Weighing The Five Ways To Get Your ABM Plan Built
myGTMplan is one option among several, and for some companies it is not the right one. Working that out now costs less than working it out three months in.
A Template
Cheapest and quickest, and there are decent free ones. It gives you a structure and a prompt to think about the right categories. It gives you no research, no funnel arithmetic, no evidenced market size, and no way of getting your sales director to commit to anything. The blank page is the easy part.
Right answer when your team already agrees on the target accounts and someone in-house has run ABM before. If that is you, take the template and keep your budget.
An Agency
Campaign execution, content at volume, creative quality, and capacity you do not have to hire. What you will not get is a view on which accounts to walk away from, because agencies are paid to run activity, which makes them structurally poor at recommending less of it. The plan also tends to belong to them, so the thinking leaves when the contract ends.
Right answer when you already know what you want run. An agency executing a plan your team owns is a strong combination. An agency writing the strategy it will then be paid to deliver is a conflict you can see from here.
An ABM Platform
Real capability: intent data, orchestration, account-level reporting, and the infrastructure the programmatic tier eventually needs. What it cannot give you is your ICP, your account tiers or a resolution to the disagreement between your two teams. Platforms assume the strategy exists.
Right answer when you know your tiers, you are running programmatic at a scale manual work cannot sustain, and you can say precisely which questions you need it to answer. Buying before the strategy is settled is the most common expensive mistake in early ABM.
Hiring An ABM Specialist
Permanent capability, institutional memory, and someone whose job it is to care about this every day. If account-based growth is central to your strategy, this is the right long-term answer. It is also slow: recruitment takes months, good ABM people are scarce, and a new starter still needs a plan and an agreed account list on day one.
Right answer when the programme already works and volume is the constraint. Not as a way of deciding what the programme should be.
myGTMplan
The part the others do not do: getting your own people to agree one account list, one set of numbers, three tiers of coverage and who does what at each stage, with AI-assisted research underneath and written guidance for every tactic. It will not run your campaigns, build your content or operate your platform.
Right answer when sales and marketing are pulling in different directions, when you have some ABM knowledge but no working plan, or when you are about to spend money on an agency, a platform or a hire and want to know which you actually need.
What It Comes Down To
The four alternatives are all ways of doing more. A template gives you a format, an agency gives you output, a platform gives you infrastructure, a hire gives you capacity. None of them decides what you should be doing, and that decision is where most ABM programmes are actually stuck.
Let's Talk
Bring your numbers and your account list. One conversation will tell you whether myGTMplan fits.
Patrick Rea FCIM
CIM Course Director for Account-Based Marketing
Prefer to write directly? Email is just as welcome as the form.