Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
Empathy is an emotion that many marketers invoke when they are developing their positioning and messaging for various campaigns. They consider questions such as: “If I put myself in the buyers’ shoes, what do I think they think or feel about this particular pain point?” “Do I understand the challenges they are facing?” “How can I help them overcome this issue and provide long-term value?” Over the last few years, many B2B marketers have leveraged account-based marketing (ABM) to address these questions with specific use cases and examples tailored to their target accounts, in order to boost engagement and drive high-value conversions.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | August 23, 2022
Account-based marketing has been around since the early 2000s, but only recently have businesses started to implement it widely in their marketing strategies. By focusing on ideal customer profiles (ICP), businesses shortlist key accounts and target them with customized content campaigns to convert them from marketing-qualified leads to buyers. An account-based marketing strategy uses sales and marketing orchestration to transform the way key accounts are approached.
ABM marketing contributed to a 70 percent increase in the number of opportunities created. (Source: Gartner)
Nash Haywood, Global Director-Digital Conversion & Paid Media, Genesys, talked about ABM’s impact on how sales and marketing teams function.
“We wanted to have more control of the entire (marketing and sales) process, and an ABM approach allowed us to do that.”
B2B account-based marketing drives valuable engagement and leads to higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies.
Benefits of Account-based Marketing
Account-based marketing benefits range from increased marketing efficiency and higher ROI to higher engagement and retention. Let us take a look at them in detail:
ABM Enhances Your Marketing Efforts
ABM marketing is data-driven. Account-based management becomes easy with crucial data like role, industry, and buyer journey stage. Based on this data, appealing personalized content campaigns are created to target key accounts. These campaigns optimize your marketing efforts. They also give insights on which channels and messages appeal to your targeted key accounts so that you can refine your account-based marketing strategy. According to Emarketer, 46 percent of marketers are benefitting from real-time optimization to accelerate their pipeline revenue.
Sales and Marketing Teams Synchronize
An account-based marketing campaign aligns the goals of the sales and marketing teams. It also brings other important stakeholders, like the IT team and the executive team, together to create an effective strategy for achieving goals.
Sales and marketing orchestration can lead to a massive increase in marketing revenue (up to 208 percent as stated by MarketingProfs).
ABM Improves Marketing Efficiency
Account-based marketing automation technology helps streamline marketing processes and scale ABM implementation across different marketing campaigns. Activities like ad targeting, modelling, upselling media buying, and executing lead nurturing campaigns can be done efficiently using account-based marketing software. You can cease marketing to accounts that do not respond to your campaigns and focus on the ones that do. This can help you save your money and allocate your time and resources better.
You Retain Customers Better
ABM uses hyper-personalized content to pursue higher customer engagement and retention. By showing key accounts the content they want to see, brand awareness and trust are increased. An account-based marketing campaign, especially one created to engage target accounts, contributes to an enhanced customer experience that makes B2B marketing significantly impactful. It translates to long-term associations and bigger deal sizes.
You Close Deals Faster
You can move key accounts through the sales funnel swiftly and close deals faster by identifying decision-makers of your key accounts. B2B account-based marketing saves time and resources, which can be used to generate new leads. That is why this is one of the most important account-based marketing benefits.
ABM Improves Deal Sizes
Account-based B2B marketing targets only key accounts with buyer intent. It is about quality more than quantity, and this makes a whole lot of difference in how you approach accounts and strike deals. A shorter sales cycle through account-based marketing means landing a big account that signs away more money than many small accounts would.
You Get a Higher ROI
According to a report by ITSMA, 87 percent of marketers stated that ABM delivered a higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies. Since account-based marketing is a data-driven strategy that uses personalized content to target accounts, this approach is easier and more cost-effective as it saves time and resources because of its precision.
ABM Performance Is Measurable
Account-based reporting is a key account-based marketing benefit. Using metrics like engagement, brand awareness, target account reach, retention, ROI, and influence helps you understand how well your ABM strategy is working. You can optimize your strategy to make it perform better.
