Account expansion with influence
Contacts opened new buying committee
Incremental hybrid cloud pipeline
At HPE, the Big Four financial institutions sat at the centre of our FSI portfolio as major expansion targets. These accounts were heavily invested in legacy on-prem infrastructure and running multi-vendor conversations with several cloud providers, representing seven-figure annual opportunities for HPE GreenLake hybrid cloud.
Sales had always worked these accounts through personal relationships built over years, and with so many stakeholders and buying committees to cover across each institution, that approach alone wasn't scaling fast enough to keep pace with the opportunity.
When I proposed a structured ABM program to complement the relationship-led approach, Sales had genuine reservations, not just about the method, but about who and where it should target.
Their instinct shaped our first wave, aimed at the senior contacts they already knew in the state where those relationships were strongest. The signals came back weak, and a few weeks in, engagement was flat, making the early scepticism from the Sales team look justified.
Rather than pushing harder on the original plan, I went back to the Bombora and 6sense intent data to see what it was telling us.
It revealed two things at once: the real opportunity sat with technical influencers, a much larger, previously overlooked group across security, infrastructure, and architecture, and the strongest intent signals were coming from outside the single state we'd originally focused on.
I rebuilt the program around both insights, shifting to education-first content for technical influencers and widening geographic targeting to follow the real signal of new prospects. I then layered in a finance-focused benchmarking webinar and an executive roundtable to convert engaged prospects into sales discovery conversations.
Throughout the pivot, I ran weekly 15-minute account reviews with Sales so they could see the shift happening in real time, which kept them engaged through the uncertain middle phase rather than checking out after a slow start.
Once retargeted, engagement with these prospects built steadily and then accelerated, growing multi-threaded contacts within the account from around 30 to over 55, giving Sales far deeper coverage.
That depth translated into A$13M in pipeline against a 25% FSI target, at a 40% lower cost-per-opportunity than traditional FSI campaigns, with Phase 1 closing A$4.2M in Year 1 and expanding to A$8M in Year 2, including new business secured from a previously untapped business unit within the same institution.
The corrected formula became our FSI template and was successfully replicated on another banking institution, giving the business a scalable playbook rather than a one-off win.
Now, Sales and Marketing recognise the value of getting into the detail together, and Sales asks for intent data and ABM support on strategic accounts from day one.