The primary goal of your onboarding is to make sure your RollWorks program is set up for success. Your dedicated Onboarding Success Manager will guide and enable you every step of the way to make sure you understand how to effectively use all RollWorks platform features to power your account-based program.
There are a few things we recommend doing before you start Onboarding that will help you to be prepared to ensure a smooth and successful experience.
Understanding the calls and sessions we will have together, aligning your key stakeholders and understanding their involvement during the process, and starting to document the components of your ABM program will help to kickstart your Onboarding. This will ensure there are no delays or uncertainties so that we can begin working on your program immediately after the contract signature.
Your onboarding will take 45-60 days to complete
The Onboarding process generally takes 45-60 days to complete after the contract signature. Getting prepared by completing the 4 steps in this article will help accelerate that timeline and get your program off the ground!
The first step will be to align your internal stakeholders and understand who will be involved and needed for the scope of work during Onboarding. Marketing and Sales alignment is key but also having the proper internal resources and understanding their role within the process will help with preparation and ensure a smooth program start. We recommend involving and inviting the following stakeholders to the calls and working sessions we will have together:
- Marketing & Sales Leadership
- Dedicated Marketing point of contact
- Dedicated Sales point of contact
- Marketing Operations and/or CRM administrator
- Technical & Web Development resource
Watch this 3-minute video to learn about the different calls and working sessions we will have together and what stakeholders we recommend attending for each call.
Once you sign your RollWorks contract, the Onboarding process will begin and you will be introduced to your Onboarding Success Manager who will schedule your first call together to review our onboarding process, specifically how we will work together, and your next steps.
The main point of contact will be to liaise with stakeholders at your company to complete the technical and strategy setup with your Onboarding Success Manager. Carving out the time and resources prior to signing your contract is key to a smooth onboarding.
Onboarding will kick off upon contract signature
It is important to note that your Onboarding will kick off upon contract signature and we don’t have to wait until your contract start date. We want to ensure we have ample enough time to train and enable our customers and complete the technical and strategy items required for your program.
One of the first areas we will focus on during Onboarding is completing the technical and platform setup items which are foundational to getting started and unlocking our data and account-based functionalities. This includes placing the RollWorks base pixel and integrating your CRM with the RollWorks platform. Check out below for some resources to get you familiar with those items.
Our Solutions Engineers will guide you along the way
The scope of the technical setup and integrations could seem daunting at first but we are here to help! Your dedicated Onboarding Success Manager with the assistance of our Solutions Engineering Team, will guide you through them to get your RollWorks account successfully and seamlessly plugged into your tech stack.
Connect with your RevOps team or CRM admin to make sure they know you'll need them for a CRM integration. If your company works off of a sprint schedule, carving out that time to complete the integration and getting that scheduled ahead of time will help since your CRM will be integral for pulling in audiences and customization of your program.
In addition to completing your CRM integration within the first few days of Onboarding, it is important that your audiences, including your Target Account Lists and contact lists, live in your CRM and can be imported over to the RollWorks platform. Ensuring the data format is correct is crucial. For example, HubSpot works off of company records for account lists and Salesforce requires a website field on the account record to properly pull in Target Accounts. You can check out the data we import into RollWorks and the data we export in CRM below:
You can share the applicable article(s) below with them so they can best assign and prioritize that integration. This will be a critical first onboarding step as we’ll use your CRM data to dynamically sync over your Account List and any audiences we will use to the RollWorks platform. They will also help with any custom reporting needed to set up within your CRM instance. You can check our CRM install guides below:
Depending on your tech stack and ABM program and priorities, other integrations we may work on together include:
Understanding who owns the tools and has proper admin permissions for setting up these integrations will be helpful when it comes time to integrate them with your RollWorks account.
Your Onboarding Success Manager will get you started with your ABM program and you will kick off your ABM Marketing & Sales collaboration during this period.
After your onboarding graduation, a dedicated Customer Success Manager will help you along your ABM journey with RollWorks.
You can start to brainstorm what your Account Based Program will look like. As you work with our Onboarding team, we will help you prioritize, strategize and implement your program; but having a head start will put you ahead of the pack.
We recommend checking out our blog post on “How to Build a Boss-Approved Account-Based Marketing Project Plan in 5 Steps.”
Some other important things to consider and start to think about for your Account Based Program include:
Strong Sales and Marketing Alignment
It’s never too late or too early to start building a stronger relationship with your Sales team. They’ll be your invaluable partners here and a strong bond will only strengthen your ABM Program.
Two of the strongest plays to come from up-leveling your long-term relationship with sales are:
- Running coordinated campaigns - ultimately these coordinated efforts will yield better results than each team operating in their own silos. This includes aligning on your shared audience, defining shared KPIs, and assigning responsibility on multi-channel plays.
- Close deals faster - targeting your efforts will, over time, result in higher win rates and an overall shorter sales cycle
Need some ideas? Check out these resources for a starting point:
- Article: How to Uplevel your Account-Based Marketing and Sales Alignment
- Workbook: How to Hack Marketing & Sales Alignment
Target Account List & Ideal Customer Profile
We recommend curating a Target Account List that both Marketing and Sales have agreed to prioritize during the beginning of your ABM journey with RollWorks. We’ll be dynamically syncing this list to your RollWorks account from your CRM so brownie points if you enter onboarding with the list already uploaded and tagged in your CRM!
You can check out this article “4 Target Account List Tips (We Learned the Hard Way)" to help you avoid some of the common missteps many companies make when starting an ABM Program.
Another item our Onboarding Team will ask you for in the very beginning is your Ideal Customer Profile Training Data Set. This will be a list of at least 200 company domains that make up your best customers or late-stage opportunities/deals that we’ll use to build an Ideal Customer Profile for you based on firmographic and technographic similarities between your current customers. This will be used for verification purposes but also we can use this while segmenting out your list and we will cover this during our strategy session.
Feel free to check out 3 simple and interactive templates to help you nail exactly which audience you should be going after, and when. These include:
- The ICP Building Template - Find the sweet spot of companies sure to drive business (time after time!)
- TAL Capacity Calculator - Find out how big your target account list needs to be to beat revenue goals and map to each seller’s quota
- Segmentation and Channel Planning Worksheet - Ensure the right message lands with the right audience every single time.
Content Strategy
You can also begin to think about what your Ad Creative will look like for your ABM program such as your copy, call-to-action, and images. We recommend at least 2 ad sets for each vertical and/or persona to begin with; one upper funnel and one bottom funnel. Our Onboarding team will be there to help you flush out the number of ad sets needed once we officially kick off together!
You can check out this resource for best practices and some examples we recommend to begin brainstorming your own ads.
Additional ways you can start working on ads prior to onboarding:
- Let your creative team know you’ll have some ad design projects coming their way shortly so they can prioritize their workload.
- Start building the landing pages your ads will drive to - if applicable.
- Familiarize yourself with our advertising policies to ensure you’ll have no issues getting your ads and landing pages approved by our ad review team.
When you begin your ABM journey with RollWorks, our Onboarding Team will be with you every step of the way ensuring you're confident and excited about the program you're building. Feel free to check out our Onboarding guides which include more in-depth articles on the technical and platform setup, strategy, launching advertising campaigns, and measuring the success of your RollWorks program.
We look forward to working with you as your ABM partner and can’t wait to see you on Onboarding!