ABM Makes You the Expert
While implementing account-based B2B marketing, you gain deep insights into the conversion behaviours, preferences, challenges, and needs of your target accounts. This knowledge makes you an expert in offering solutions that your target accounts crave. It also helps with new service or product design ideas that can cater to customers in a more personal way.
Creating an ABM Strategy That Works
To create an account-based marketing program that works, follow these steps:
1. Define the key accounts you want to target.
2. Identify the decision-makers for these accounts.
3. Create hyper-personalized content for them.
4. Zero in on appropriate channels to get maximum impact.
5. Create impressive content campaigns to increase engagement.
6. Measure the success of your campaigns using the correct metrics.
Account-based Marketing Services to Scale Your ABM Strategy
To adopt ABM at scale for exponential business growth, you need to evaluate your target accounts and then expand your ABM strategy from a small scale to a full-blown ABM. Your expansion can also be across new segments or businesses based on industry or company size. Artificial intelligence and marketing automation make it easier to implement ABM at scale.
Account-based marketing services offered by companies that specialize in ABM and marketing like Marketo, Terminus, Demandbase, Optimizely, and Oracle make it easier to implement an ABM strategy at scale. These companies offer services to attract and convert prospects, scale up your marketing, and grow customer relationships through up-selling and cross-selling.
Account-based marketing automation, email marketing, lead management, account-based management, social marketing, digital advertising, mobile marketing, multi-channel marketing, account-based reporting using ABM metrics and optimization along with account-based marketing software can help you scale your ABM strategy without breaking a sweat.
How SAP Created New Pipeline Opportunities Using ABM
SAP launched an account-based marketing program to target the company's top 10% of key accounts. These accounts were responsible for a third of their revenue in America. Through their ABM program, they offered specialized marketing plans for these accounts. SAP gained new pipeline opportunities and moved $57 million down the pipeline because of the benefits of account-based marketing.
Summing It Up
The time to implement ABM in your marketing strategy is now. Adopting it into your marketing strategy can help scale your business and achieve your business goals.
FAQ
What are the benefits of account-based marketing?
Some noteworthy account-based marketing benefits are: higher ROI, sales and marketing alignment, customer retention, and a shorter sales cycle.
Which metrics measure ABM performance?
Metrics like engagement, ROI, customer churn rate, content engagement, conversion rate, and average deal size are used to measure the performance of an ABM program.
Why is ABM more efficient compared to other marketing strategies?
ABM targets accounts with buyer intent, helps with better resource allocation and is cost effective. These factors contribute to a higher ROI and bring great results.
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Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
In any company, there is a sales function and a marketing function. They are supposed to work together to help the organization secure business, earn revenue, and facilitate growth.
Oftentimes, because of the nature of their business, sales and marketing work at cross purposes and they lose focus on their ultimate objective of identifying, creating, and retaining customers.
In this article, we will discuss how sales and marketing can work together to form an effective B2B sales funnel.
But first, let’s explore the roles of sales and marketing within an organization.
Sales are the function of driving revenue with salespeople who follow a defined sales process. A typical sales process involves a research phase to ensure that the intended customer is a good fit to the company’s Ideal Customer Profile, a discovery phase where the salesperson gets to know the customer, understand their needs, and see where their solution can help solve the customer’s problem, a demonstration phase where the seller lets the buyer envision how their solution for a product or service can satisfy the buyer’s need.
A proposal phase is proactive and where the seller provides the customer with an outline of the work they will undertake and at what price. Sometimes a seller will instead be responding to a buyer’s request for a proposal (RFP). Up until this point in the sales process, prospective customers are referred to as “suspects,” meaning that they may be a good fit, but they have not expressed any interest in the company’s solutions and the company has not proposed any ways in which it could be of service. However, once a salesperson provides the prospective customer with a proposal, that prospective customer becomes known as a “prospect.”
