When I wrote Account Planning in Salesforce in 2013 my primary focus was to help sales professionals and account teams to maximize their revenue from their existing customers. I may have made a mistake.

While the book has been successful – it went to #1 on Amazon, has shipped more than 10,000 copies, and is still selling in reasonable numbers – I think I might have under-served the marketing profession by not allocating more space in the book to the role of marketing. I will try to redress that in part here.

In the first chapter of the book I wrote …

As 2013 unfolds, my prediction is that Account Planning will eclipse general marketing as a source of opportunities for revenue growth among winning sales professionals.

Over the past few years, since the publication of the book, we have seen Account Planning explode as a material source of pipeline development, and in a significant number of cases we have seen progressive marketing organizations play a material role in this important discipline.

The ubiquity of the Internet, your customer’s ability to find out about your products and services as quickly as you can yourself, the impact on social networks as a driver of influence and preference, the pervasiveness of mobile devices providing always-on communication, and the growing barriers to customer acquisition all mean that you can no longer be a generalist in your market.

As companies experience the pressure of more knowledgeable buyers – a pressure felt most pointedly by sales and marketing – there is a need to get ahead of price dominated sales conversations. We have seen progressive companies take a more proactive role in account planning, and marketing can often be a core first player in these initiatives. This is one of the reasons behind the increasing popularity of Account Based Marketing (ABM).

I am delighted to see this account based marketing approach gathering momentum where sales and marketing activity can be truly confluent and deliver synergistic special value. I am passionate about the value of account planning and one of the design objectives we had for our Account Manager product was to be the collaboration framework for sales and marketing.

Account Planning is an organizational discipline and Account Based Marketing has a critical role to play. ABM borders on business development, and this is where the lines can get a little fuzzy. It means that Marketing needs to stay very close to selling and the account strategy and that is not as common as we’d like to see. It is really important to consciously manage the hand-off from marketing to sales, recognizing that applying marketing strategy to sales plans, and influencing the development of the plans can be very effective.

We have seen ABM work very well, but unfortunately there are many situations where ABM fails, causes headaches for the account team, and becomes a nuisance to the customer.

Here are the 7 most common reasons why ABM fails.

1. Lack of account insights – If you don’t know anything about the account, the people in the account, or their business needs, it is hard to develop an effective marketing strategy for the account. In my book I outlined three main principles of account planning: Research for Insight, Integrate for Velocity and Focus for Impact. Research is critical to ABM. ABM should help to create, not just communicate, value. If marketing has not done the research, the insights they bring will be hollow, and that’s worse than no communication.
2. Lack of alignment to sales goals – Marketing needs to know what sales need to accomplish in order to construct the strategies and activities to deliver on those goals. Better-organized account teams have the marketing resource as a report (perhaps dotted line) to the account manager. That makes sure that everyone is on the same page.
3. Overly broad deployment – When marketing tries to take on too broad a role in a specific account or too many ‘specific’ accounts at the same time, it typically does not work. The very nature of ABM is that is has to be account specific and as I said in Account Planning in Salesforce, you need to Focus for Impact.
4. Lack of accountability – If marketing is involved in the account plan, then their role is to help develop pipeline in the account. Too often marketing is involved at the front-end but then hand off to sales and wash their hands of the outcome. That’s not a good answer or a recipe for success.
5. Lack of resources – ABM requires meaningful resources. This is particularly true if Account Planning is critical to your company. Ideally you should have ABM managers as part of the account team. In Account Planning in Salesforce I talk about one of the roles of marketing as developing Marketing OSAs (Objectives, Strategies, and Actions), a critical part of the account planning and execution process. Someone from Marketing needs to have the aptitude and bandwidth to do this properly if they are going to have a role.
6. Lack of customer alignment – account planning, and consequently ABM, must be all about the customer. More than your own solutions you need to know the customer’s world and understand how you can help. Marketing needs to be authentic and grounded in the customer’s success. Without that it will be come a distraction for sales and will be viewed by the customer as a nuisance.
7. Undifferentiated tactic execution – attempting to say the same things to targeted large accounts as you do to the general market will not work. Using generic messages will not work. We know this is true. In fact, if you are positioning yourself as a strategic partner for an account, and they perceive that they are getting the same messages as everyone else, it will in fact damage the quality of relationship.

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Donal Daly is Executive Chairman of Altify having founded the company in 2005. He is author of numerous books and ebooks including the Amazon #1 Best-sellers Account Planning in Salesforce and Tomorrow | Today: How AI Impacts How We Work, Live, and Think. Altify is Donal’s fifth global business enterprise.