ABM is getting more attention in the channel, and for good reason. As pressure on ROI grows, it's one of the few tactics that forces the discipline partner marketing often lacks: the right accounts, a value proposition that actually means something, and sales and marketing working from the same playbook. We brought together Katrina Sadova from Intel, Yash Aggarwal from Canonical, and Sherpa CEO Tom Perry to get into the detail. Target account lists, JVPs, AI, and sales alignment — this is what they said.
Your speakers
|
|
Tom Perry CEO & Founder, Sherpa As the CEO of The Sherpa Group, Tom leads a global, specialist, channel marketing agency that helps technology companies grow their revenue through effective partner marketing, partner assessment, and partner recruitment. With over 20 years of experience in the channel ecosystem, he has a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities that vendors, distributors, and resellers face in the rapidly evolving tech market. |
|
|
Yash Aggarwal Partner Marketing Manager, Canonical Yash is a partner marketing manager with a track record of building co-marketing programmes that deliver real commercial results. Working with partners including Microsoft and Intel, he has run campaigns spanning webinars, ABM, paid media, and whitepapers, achieving a 1:20 ROI. In all his roles, B2B partnerships have been central to growth, and he brings both the strategic and executional experience to make them work. |
|
|
Katrina Sadova Partner Marketing Manager, Intel Katrina brings 20 years of experience in marketing and finance across the tech industry. At Intel, she leads partner programmes and ecosystem strategy across EMEA, specialising in co-marketing, joint campaigns, and driving measurable partner revenue. She combines a deep commercial background with hands-on expertise in partner programme design and execution. |
ABM has been a fixture in B2B marketing for years, but in the partner context it comes with a specific set of challenges that pure demand gen doesn't prepare you for. How do you build a target account list that reflects both vendor and partner priorities? How do you get to a joint value proposition that
actually says something, rather than just listing everything both parties bring? And what role does AI play now that the tools are genuinely getting good?
We brought together Katrina Sadova from Intel and Yash Aggarwal from Canonical to work through those questions with our community. Both have run partner ABM programmes at scale, and they came with specific, practical perspectives rather than theory. Tom Perry from Sherpa hosted the session and pushed on the detail throughout.
Four areas shaped the conversation: building target account lists, crafting joint value propositions, using AI in ABM execution, and aligning with sales. What follows are the things most worth taking away.
Start with where you've already won together
The instinct in partner ABM is often to start with a big list of target accounts and work backwards. Both Katrina and Yash pushed against this. The more reliable approach is to look at where you and your partner have actually succeeded together, identify the vertical and account characteristics that made those wins happen, and use that pattern to build the list forward.
Yash was direct about it: large enterprise partners often want to target everything, and the result is a list that's too broad to work as ABM. The discipline is narrowing it down to accounts where the joint value proposition genuinely lands. For channel partners specifically, the frame shifts slightly. You're thinking about which partners have strong coverage in the geo and vertical you're targeting, then building the list around their existing relationships and your data on propensity to buy.
Katrina added a practical step that often gets skipped: audit both CRMs at the start of planning. You'll surface accounts already in the system, understand where engagement has happened before, and spot gaps. It also puts intent signal data in context. Knowing that someone has searched for a solution like yours, or engaged with related content, means a lot more when you can match it to what your partner already knows about that account.
"It's super overwhelming when you have thousands of enterprise partners you might want to target. I think it really starts from the joint value proposition, identifying with your larger partners where you really succeed together."
Yash Aggarwal, Partner Marketing Manager, Canonical
A good JVP starts with the customer's problem, not your product
Katrina was at her most precise here. The temptation when building a joint value proposition, especially when both parties have strong products and strong brands, is to aggregate. Each side lists what they bring, and you end up with a document that covers everything but says nothing.
Her fix is to flip the conversation: start with the specific business problem the customer is trying to solve, and then have each party articulate what they contribute to solving it. It keeps the JVP anchored to the customer rather than the technology. For smaller partners, the vendor's brand often carries real weight and is part of what makes the proposition work. For larger partners, like Intel and Microsoft going to market together, neither brand dominates and the focus has to be on the engineering or solution depth that makes the combination genuinely different.
