ABM Program Budget Template

Your Problem

You need to set and track your overall account-based marketing (ABM) budget. 

Our Solution

Our ABM Program Budget Template will help create an ABM program budget and track your spending.

This Microsoft Excel worksheet allows you to identify expenditures in the following budget categories:

• ABM Software Subscriptions
• ABM Program Manager (salary)
• Account-Based Advertising
• Executive Breakfast Campaign
• ABM Content Production (agency)
• Contact Data Platform + Credits
• Direct Mail Campaign
• ABM Training Workshop for Staff
• Professional Services & Consulting

Once you input all of your projected and actual expenses, this template will allow you to track spending throughout the year. The template also creates several charts automatically so you can understand your “Actual Spend vs. Anticipated Budget” and analyze your ABM budget by category. 

Key Benefits

• this template serves as a baseline for your ABM budget
• provides a real-world ABM budget example
• includes automatically generated charts for analysis and monitoring
• Helps you identify actual spend vs. anticipated budget
• calculates year to date & cumulative spend

Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet

Estimated Time Required: 2 Hours

Skills Required: Excel (Basic)

Background

Though ABM success stories from large corporations may seem the most common, effective ABM does not necessarily require a large budget. In fact, ABM is actually an affordable way for small businesses to make the most of their marketing budgets. Companies commonly start with a pilot program that allocates a small portion of resources to test ABM. While starting an ABM initiative does not require aligning resources to tiers, as a plan evolves, it is essential to allocate budget and headcount to each tier.

Create a budget for each ABM tier by understanding the areas where you’ll need to invest. Strategic ABM typically sources funding from internal business units, sales, and marketing, while ABM lite and Programmatic ABM only source funding from Marketing. You can determine the percent of the overall marketing budget per ABM tier by reviewing your marketing team headcount, the number of target accounts per marketer and sales rep, and revenue goals for each tier. The ITSMA provides a rule-of-thumb for the average number of accounts per full-time ABM marketer: the average is four for strategic ABM implementations and twenty-two for ABM lite.

Many marketers will also need to budget for upgrades to the martech stack to support ABM. According to a Gartner study, marketing leaders will spend approximately 29% of their marketing budget on marketing technology. It’s essential to make sure the right technology is in place to scale your ABM plan.

After staff, technology, and agencies, paid media is typically the next most substantial portion of the ABM budget. As data and results from early ABM initiatives begin to accrue, determining future ABM budget allocations if far less art and much more science.

Visit our Demand Generation & ABM Hub for other great resources.