Sector
Account-Based Marketing For Professional Services Firms
Your partners know which client relationships matter most and which target organisations are worth pursuing. The difficulty is turning that individual knowledge into one shared plan that marketing and client teams can act on.
myGTMplan identifies the priority clients and prospects, maps their buying groups and sets out the actions required to strengthen relationships, create opportunities and win work.
It is presented on two practical pages your partners will use, with the research and guidance needed to make it work.
Why It Is Harder In Professional Services
Relationships now have to survive a process. FT Longitude surveyed 805 business leaders, half of them at C level. Around 80% are putting more contracts out to competitive tender, many retendering at least every two years, and almost 90% research a firm before inviting it to pitch. The work that decides whether you get invited happens before anyone calls you.
A board decides, not a buyer. The same survey found an average of nine senior executives involved in a strategic engagement, with the chief executive taking part in more than half and the finance director in 41%. Your client partner knows the sponsor well. The firm knows almost nothing about the other eight.
Being the incumbent no longer protects you. Source Global Research asked 150 clients what they planned to do next, and 88% said they were likely to appoint a firm they had never worked with before. Being trusted and being reappointed have quietly become different things.
The growth is where your partners already are. Every company in the Inflexion Group ABM Benchmarking Study 2024, 32 large organisations, said the point of its ABM programme was growing business with clients it already had.
What Your Plan Contains
Illustrative example, not client data.
The ABM Strategy page.
Your targets by year and by month, the kind of client you are aiming at, the people who now make the decision, your conversion rates, and the resource behind the number. In a firm that resource is partner and director hours, the thing you actually sell, so the maths shows what the plan costs in chargeable time before anyone signs up.
The ABM Playbook page.
How a client or target moves from a name on a list to a signed engagement across eight stages, with an owner and one measure to watch at each. Built around the two places firms lose work: getting onto the panel before the tender is written, and keeping the relationship alive between pieces of work.
The guidance to run it.
A full presentation behind the two pages, covering how to choose each tactic and put it into practice.
Your Three Tiers, Set For A Firm
One to one.
Your largest clients, plus the two or three pursuits where a single mandate would change your year. Each gets its own research: what is pressing on that client, who has arrived or left, and when the panel comes up.
One to few.
Small groups of clients sharing a real situation: the same regulation landing on them, the same kind of transaction, the same retender date. You build one proposition for the group, then adjust it lightly for each.
One to many, run programmatically.
Organisations that fit your ideal client profile where no partner has a relationship yet. You score them, follow them by account rather than by enquiry, and work them steadily.
Your referral sources get their own tier.
Banks, brokers and other intermediaries want something different from a client, and they are usually the least planned part of a firm's growth.
How the work splits across the tiers is settled in the workshop, against partner time rather than budget.
How It Runs
The research comes first. Accounts are scored, the market sized, and the real decision-making groups mapped inside the clients and targets you named, before anyone sits down. Then comes the Insight Workshop, where your partners and marketing lead build the strategy page with that research in front of them. The Solutions Workshop follows, settling the playbook, the tier split and the stage measures.
Marketing has influence over the account list but no authority, so partners have to be in the room rather than briefed afterwards. Getting them there is the expensive part. Research first is what makes the time worth spending, because the session is spent deciding rather than swapping impressions.
Where AI Does The Work
AI does the research and the first drafts. Nine executives across a client's leadership, how long each has been in post, when the panel comes up, the regulation heading their way. This is work partners never get to, because it is not chargeable and belongs to nobody. Clients assume you are using it already. Source Global Research found 90% expect professional services to change a great deal within two years because of AI. The judgement stays with your partners, and with someone who has trained more than 400 enterprise marketers to make these calls.
Questions And Answers
Q. Our growth comes from referrals and existing clients. What does a plan add?
A. It protects both. At the moment they depend on whichever partner happens to remember.
Your existing clients and the people who send work your way each get a named owner and a regular pattern of contact, so nothing rests on memory. The findings above are the reason to write it down: clients now put work out to tender, and being trusted no longer guarantees being reappointed.
Q. Our partners will not give this the time.
A. Partner hours are what the firm sells, so the plan is built to use as few of them as possible.
The research is done before anyone sits down. Your partners join two working sessions, and what comes out is two pages. If it needed a standing committee and monthly meetings, it would have failed already.
Q. We already have a key client programme. Is this not the same thing?
A. A key client programme looks after your largest clients well, and usually stops there.
This adds the clients just below them, the organisations where no partner has a relationship yet, and a specific action with a named owner at every step, rather than relying on good intentions.
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.