Sector
Account-Based Marketing For The Energy Sector
Energy is a market where much of the buying calendar can be anticipated. Regulatory deadlines, network price controls, planning consents and major investment programmes are public, giving suppliers earlier visibility of where opportunities may emerge.
myGTMplan turns that visibility into a shared key account plan. Your priority accounts, the people involved in each decision and the actions needed to build preference before a formal buying process starts, on two pages your team can use.
Why It Is Harder In Energy
The dates are published. Almost nobody plans against them. The Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme runs in four-year phases, each with a qualification date and a compliance deadline set years in advance. Any UK business with 250 or more employees is caught, and the audit has to cover at least 95% of energy use across buildings, transport and industrial processes, so a fleet sits inside the same assessment as an estate. On the supply side, Ofgem fixes network spending five years at a time, and the current control period carries a pipeline of around £90 billion. Your buyer's deadline and your buyer's budget are both already set, and both are public.
The person who wants it is not the person who signs. The case is built by whoever owns the problem: an energy or facilities manager, a fleet manager, a property lead, sometimes a sustainability director. Where the site is leased, the landlord holds a veto nobody thought to check. Then finance rules on the payback and procurement runs the process. Most suppliers know that group well and have never spoken to finance or procurement, which is why so many conversations stop after the survey.
Selling to a utility means getting on the list first. Under the Procurement Act 2023, a utility can set up a qualifying utilities dynamic market and send the tender notice only to member firms. The UVDB scheme run by Achilles works this way, used by water, gas and electricity companies across Britain. Qualification is the sale before the sale.
What Your Plan Contains
Illustrative example, not client data.
The ABM Strategy page.
Your targets by year and by month, the organisations you are selling to, the people who decide, from energy, fleet and facilities through to finance, your conversion rates and the headcount behind the number. It is set against the compliance and investment calendar, so the plan says which year each opportunity lands rather than pretending it is all available now.
The ABM Playbook page.
How an account moves from a name on a list to a signed contract across eight stages, with an owner and one measure to watch at each. Built around the places these deals actually stall: the finance stage, where the payback case has to stand up without you in the room, and the gap after the survey, where a grid connection, a landlord consent or a prequalification quietly stops everything.
The guidance to run it.
A full presentation behind the two pages, covering how to choose each tactic and put it to work.
Your Three Tiers, Set For Energy
One to one.
The accounts where one contract carries years of revenue: a multi-site estate, a large manufacturer, a network operator or a generator, each researched on its own terms.
One to few.
You group accounts sharing a real situation: the same compliance deadline, the same technology, the same lease or renewal date, the same price control. One proposition serves the group, adjusted lightly for each.
One to many, run programmatically.
Here the regulations do your segmentation for you. Every organisation above the ESOS threshold is a definable, listable market you can score and follow by account.
Your influencers get their own tier.
Lead assessors, consultants, engineering firms and installers shape more shortlists than suppliers realise, and are often the way in.
How It Runs
The research comes first. Accounts are scored, the market sized, and the real buying groups mapped inside the organisations you named, before anyone meets. Then comes the Insight Workshop, where your sales and marketing leads build the strategy page with that research in front of them. The Solutions Workshop settles the playbook, the tier split and the stage measures.
The research usually turns up a renewal or notification date nobody had written down, and that reorders the plan on the spot.
Where AI Does The Work
AI does the research and the first drafts. Tracking who qualifies for ESOS and when they last notified, watching planning consents, fleet renewals, capital announcements and changes of energy manager across hundreds of accounts is continuous work no team keeps up with by hand. McKinsey found 60% of market leaders reporting double-digit growth against 21% of laggards in its most recent global B2B survey. The judgement stays with your team, and with someone who has trained more than 400 enterprise marketers to make these calls.
Questions And Answers
Q. Our contact wants it. Finance keeps putting off the decision.
A. That is a plan that stopped at the person who wanted to buy.
Finance gets its own step in the playbook, with someone responsible for it and a payback case prepared in advance. The argument for the money is ready before finance asks for it, rather than being put together in a rush.
Q. We sell to energy companies and to businesses that use energy. Does one plan cover both?
A. Yes, as two separate groups inside it. They buy in completely different ways, so each gets its own message, its own signs to watch for and its own measures.
It is still one plan, and your sales team works from all of it.
Q. Our sales can take years. How does a yearly plan help?
A. By showing which year each opportunity is likely to land.
The strategy page sets targets by year and by month, so a long sale becomes a sequence you can staff and budget for, and the board sees progress well before the revenue arrives.
Selling Into A Different Sector?
The method is the same. The buying committee, the triggers and the length of the cycle are not.
One plan covering your whole market, across all three tiers.
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.