When I was running Enterprise Marketing for edX we evaluated ABM platforms and ultimately selected and deployed 6sense. I thought I would take a moment to publish a few insights from that evaluation experience:

1) Assemble stakeholders

Before engaging ABM vendors, we had dozens of meetings with sales and marketing to educate everyone on the benefits of ABM and scope out what we wanted ABM to look like at our company. We presented on company staff meetings and gained alignment all the way up to the CEO level.

This was a critical first step in the process. By the time we were ready to engage with vendors we had a coalition of stakeholders bought-in and excited about ABM. They were well prepared for the cost, the time and effort it would take to get it up and running, the support we would need from operations, the way it would change the daily motion of marketing and selling, and the transformational benefits it would drive for our revenue.

2) Involve sales stakeholders in meetings with ABM vendors

Sales was involved in many of the ABM vendor meetings and demos. Marketing led the engagement but sales was a critical stakeholder. In particular, it was important for our sales leaders to view the sales demos conducted by the ABM vendors.

• What does it look like in email and as a component of the Lead / Contact / Account / Opportunity object in Salesforce?
  
• How does a sales rep interact with the ABM platform while organizing their daily activity list? How does a sales leader use it while reviewing dashboards and reports to understand pipeline? How does a marketer interact with the ABM platform to run campaigns to in-market segments?

3) Ask the ABM vendor to show you your own journey

A fun and informative thing to do with the ABM vendors was to ask them to do an ad hoc demo showing us our own journey through their system.

• When did we first show up on their radar screen as “in-market” for an ABM solution?
  
• What were the specific triggers that identified us as in-market (web searches, specific keywords, web site hits, content reviewed, etc.)? — “Hey, I remember downloading that analyst paper, that was me!”
  
• What marketing and sales programs did they launch at us? — “Oh yeah, I remember seeing those banner ads on LinkedIn!” “Ha ha, I remember all those voicemails your BDR left me!”
  
• When did we engage with their marketing/sales?
  
• When did they first attach a contact name to our account record and how did they do that?
  
• Can they show us the chart of our “hotness” score and explain the different events that changed the score over time?
  
• What does it look like for the sales person end user?
  
• How would sales management see our opportunity as a component of their pipeline reporting?
  
• Have they detected which other ABM vendors they are competing against, and how do they know that? Did they get it right?

This was a very powerful way for us, as the sales prospect, to see a real-world example of how the technology worked.

The evaluation process took about 6 months. We ultimately selected 6sense but we also saw excellent demos from the other finalist, DemandBase.

Do you have tips from your own evaluation of ABM vendors? If so, please share them in the comments below.

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