Christina Daroca introduces herself as the Senior Director of Global Demand and Americas Marketing at Riverbed Technology, a company focused on IT solutions for optimizing digital employee and customer experiences. She shares her 12-13 years of marketing experience, primarily in demand generation and ABM, and briefly describes Riverbed’s product scope.

Christina explains Riverbed’s multi-tiered ABM strategy involving one-to-many, one-to-few, and one-to-one approaches. She recounts her ABM journey starting around 2015, initially rudimentary with basic email sequences before the advent of ABM technology platforms. She emphasizes fundamentals such as account targeting, sales alignment, and tailored engagement tactics.

Christina describes a successful virtual roundtable ABM campaign where they gathered executive-level CIOs from key accounts to discuss cloud management challenges. The insights were then converted into a thought leadership ebook shared back with participants to extend engagement and deepen relationships—highlighting the importance of making accounts feel valued and heard.

She explains that while Riverbed had prior technical-level contacts in accounts, this roundtable helped engage executives using a third-party vendor to facilitate participation. The motivation for executives was peer learning and open discussion, with absolutely no sales pitch during the session, underscoring ABM’s consultative approach.

Christina advises beginners to start by grouping 30-50 accounts based on industry or shared challenges rather than jumping into one-to-one ABM. She recommends beginning with digital content or events rather than cold emails, tracking engagement carefully, and then focusing one-to-one efforts on accounts showing interest, always aligning closely with sales.

She details how Riverbed integrates one-to-many (hundreds of accounts), one-to-few (40-50 accounts), and one-to-one (a handful of accounts per quarter) ABM programs. The one-to-many approach focuses on broader demand generation tactics, one-to-few tightly aligns with sales territory and industry, and one-to-one involves highly customized outreach including content personalization and exclusive experiences.

Christina stresses the importance of clear expectations and regular weekly syncs between sales, marketing, and BDR teams to review account plans and engagement data. She highlights that measuring ABM success differs from typical demand gen metrics, focusing on account engagement and quality conversations rather than just leads or MQLs.

She recommends that even smaller or resource-constrained companies can start ABM with basic technology like CRM and marketing automation. Budget-conscious approaches such as hosting webinars or digital events with internal or customer speakers are encouraged over heavy advertising. Christina advises companies to have a demand generation foundation before launching ABM, especially when lacking content or clear ICP.

For companies with inbound motion and demand gen programs, Christina suggests running ABM as a parallel effort with dedicated focus or teams. The content and tactics from demand gen should be adapted and targeted for ABM accounts rather than trying to do everything at once.

Christina discusses how no single ABM platform meets all needs, so successful ABM uses a combination of tools integrated with CRM (like Salesforce). Critical capabilities include tracking account-level engagement across multiple touchpoints, intent data as an additional insight, and digital targeting via custom ads or landing pages.

She advises starting small by leveraging existing demand gen activities but focused on target accounts. Budgets should be allocated at the account list level (bucket) rather than per account to manage risk. Success metrics should emphasize engagement and pipeline conversations, not just lead volume, to justify future budget increases.

Christina recommends using conversion rates from accounts targeted via ABM versus non-ABM accounts to demonstrate marketing’s contribution to pipeline. Even if lead volume is lower, higher quality engagements and meetings with buying committees validate ABM’s value.

She emphasizes ABM is a long-term play, often taking a year or more to show results. Managing expectations with sales is critical, breaking the program into phases—starting broad with one-to-few then narrowing to one-to-one based on engagement. She also stresses being agile to replace accounts that show no activity.

Christina shares that even campaigns without direct pipeline impact are valuable learning experiences. She advocates for quick pivots when things don’t work, using insights to refine future efforts rather than blindly persisting with failing tactics.

She identifies account selection as the single most critical factor for ABM success. Selecting the right accounts based on ICP, past successes, and sales-marketing collaboration is fundamental. Avoid launching ABM into unknown industries or personas without prior demand gen insights.

The conversation concludes with Christina inviting viewers to connect with her on LinkedIn for further discussion and sharing of insights, expressing appreciation for the opportunity to share her ABM expertise.