Your CEO asks one quick question: "Is marketing contributing meaningfully to our pipeline?" The question takes five seconds to ask. For most marketing teams, the answer takes three days.
On 4 November, N.Rich ran a workshop at the Global ABM Conference in London called "Prove it: closing the CEO-marketing gap with AI". We planned a presentation. The group was small, so we pulled the chairs to one table and made it a working session instead.
Around the table sat ABM leaders from IT services, consulting, life sciences, telecoms, SaaS and agencies. Some had run ABM for more than ten years. Others had just been asked to build their first ABM motion. They all came with the same problem: leadership does not see what marketing does.
On our side, three people took the seats at the leadership table. Markus Ståhlberg played the CEO. George Storm played the CRO. I played marketing. Sara Storm moderated.
In short:
Most marketing teams cannot answer the CEO's pipeline question in the same meeting. We asked the room a simple question. When your CEO asks about pipeline in a meeting, can you answer on the spot?
Three people raised a hand. Three more can answer within a week. One team is still building the data. One person said their CEO stopped asking.
The delay has a cost. The CEO waits, the answer arrives late, and the CEO trusts the next answer a little less. ABM is not one campaign, one event or one webinar. It is all of them together. Most teams do not know how to put that data in one place.
The CEO looks at sales and marketing as one go-to-market motion. Markus asks three things. Are we on target this quarter? How do the next quarters look, and how confident is the forecast? Where should we spend more money?
Markus's view on budget is direct. The money is there if marketing can show where it returns.
The CRO has a shorter horizon. George's targets are less than two months out. He looks at the marketing funnel the same way he looks at the sales pipeline. He wants to see target accounts move from no awareness, to engagement, to a first conversation. That progression must repeat quarter after quarter. Then he can trust the fuel behind his forecast.
Marketing has to answer both. That means one set of data, shown in the way each leader thinks.
Inbound form submissions are still a monthly KPI for many marketing teams. A form fill shows one person who raised a hand. Marketing also influenced the people around that person who never filled in a form.
Account-based metrics show that wider influence. We cover five of them in How do you prove marketing impact in long sales cycles?
Incentives make this worse. Several attendees described BDRs who earn commission only on accounts where sales made the first touch. Those BDRs skip warm accounts that marketing built up. They chase the person who downloaded an ebook last week instead.
N.Rich fixed this in its own team. Our BDRs earned a bigger commission on accounts that marketing had warmed up. Sales goes where the money is. The BDRs also saw better conversion on those accounts.
Sales leadership has to own the follow-up on warm accounts. We call it alignment by force. The force is data.
Marketing teams often try to convince individual reps to call a hot account. That does not change behaviour. Reps do not report to marketing. Their manager and their incentive model drive what they do. Sales leadership has to push the motion down to the team.
Data keeps both sides accountable. At N.Rich, a hot account gets a follow-up within an agreed SLA. The coverage target is 100%. Every week, the team reviews which hot accounts did not get a follow-up and why.
Conversion is the argument that sales understands. Compare how many calls a rep needs to book a meeting with a cold account and with a warm account. That difference motivates a revenue team more than any campaign report.
Attribution helps marketing optimise channels. It does not work as the main report to management. Markus made this point in the Q&A: the CEO cares about the business impact of the influence, not the attribution model.
George stopped asking which ad drove a deal. I showed him that win rates were almost 2-3x higher with multichannel influence. When an account sees three or more touches across different channels, the numbers change.
One of N.Rich's biggest accounts first met the team at an event 18 months before the discovery meeting. In that time, the account had 37 touches across LinkedIn ads, programmatic, events and webinars. No single touch closed that deal. The blend did.
Sales works in the CRM. Marketing works in its own platforms. Each side ends up with its own numbers, and neither side trusts the other.
AI adds a new risk. Teams now build reports in their own AI tools, and each tool gives a slightly different answer. A new report every Friday does not build trust. It makes the CEO ask which number is correct. Once you lose that credibility, it is hard to win it back.
Large companies often have a data warehouse and a BI tool too. In many cases, only one gatekeeper can open it. Data that nobody can access is as good as no data.
N.Rich AI is the reporting layer inside the N.Rich ABM platform, built for this problem. It puts business intelligence on governed data: N.Rich advertising, CRM data, LinkedIn Ads and other sources. A context layer sits on top.
In the workshop, I showed apps I built for the questions leadership asks. One app shows which campaigns influence which accounts and open deals. Another shows which accounts are hot right now, so reps know where to act. A third shows the return on each dollar of effort per market, so leadership can decide where to invest next.
Leaders do not have to be marketers to use them. George can open an app, find a data point and ask the chat what it means.
Build the business case for ABM with numbers. George closed with one piece of advice. Boards, PE firms and sales leaders understand numbers better than narratives. Show where the money went. Show which accounts engaged with your ads and visited your pricing pages.
Markus added the business case for ABM. Warm accounts convert better, pay more and close faster. Make that math visible. For example, show how much more revenue you get if half of your cold accounts were warm.
When marketing can answer in the same meeting, the conversation changes. The CEO stops asking if marketing works. The CEO starts asking where to put the next dollar.
Pick the question your CEO asked last week. Open the N.Rich AI Playground and build an app that answers it on sample data. When you see how it works, try it on your own data.