Scaling Success with ABM: Avishek Chakrobarty on Sales, Marketing, AI, and Revenue Growth

Avishek Chakrobarty, Head of Global ABM Centre of Excellence at Kyndryl, shares his journey from enterprise sales to working on ABM and Growth Marketing roles. He discusses the evolution of ABM, the importance of sales-marketing alignment, and how AI-powered insights are transforming customer engagement, personalization, and revenue growth in today’s competitive landscape.

Welcome to the interview series, Avishek. Tell us about your journey to becoming a marketing leader.

I started off as an enterprise sales executive back in 2011 and handled a dual role of hunter & farmer. As of today, my career can be split into equal parts between sales and marketing. After having spent a significant time in sales roles ranging from corporate banking to building B2B sales channels from scratch, I got an interesting opportunity to be part of a role in marketing that worked in the space between core sales and marketing. That was my first exposure to enterprise marketing, driving new logos business. Since then, I have handled multiple roles (ABM, Field Marketing, Demand Generation) and led a global growth marketing team. The origins in sales have stood me in good stead for all my marketing roles and helped me bring greater collaboration with sales and augment business efforts successfully.

Could you walk us through your approach to creating and executing successful ABM programs?

I believe in building programs based on a first principal approach, as long as we stick to the basics and stay true to core objectives, any program will have the potential to succeed. What is the goal of ABM? To engage with customers as a market in its own right and provide a bespoke experience of your brand to build and strengthen relationships and reputation, so with that in mind, as long as we keep the customer at the centre of all planning and tactics, keep things relevant and impactful for customers, I am confident the 3 R’s of ABM will always be achieved.

How do you think account-based marketing (ABM) has evolved from a concept to a strategic need?

If you strip away all the jargon and tech that surrounds ABM today, you will realize that at its core ABM is a plain and simple good common-sense approach. In its initial days, this was a concept being deployed by a handful of large enterprises and as they started reaping the benefits, the adoption spread. Now, we know that ABM is not “just another” marketing channel. I would go out on a limb and say it’s not even a Marketing program. Successful ABM done the right way is an organizational mindset and an enterprise growth strategy involving multiple business teams working in tandem to drive toward a single objective. The complexity, uncertainties, and competition in today’s world necessitate the need for an ABM strategy simply because the stronger your relationship and higher the reputation with your customers, the greater the competitive edge you will have to win business.

“The world necessitates ABM strategy simply because the stronger your relationship and higher the reputation with your customers, the greater the competitive edge you will have to win business.”

How has the close alignment between the different revenue functions benefited marketing specifically?

It’s common knowledge that siloed marketing programs disconnected from on ground needs and priorities rarely drive any ROI. Increasingly, marketing functions are transitioning into being one of the revenue impacting functions and as such not being aligned with the other revenue functions within the org is a sure shot recipe for disaster. I feel, the alignment brings in customer focus, relevancy in approach and messaging as well as a clear, common goal (revenue growth) that marketing and revenue functions are striving towards, and if all oars row in the same rhythm, it’s bound to move the boat faster and true to direction.

Could you tell us about your most challenging yet rewarding marketing campaign experience?

To me, the most challenging but ultimately highly rewarding as well as professionally satisfying marketing campaign was called “Project Bull’s Eye” with my previous employer. The objective was to open up a significant business opportunity pipeline for the organization’s offerings in the US market through a concerted and sustained effort. We zeroed in on an industry where our product offering had the most relevance and had customer stories across the globe. Based on this, we designed an always on omnichannel waterfall campaign model which had a digital brand air cover that fed into subsequent connected tactics with channels firing in trigger-based sequences. This was the most complex campaign design I had worked on that incorporated Paid Digital, 3^rd Party Digital, Organic, Events, Emails, Alliances, and SDR touchpoints orchestrated with high usage of retargeting, intent tracking, and automated nurtures spanning over 6 months. This allowed us to open up a significant $XX Million pipeline in the chosen industry as well as serve as a template to deploy across other industry verticals.

You’ve mentioned the “one-to-one” and “one-to-few” ABM models. Can you share how these models work in practice and how they help create personalized customer experiences?

Absolutely! The “one-to-one” and “one-to-few” ABM models are pivotal in creating personalized customer experiences, and here’s how they work in practice:

The one-to-one ABM model is all about deep customization. This approach is typically reserved for our most strategic clients. Here, one marketer is dedicated to up to three accounts, becoming an integral part of the account team. The marketer works closely with the sales team to understand the unique needs, challenges, and goals of each account. This deep dive allows us to tailor our marketing efforts specifically to each account, ensuring that every interaction is highly relevant and personalized. For instance, we might develop bespoke content, personalized events, and targeted campaigns that address the specific pain points and objectives of each account.

On the other hand, the one-to-few ABM model focuses on a cluster of strategic clients or the next tier of accounts. Accounts are grouped based on similar issues or characteristics, and one marketer is responsible for up to three clusters, each containing 5 to 15 accounts. This approach allows us to scale our efforts while still maintaining a high level of personalization. We create customized campaigns and content that resonate with the common challenges and goals of the cluster, ensuring that our messaging is relevant and impactful. For example, we might host industry-specific events, develop cluster-specific thought leadership content, and execute targeted advertising campaigns that speak directly to the needs of the cluster.

From a reporting perspective, how has the change in focus on tracking pipeline and ROI, rather than vanity metrics, made marketing efforts more meaningful?

A common pitfall is to revert back to the demand generation model where one tends to measure success by the volume of leads (MQL/SQL) generated by a program. However, staying true to the philosophy of ABM, what matters most is how you are building stronger relationships, and positioning yourself as a partner of repute, these in turn impact the pipeline of business created. I strongly feel that measuring and tracking pipeline and/or ROI metrics bring in a revenue growth mindset and focus which is the ultimate objective. Tracking Relationship and Reputation metrics act as guides as to whether your ABM efforts are moving in the right direction. Tracking and measuring metrics that matter to business is obviously a must rather than vanity metrics that really don’t drive any action or impact.

What is your experience leveraging AI-enabled tools for ABM initiatives?

AI has seen a boom across business functions and ABM is no exception. The judicious use of AI where it matters can help an ABMer achieve the following –

1. Deeper insights about account priorities, pain points, and opportunities to show value.
2. Achieve faster turnaround times to ensure relevant messaging is delivered at the right tie to the right audience.
3. Ingest, process, and extract actionable insights from a vast range of data like engagement patterns, intent signals, and account behavior to act in a timely and impactful manner to drive the quality of engagements.

Outside of these major benefits, the use of AI tools also helps an ABMer in a range of tactical activities to surround the account with information that matters to them.

What advice do you have for marketers on building and leading high-performing marketing teams?

Based on my experience, I would advise that any marketer setting out to build high-performance marketing teams needs to ensure the following –

1. Diversity of experience and skill sets in a team makes it more resilient, innovative, and effective.
2. Clarity of a common objective and well defined individual goals that feed into the team’s objective is a must to drive high performance
3. Always cultivate a collaborative mindset because successful marketing cannot be done in silos
4. Provide an environment where experimentation is encouraged and failures while experimenting are not punished.
5. Continuous learning and curiosity must be supported to drive innovation as well as be at the edge of new technology/approaches.