To drive adoption, CloudPay positioned its intent platform (Demandbase) as a daily dashboard for AEs. Salespeople start their day by seeing which of their nominated target accounts are actively engaging, turning an abstract marketing tool into a tangible, prioritized sales workflow.
CloudPay stopped using the word "lead" and adopted "signal" instead. This semantic shift prevents sales reps from chasing a single junior contact and encourages them to research and target the entire buying committee (CFO, CHRO) at the interested account.
To overcome the perception that ABM is just a marketing initiative, leadership considered renaming it "Account-Based Selling." This simple change in terminology helps position the strategy as a sales-centric approach, emphasizing that the AE is in the driver's seat, not just receiving leads.
To overcome internal assumptions that only the "head of payroll" mattered, the marketing team analyzed past wins. The data showed that 17 different job roles were involved in the customer's buying process, providing definitive proof to justify broadening their account targeting.
A pure ABM strategy operates on your company's intent to target, not the customer's intent to buy. This creates a necessary but nerve-wracking lag time before pipeline builds, as you must wait for contracts to expire or needs to arise. Leadership must manage this expectation.
CloudPay stopped attributing opportunities to single sources like "marketing" or "sales." Analysis showed multiple departments influenced every deal, rendering attribution a source of pointless internal arguments. They still use multi-touch attribution at the campaign level, but not to assign inter-departmental credit.
To create genuine alignment, CloudPay's CMO changed his personal KPI from lead volume to the dollar value of sales-ready pipeline, a number co-signed by sales. This makes marketing directly accountable for generating valuable opportunities and forces them to operate like sales.
Despite generating 1,000 leads a month (3x previous volume), CloudPay's marketing team saw the sales pipeline's dollar value fall. This forced a radical shift from a volume-based "net fishing" approach to a quality-focused, account-based "spear phishing" strategy.