, we see executives complaining on LinkedIn about the sheer volume of product-centric or supplier-centric outreach hitting their inbox. No matter how much product training we provide - talking about our product rarely compels a customer to change when they don't believe they need to. What if we helped sales and revenue teams engage in a two-way conversation that helped future customers understand the gaps and the costs/risks of their current approach? What if we helped teams stop responding to pre-defined needs?  What if we actually helped teams go beyond piquing interest (which put them into the pipeline) and create the buying vision across the organization? Because there is so much focus on sourcing the pipeline with ABM, teams are missing the next steps, the interactions and the experiences that would drive stage progression, shorten sales cycles and acce