Is your view of marketing prospects a bit blurred? A bit hazy? Account based marketing (ABM) aligns marketing and sales to deliver consistent, personalised buying experiences for your B2B prospects – and in doing so create a clearer vision of them. It doesn’t have to be a replacement for your existing marketing methods - it can be an evolution.
What is Account Based Marketing?
ABM is a highly targeted, focused growth strategy. It works by aligning marketing and sales functions to create personalised experiences for accounts. When did you last stop to think ‘just how many individuals are involved in influencing or deciding on whether to buy our product or service?’ It may range from just 1 or 2 two individuals to as many as 10 or 11:
ABM is a strategy that says ‘let's make sure we plan how to market and sell to each decision maker and influencer in each target account’.
This starts with aligning Sales and Marketing to choose a select set of accounts. Together they then create marketing and sales strategies that target each account. This saves time for marketing and sales and delivers a more consistent buying experience for the customers within each account.
Businesses that are typically a good fit for using an ABM strategy are those that sell high-value and/or complex products or services to other businesses.
The alignment of Sales and Marketing when using an ABM strategy helps you make more streamlined business decisions. It eliminates the time you’d spend trying to sort out the best accounts to target, and instead, speeds up the process of delighting those prospects with personalised content strategies.
ABM is a strategy for shortening sales cycles, increasing ROI, and effectively selling to your highest value accounts in the way they each prefer to buy.
How to adopt Account-Based Marketing?
To ensure you keep prospects at the centre of your ABM strategy, stick to the principles. Make your ABM strategy centre around tailoring the way you communicate with your target company.
There are five stages to ABM:
1. Identify the Accounts you really, really want as customers
ABM begins with sales and marketing identifying and selecting relevant accounts. When beginning this selection process, data, such as company size, number of employees, location, and annual revenue, can give you an understanding of accounts you may want to target.
Then develop buyer personas to understand the day-to-day lives and challenges of your target buyers, then determine content and channels to approach them. Don’t rush this stage!
2. Build a decision-making model and user journeys for the accounts
In sales where ABM is typically used, buying decisions are generally made by numerous individuals within a company. ABM helps establish a relationship with each potential buyer and engages them in the purchase decision.
Creating unique, company-specific content that interests each potential buyer within the organization is important. Whether your product or service is for marketers, operations chiefs or CTOs, or anyone else, ensuring that you identify and engage with everyone in the buying decision is crucial to winning a customer. As importantly, thin about how you package your proposition for different personas – it’s no longer one-size-fits-all. At the planning stage, identify the prospect decision making model and constantly learn and refine moving forwards.
Consider the challenges each of your stakeholders faces in order to create compelling content. For example, Finance may be concerned with pricing, while Operations might be focused on things like user access, ease of use, and security for a tech purchase. With this context, you can create targeted content and interactions – the user journeys - that match each individual's concerns and challenges.
3. Engage when and how your prospects like to be engaged
Here’s where sales and marketing come together and engage with stakeholders across various channels. For example, if one of your stakeholders prefers email, then equipping sales or account management to reach out to that person with a helpful and relevant message can get a conversation started. This stage is largely about developing relationships with and getting to know all the buyers who’ll make the final decision.
4. Build advocates, create a buzz
Next, you want to nurture bonds with a few stakeholders who can serve as advocates within the organisation. The modern buyer can tune out information they don’t want to hear. So it’s up to both marketing and sales here to provide value — and talk about the product or service when and where necessary.
5. Measure and improve
Finally, reporting at the account level can give you data on what's working, what's not, and how to improve over time. With the right analysis and software, you can report on company growth, revenue, job titles, engagement levels, and much more — all at the account level.
ABM does come at a cost. The cost of investing in better content programmes and resourcing and also equipping yourselves with the right technology to cultivate and report on relationships at a 1:1 level – at scale. ABM also takes time to set-up. But it’s proven itself so successful at delivering shorter B2B sales cycles and much better marketing ROI.
For more information about how to align ABM with your existing marketing engine, strategically and operationally – do get in touch.
If you’d like to re-appraise your demand generation strategy and implement better prospect and account based marketing - do get in touch using the form below: