Marketers have been reporting huge wins with account-based marketing but it’s no surprise that only a clearly defined ABM strategy will get you results.
But what is ABM strategy? How can your team turn into revenue superstars? What template for ABM will take you there?
These are some of the many questions that we answer in this post. So let’s begin.
1. Define your ABM goals
Setting goals is very important in business, but especially so in B2B marketing. Without clear goals, you would neither muster the right resources nor measure the outcomes correctly.
For account-based marketing tactics to deliver results, you need to begin by defining your goals clearly.
Action points: Here’s how you define your goals for ABM:
- Deliver more to your current customers. If you haven’t been able to unlock their full life-time value, upselling and cross-selling could be your ABM goals.
- Serve to a bigger chunk of the market. Aim to win a larger market share with your existing solutions.
- Create space for yourself with a new product. Perhaps you have just unveiled a new product that’s amazing. Then you want to launch a new product.
- Enter new verticals. You already have a product and a set of customers. But now you’re aiming to get into new categories and expand your base.
- Target bigger customers. Have served only small businesses till date? Perhaps your team and your product are now ready to woo enterprise accounts with a much bigger ticket size.
2. Create your ICP
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description you create of an organization that will benefit the most from the solution you’re trying to sell. HubSpot quotes a study which says strong ICP can help organizations achieve 68% higher account win rates.
ICP helps you understand your customers better and tell you precisely what kind of prospects you should be targeting.Â
Action points: Here’s how you build an ICP:Â
- List out your existing customers and figure how they use your solutions.
- Look at the accounts you lost. Ask why you lost. Was it merely a case of poor-fit? What could be different this time around?Â
- Find what attributes your customers share. Such attributes include revenue, the kind of customers they serve, employee count, geography, technologies used, distribution channels, and more.
- Interview a few of your existing customers to cross-verify your understanding. Speak to the decision-makers and decision-influencers in particular, because unlike a buyer persona, ICP doesn’t focus on one individual. It focuses on buying committees that have a huge and decisive say in the purchase of solutions like yours.
- Dig deeper to understand things like responsibilities, roles, and job titles of the people in the buying committee.
- Analyze the dynamics of how end-users of your solution interact with their buying committee.
- Create a rough outline of the ICP.
- Conduct several meetings with your teams to refine the outline you’ve created.
3. Build your target account list
What is ABM strategy if not targeting the right accounts? Once you have the ICP ready, the next step is to look at the real world to identify which business accounts you want to win.
Action points: The process to build the list of accounts that you want to target with ABM is as below:
- Match your strategy with the account. What’s the potential size of each account? How complex will it be when selling to those accounts? Questions like this will tell you which ABM strategy will be required for which account.
- Verify and collate your data. You’ll soon find there are data gaps or even slightly conflicting data. You don’t want to move ahead without sorting this one out.
- Build with accountability. When you have defined the roles clearly, you will know the accountability of each role. Be sure to make teams accountable for account selection, success, and outcomes.
4. Tier your accounts
For most B2B marketers, each account will have a different value. Because B2B solutions are broad, customizable, and typically complex, each account presents a different revenue potential.
Almost always, tiering your accounts will reflect the Pareto principle: just a few accounts will bring in a majority of revenue. For instance, about 5 to 10% of your accounts may bring 80% of the total revenue you generate from your ABM campaigns.
Action points: Here’s how you segment your accountsÂ
- First look at the data. See what behavior your existing big ticket customers exhibit. How do they articulate their requirements? How do they approach solution providers? Such questions will give you a better idea of how to tell big-ticket accounts from the low-value ones.
- Go through customer interaction records. That includes calls and emails. All these are invaluable resources to understand what the customer finds most troublesome or most useful.
- Now get ready to classify. The top rung is the accounts which, though very small in number, are big in ticket size. They need one-to-one ABM marketing. The next rung is those accounts that require a one-to-few ABM strategy. The last rung has more accounts, but they are relatively smaller in terms of revenue potential.
5. Map out the budget, your ABM tools, and teams
This step summarizes what important resources you have at your disposal in order to run an ABM program successfully.Â
Remember, all these will pretty much decide your ROI.
Action points: Here’s what you need to do:
- First get your teams’ buy in. Make sure you know who all are a part of the core team. It’s also important to document the nature of their roles. Do you need Mary’s approval for a certain level of activity, or do you only need to keep her in the loop?
- Next, be clear on the budget you have. ABM is certainly not for everyone or every account, so you want to know you have the financial muscle and stamina to see you through.
- Keep room for training (and also allocate a budget for it). Training is vital to the success of ABM. Allocate proper resources, time, and budget for the training.
6. Collect account intelligence
With every business function running on data, you cannot overestimate the role of information in your selling process.
From the industry that you operate in to the competitors you are pitted against, the more you know, the better your chances of engaging and converting prospects.
Action points: The success of ABM tactics rely upon your ability to collect and leverage intelligence. Here’s how you can do it:
- Begin with broad data. First, look at the industry of your account and its general trends. Where do they point to? Are they poised to grow or do they expect a severe drop in the coming years? What drives their growth? Ask questions like this to get a sense of where the industry is headed to.
- Next, look at a couple of key numbers. Specifically, find the revenue (and revenue projections) of the account as well as employee headcount.Â
- After that, go closer to understand how the buying process works there. Figure out key things like who influences purchases, what’s their budget, and how the sales cycle works there,   Â
- Learn where your solution fits. You must know exactly where your solution comes into picture and what it will help your account achieve. The more vital a role your solution plays, the more valuable it will be perceived to be.Â
- Finally map out your competitors. What does your competitor sell? How does their solution fit? Remember, the incumbent vendor as well potential suppliers are both your competitors.
7. Target buying groups for your ABM programs
For bigger accounts, if targeting buying committees isn’t a key activity, what is? ABM strategy works best when you realize it is about targeting the right groups.Â
Understanding that the way buying groups make decisions is one of the critical processes in ABM. Tools, social media, databases, platforms, … you leverage everything to know exactly the group of people you’ll be dealing with.Â
Action points: Here’s how you unravel the purchase committee:
- First, find how many departments will be involved. This will depend upon how big your solution is and what all teams it will impact at the account’s end.
- Next, identify the people who’ll be involved from each of the departments. Make sure that you understand their roles and that you have some idea about how they’ve approached working with vendors in the past.
- Pay attention to their preferences. How happy have they been while working with vendors that are similar to you in size, service offering and so on?
- Finally, chart out the metrics they highly value. This will lead you to understanding what attributes they base their decisions on.
8. Align sales and marketing
Zoominfo reports that better alignment can improve your deal closing rate by 67%. Which makes the sales and marketing alignment one of the most important elements in your ABM strategy.
Without aligning the two, you will only be wasting resources and producing sub-par results. Your GTM strategy will not deliver.
Action points: Here’s how you align the two teams:
- Define the terms you’ll be using. In order to run successful account-based marketing programs, you want the two functions to use the same language.Â
- Chalk out who will do what. Define roles. Have everyone see clearly what they’ll be responsible for and whom they can turn to when they need help.
- Bring them together for lead scoring. There’s no fun if MQL (market-qualified leads) don’t become SAL (sales accepted leads). When both teams agree on what kind of leads are worthy of chase and where these leads stand in the buying journey, your revenues begin to rise.Â
- Build common KPIs. After all, both teams work for the same organization. So it only makes sense for them to work towards the same KPIs.
- Reorient your systems and processes. There’s a chance your processes have grown to support only siloed working. Pivot them to support the alignment.
- Draft a SLA for the two teams. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) will clearly define the roles, goals, initiatives, accountability criteria, and more for the two teams.
