Your guide to going account-based

Winning by Design’s Shari Johnston shares her sought-after playbook

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.

---

Lately I’ve been borderline obsessed with pointing out the flaws of the marketing qualified lead (MQL) paradigm. If we’re ever going to find out what works, we need a unified (and account-based) view of go-to-market effectiveness. Thankfully, there are people who’ve been championing this for far longer than I have–and Shari Johnston is chief among them. 

Shari built and ran the account-based practice at GTM consultancy Winning by Design since 2019. She’s now Winning by Design’s Chief Operating Officer where she’s led training and consulting delivery teams across innumerable successful engagements including one out of every four public SaaS companies. Keep reading for Shari’s battle-tested insights into going account-based (hint: it’s an account-based strategy, not account-based marketing).

---

Why account-based suddenly feels fresh

“Account-based goes back in style in times of fewer resources and the need to focus,” Shari told me. “If you can’t do demand gen campaigns that easily bring in prospects, account-based allows you to focus on a set of customers and see results.”

In other words, we don’t have the luxury of resources, budgets, or time for spray-and-pray marketing – hoping that marketing reaches and influences the right customer. We can’t convince the CEO or Board to fund broad-based brand awareness when we’re behind on pipeline goals. 

“I would hear a lot about how marketing ran this great webinar with Forrester and got 400 leads from it, but then there would only be one lead that sales wanted to talk to. With traditional demand gen, marketing thinks they’re doing a great job, but sales isn’t aligned.”

She believes that an account-based strategy is the best path forward in this environment. By account-based, she’s specifically referring to aligning your entire GTM team on winning and growing the accounts that will be your next best customers. (These specific words were extremely purposefully chosen.)

---

Who owns an account-based strategy

Shari didn’t mince words on the topic of ownership. “It’s not a marketing initiative, it’s a go-to-market strategy,” she said. “There is no single owner for the function. It’s something that needs buy-in by the full go-to-market team and not a particular function.”

With that in mind, Shari notes that account-based efforts most often sit in marketing. The larger the deal size, the more she recommends it be owned by sales rather than marketing. Without a central owner, alignment can be achieved by creating a GTM council to align on ideal customer profile (ICP), measurement and progress against goals as a unified leadership team. The greatest impact is achieved through an account based strategy that is orchestrated across the GTM team, not just a single marketing outreach effort by a siloed function.

---

The steps to going account-based