"The temptation is to put everything in, especially when you have a strong brand and strong value proposition on both sides. But it just ends up being a competition of what each party wants to add, and at the end of it, it's not a value proposition. It's just noise."
Katrina Sadova, Partner Marketing Manager, Intel
The one-plus-one framing
Yash added the one-plus-one framing: the JVP should describe something that neither partner could offer alone. That differentiation is what makes partner ABM more compelling than regular ABM and it's the thing that gets lost when the process collapses into a feature list.
AI is genuinely useful here, but not in the way most people are using it
The conversation on AI was more nuanced than most. Yash identified two distinct use cases worth separating. The first is intent signal analysis: AI's ability to aggregate signals across platforms and identify purchasing behaviour is now well established in B2B, and in the partner context it's more powerful because buyers researching a complex use case are looking at content from multiple partners across the ecosystem, not just one vendor. That cross-ecosystem signal is something ABM platforms are starting to surface.
The second is personalisation at scale. This is where the practical shift is happening. Taking a single JVP and tailoring it one-to-one across many accounts used to be unrealistic. Yash has seen it work in practice, with genuinely personalised content reaching buyers at the account level, across partner combinations. For partner ABM, where the story is inherently more complex than single-vendor marketing, this matters.
"In the past, tailoring a joint value proposition one-to-one for each company just wasn't realistic. With AI, it kind of changes the game. If you're able to pull in data and take a common JVP for a certain vertical with two partners, you can then tailor it one-to-one across 10, 20, 30 partners and actually execute a campaign that way."
Yash Aggarwal, Partner Marketing Manager, Canonical
Sales alignment isn't a handoff, it's a continuous conversation
This comes up in almost every ABM discussion, but the specifics here were useful. Katrina's starting point: bring partner sales in early, not because it's good practice, but because they hold data you don't have. They know the accounts, they know the objections, and involving them in list-building and JVP development changes the nature of the conversation from 'marketing handing over leads' to a shared campaign. When sales people help shape the target list, they're invested in the outcome.
Yash made the sharpest observation of the session on the middle and lower funnel. The torch doesn't fully hand off from marketing to sales. In modern ABM they run in parallel. Marketing continues feeding content and campaign signals to sales while sales is already in conversation with the account. The risk in the transition is message inconsistency: the buyer is hearing one story in the marketing touchpoints and a different one in the sales conversation. Making sure the joint story stays coherent through that period is where a lot of ABM campaigns quietly fall apart.
Tom added the buying group dimension. By the time you're in mid-funnel on a large deal, you can be dealing with 20 or more stakeholders across the account. The partner has to be shoulder to shoulder with the vendor in that phase, and the content and conversation has to be calibrated to each stakeholder's role, not just the general JVP.
"It's not marketing just doing their thing and then we either like or don't like what they've given us. It's more of a joint venture, really both parties working together towards a joint goal."
Katrina Sadova, Partner Marketing Manager, Intel
White glove ABM isn't always about the biggest accounts
The question of which accounts get the most intensive treatment came up towards the end of the session. The obvious answer is your highest-revenue opportunities, and that's often right. But both speakers pointed to other factors that shift the calculation.
Katrina flagged accounts where trust needs rebuilding. A customer with a difficult history, or one that's had a poor experience with a previous solution, may need more intensive handling to move forward regardless of deal size. The case-by-case judgement is about what the situation actually requires, not just what the pipeline says.
On funding: ABM in the partner context often gets funded from a combination of central vendor budget and MDF, and the split varies. Katrina's experience at Intel has been roughly half and half: vendor-funded for the third-party infrastructure and data work, MDF-eligible for partner-specific campaign activities. Tom's point was that MDF is often the smallest bucket available for strategic ABM; if the opportunity is large enough, there are usually other funding paths worth exploring.
“One-to-one might be a singular decision, but cumulatively that adds up. At the end you do have to show a return for your ABM campaign. You'd want to make sure that cumulatively you have the correct service type for each type of account.”
Yash Aggarwal, Partner Marketing Manager, Canonical
A community for partner and channel marketers. Join us at https://partner-marketing-leaders.circle.so/c/getting-started/