- Work your demand gen model. Is your model optimized for every touchpoint? You’ll find that your ABM tools deliver their best when every activity directed towards customer acquisition is optimized.
- Create content that’s consistent at every stage. Coherent and consistent messaging will bind the two teams together.
It may sound a little cliche, but we need to say this: You can’t improve what you can’t measure. But equally important is deciding what you’ll measure.
Because it’s more focused than a spray-and-pray approach, account-based marketing has fewer metrics to measure. So how do you go about it?
Action points: Here’s the process to follow in order to measure the key metrics of your ABM and track your ROI:
- First, make sure you have the right marketing technology stack in place. Better tools means better measurement.
- Begin by defining and measuring engagement. How much time do they spend checking out your online assets? How many of them do this? Which of your promotional exercises brought them here?
- Next, measure their journey. What’s the velocity at which they’re proceeding from one stage to the other? What are the volumes involved?
- Finally, check outcomes. Deal size, volumes, conversion rates,… They tell you not only about your results but also about your processes and alignments.
Remember to continually expand your field of vision. Gartner says your buyers spend only about 17% of their total buying time meeting with potential suppliers and vendors. That means if you aren’t observant you track only 17% of your buyer’s total activities.
10. Excel at content to ace ABM
If you were to ask successful marketers ‘How to run an ABM campaign successfully?’, you’d be probably surprised at the answer: Make your content distribution effective.
Publishing a blog here or uploading a Christmas message there are of no value, unless they are a part of a well thought-out and carefully executed content distribution strategy.
Action points: Here’s how you can best leverage your content:
- First make sure your content is connected to the ICP and their journeys.
- Nurture your own audience. Remember, ABM isn’t about a large audience, it’s about a carefully curated, targeted audience. And account-based marketing tactics can never ignore community engagement.Â
- Have clear content goals and tactics for TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content. As an example, TOFU content will aim at engagement with new visitors, MOFU will intend to deepen the engagement with repeat interactions and BOFU will target demo requests.
- Involve your sales teams in the distribution. They not only know what kind of leads convert more often but they’ll also become more accountable with the involvement.
- Fix the content cadence in consultation with your marketing and sales teams.
- Use paid promotion. For example, you can use retargeting ads to stay in front of people who’ve had some encounter with your brand.
11. Let playbooks add muscle to your ABM tactics
Marketing playbooks, for instance, are required to build awareness and reinforce your brand. Sales playbooks, on the other hand, will guide you to capture the demand generated.
Different forms of content will achieve different results and you want to hit each goal without fail. The whole point is to make sure your funnel isn’t leaking even a bit.
Action points: Use the following structure to build a scalable, successful playbook for ABM:
- Use events, micro-events, and conferences to establish thought leadership.
- In-depth guides and guest posts on third-party websites will make your brand more familiar. The higher the recall value of your brand, the shorter your sales cycle turns out to be.
- Identify what the engagement triggers will be. That will tell you, among other things, when your sales teams need to step in and take over.
- Another powerful tool is AMAs (Ask Me Anything). Very few events can quickly raise your thought-leadership quotient as AMAs do.
- Carefully exploit social engagement through meaningful comments. You want to be seen as an organization that’s genuinely keen to solve problems.
How can marketers scale an ABM campaign successfully
The answer is: a sound strategy. Big accounts will ask for better planning and coordination, and if you can templatize things you will be able to repeat success effortlessly.
In summary, we’ll say defining your goals, creating your ICP, scoring your accounts, generating the right business intelligence, aligning your sales and marketing teams, and tracking the key metrics are some of the most crucial steps in your ABM strategy.Â
Yes, sure, there’s so much to be done with ABM, and it’s quite common to feel overwhelmed or get confused even when you take the first steps.Â
And that’s where it makes sense to speak to an expert who can help you sort out things and walk you through the entire ABM journey. Feel like talking to a seasoned marketer? We’d be happy to help – let’s connect!
