The three 'Ms' of account-based scaling

Fundamental to developing any account growth program is how to tackle the scale challenge.

Whatever your program’s evolutionary path, finding the best way to scale into more accounts is a critical milestone in establishing your account based go-to-market strategy. But creating an operating model for scale that drives demand as well as keeping communications differentiated and relevant to a diverse, growing account audience… that can be a little daunting!

Fear not! I think there are three fundamental factors growth marketers can keep front of mind to make tackling their scale challenge a little easier. So, inspired by Momentum ITSMA’s 3Rs of account-based measurement (reputation, relationships, and revenue), I propose the 3Ms of account-based scaling!

The first is Music. Specifically, finding the business music in your messaging. Building trust through engagement requires a sustained business focused narrative and being able to execute comms quickly. So, make sure you have messaging frameworks in place that are built around persona and industry business themes, and keep research and insights running in the background so your proposition and messaging stays fresh and relevant to every account.

The second M stands for Modes. As you prepare to scale, you will need to segment and prioritize accounts into clusters. Develop a simple scoring framework to plot your accounts on a grid. Your scoring doesn’t have to carry hundreds of different data points. But make sure you map accounts consistently against the value they bring to you (e.g., current footprint, relationship coverage, engagement, pipeline, etc.) versus the value you can bring them (e.g., intent signals, insights into account transformation initiatives, potential business case value, etc). Once accounts are scored this way, it becomes much clearer what your priority engagement modes need to be to drive scale. For example, you’ll likely find clusters of accounts where engagement needs to be led with comms to certain CXOs, or where there is obvious cross/up-sell opportunity. Or perhaps where there needs to be a broader push around portfolio awareness.

The last M is for Modules. As your scale program starts to take flight, there will be an increasing demand placed on content. So, start thinking about your content strategy as a set of content modules tied to your customer journey. This content journey is likely to cover a wide range of topics, from thought leadership around industry challenges, persona specific materials, to case studies and customer references. And remember all this content will need to be supported with modules of channel marketing and sales comms (or enablement). Over time you might introduce content management tools, Martech, and dynamic content engines. Being able to integrate journey aligned content into these platforms will be much easier if you modularise your content strategy from the outset.