How to brief an agency on an ABM programme
A vague brief produces polished creative that doesn't move deals. The brief is the programme. Get it wrong here and everything downstream is wrong too.
Agencies ask you what you want. The wrong answer is “brand awareness among our target accounts.” The right answer is a specific commercial problem: which accounts, which personas, what they currently believe, what you need them to believe instead, and what a successful outcome looks like in pipeline terms.
The brief I wrote for the Quantexa North America programme was a single sentence before it was a document: “ABM as innovative as the criminals our platform catches.” That sentence existed because we had done the research first. We knew fraud investigators at tier 1 banks had seen every vendor pitch. We knew the buying committee was sceptical of tools that promised much and delivered audits. The creative direction came from the commercial problem. The agency’s job was to execute that direction, not discover it.
A strong ABM brief has five elements:
The commercial problem. What deals are stuck and why. Which accounts are in late stage but not moving. What the sales team is hearing from the personas you’re targeting. This is not a marketing brief. It’s a sales brief with a marketing execution layer.
The specific accounts. A named list or a precisely defined segment with firmographic and intent criteria. “Enterprise FSI in North America” is a segment. “Tier 1 banks in the US with active fraud transformation initiatives and Bombora intent spikes on entity resolution” is a list you can build. The agency needs to know whether they’re creating for three accounts or three hundred.
The buying committee. Who the ads will reach, by title and function. The message for a VP of Fraud Operations is different from the message for a CTO. If you can’t articulate the difference, the agency will write to an average persona that nobody recognises.
The measurement model. How you’ll know if it worked. Give the agency your attribution framework at the briefing stage. If they know you’re measuring influenced pipeline on named contacts in active opportunities, they’ll design the engagement mechanic around that goal rather than optimising for impressions.
The constraint. Time, budget, what success looks like in 90 days. Be specific about what you can’t do. If you can’t run more than one creative variant, say so. Constraints produce better creative briefs than open-ended ask.
The brief is the most leveraged document in the programme. An hour spent getting it right saves three weeks of revision and produces better output than any amount of post-launch optimisation.