As a B2B marketer, we know it can take a village to increase brand awareness and nurture customers–all while generating your top focus: new high-quality pipeline. If you are a marketing team of 5 you are that village. And we get it, sometimes you can't hire for every ideal position out there, let alone silo someone into a direct ABM role right away. In the case that you're a team of 20+, you'll start to be able to get more focused and not only hire across key roles but get more strategic in building out an ABM-specific dept.
Already part of that large marketing team? Great! This blueprint can help validate your existing structure or inspire a new one for your team. This can look like splitting roles based on senior/junior titles to take items—as well as direct reports—off your marketing lead’s already heavy plate. From one marketing team to another, we believe there is always a way to make room for more targeted projects as you scale your ABM strategy.
Marketing Team Breakdown for ABM
Below, we’ve broken down the goals, and skill sets, of what we think are the primary B2B marketing department hubs—corporate marketing, demand generation, product marketing, digital marketing, social media, creative, and web design—to help illustrate how you can hire as you grow AND how these teams support ABM.
Ready to ABMify your marketing team? Check out our All-Inclusive ABM Hiring Kit for a detailed breakdown of the most sought-after skills for ABM marketers.
Hiring to build
Ah, the growing pains of a marketing team. Sharing responsibilities and being granted the honor of a hybrid role can seem like a lot, but it's all in the strategic overlap that covers all bases of your ABM strategy. Let's take corporate and digital marketing. Both teams contribute to brand awareness but one is focused on timing and messaging. While the other is focused on increased visibility, both have the same goal to generate best-fit opportunities.
Our friends at Auditoria know a thing or two when it comes to covering all bases. They nail ABM with a mighty 2-person marketing team.From HubSpot engagement solutions to Sendoso automated gifting, to RollWorks display advertising, they curated a martech stack to help power targeted ABM programs against their competition.
“With a core list of 100 target accounts, we’re not “spraying and praying” everyone. We use various tools to stay in front of the accounts we care most about and we prioritize them at all stages of the funnel so that Auditoria stays top of mind.” — Nick Ezzo, VP Marketing at Auditoria
We know it takes time for smaller teams to find and create a seamless ABM workflow. It may feel reactive, but keep in mind that you are planting the seeds for a streamlined ABM process, not to mention better-aligned revenue teams. When in doubt, focus on building your team based on your customer needs. As a rule of thumb, build up from the 20% of work that brings in 80% of the revenue.
Expanding to support
As you grow, hybrid roles transition into a singular focus (Whew!) And just like that, you make room for a more organized ABM-focused team. Departments become streamlined and promotions are afoot allowing for ownership of multiple projects.
It's important to note that with bigger teams the goal may not necessarily be to increase volume, but rather to improve efficiency. Our friends at Snowflake took a ‘divide and conquer’ approach so the teams could focus more on optimizing ABM programs for consistency, relevancy, and personalization. They created multi-channel ABM marketing campaigns, 1:1 account-focused landing pages, and coordinated with traffic-driving programs to increase SDR-booked meetings.
“We needed to make sure that when you see an ABM campaign, it’s reflective of not only sales input, but also product marketing, partner marketing, field marketing, and our SDRs. We needed a way to co-create one cohesive message for our key accounts.” — Hillary Carpio, Director of ABM, Snowflake
Expanded ABM Mindset
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Invest in marketing tech stacks. Give in already to automation and other technological mastery to take the manual work and messy spreadsheets out of sight.
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Make a habit of auditing ABM strategies because you know, there is always room for improvement.
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There is no one way of scaling ABM. If anything the bigger takeaway is not about focusing on your ABM goals, it’s about enabling success for revenue teams.
You made it to the end, hooray! Check out our All-Inclusive ABM Hiring Kit for a detailed breakdown of the most sought-after skills for ABM marketers.
About the Author
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