In sales, the measurement of potential revenue and its progress towards realization is called a sales “funnel.” In a sales funnel, the probability of the salesperson closing the sale is now weighted with percentages demonstrating the likelihood of success. In the sales process, opportunities are weighted based on their probability of closing. This is called opportunity management and it looks something like this:
0% of the prospect is identified by researching the intended sales target company.
10% of the prospect is prequalified as a potential good fit in alignment with the company’s Ideal Customer Profile (I.D.C.).
25% of the prospect is qualified via a discovery call, and the opportunity is loaded into the sales funnel.
40% is when the buyer agrees to a demonstration, shows genuine buying interest, and is open to receiving a proposal.
50% is the assessment phase where the seller determines if the buyer has Budget, Authority, Need, and the Timeframe for implementation, (B.A.N.T.). Another component of the sale to be addressed at this phase is “why,” as in, “Why is the buyer making this purchase decision, why is my company being considered, and why is this timeframe for implementation important?”
60% is when a proposal is submitted to the buyer for consideration. (Pro tip: A good salesperson will have the boilerplate components of the contract pre-vetted by legal and IT when the proposal is initially submitted to the buyer so that the contract does not get held up at the bottom of the funnel by any issues not within the buyer’s control when it is ready to close).
75% is the negotiation phase where the buyer/decision-maker(s) asks clarifying questions that show an intent to purchase or express some objections that the seller will need to overcome to move the sale forward.
90% is when both parties agree to all the conditions of the purchase and the final contract is submitted for signature.
100% is when the sale is closed and the revenue can be recognized.
If the funnel can be trusted, and oftentimes that’s a big “if” because salespeople are not always disciplined in opportunity management, then revenue recognized can be forecasted beginning at 75% of probability.
At every phase of the sales funnel, sales are conducted by calling, emailing, texting, or other outreach to prospective and existing customers to guide them towards making a purchase. The process might be consultative, taking place over a long period and involving multiple decision-makers in which the salesperson learns about the customer and their pain points, and then helps them understand how their product or service offering can provide a solution.
Sales could also be tactical and a very short process involving just a single conversation with a salesperson before an agreement is finalized.
Although technology and social media have certainly influenced how sales are conducted, the essential steps of the sales process have pretty much remained the same.
Whereas sales are hands-on, marketing is a much more comprehensive process that does not generally interact with an individual customer but is designed to increase awareness of a brand or product to target customers as a group.
Unlike sales, the methods, tactics, and channels used by marketers have evolved tremendously over the last fifteen years. Marketing today is primarily digital and includes content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, organic website traffic, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and the use of influencers and brand ambassadors.
The objective of the marketing department is to generate leads for the sales department. These leads start as “marketing qualified leads” (MQLs) and although these prospective buyers are not yet ready to purchase, they have expressed interest in a company’s product. When properly nurtured by the marketing department, these prospects become “sales qualified leads” (SQL’s) and are handed off by the marketing team to the sales team when they are likely to make a purchase.
This nurturing can occur via social media, email distribution, or other communication from the marketing team to keep the prospective client interested and engaged.
It would seem so easy for marketing to cultivate leads and hand them off to the sales team. However, this is often not the case. Too frequently marketing and sales are simply misaligned.
Just consider these statistics:
According to Upland, 55% of marketers don’t know which collateral their sales colleagues are most likely to use.
LinkedIn reports that only 46% of marketers describe sales and marketing as “highly aligned” at their company.
The Precision Marketing Group states that 25% of businesses describe their sales and marketing as either “misaligned” or “rarely aligned”.
This lack of synchronization between marketing and sales causes poor execution and lost opportunities.
According to LinkedIn’s Art of Winning Report, an estimated $1 trillion a year is lost due to a lack of sales and marketing coordination in the US alone.
An industry survey by InsideView found that the six biggest obstacles to sales and marketing
working together were:
Lack of accurate/shared data on target accounts and prospects (43%)
Communication (43%)
Use of different metrics (41%)
Broken/flawed processes (37%)
Lack of accountability on both sides (25%)
Reporting challenges (21%)
Simply put, marketing and sales need to collaborate more effectively to better manage today’s sales funnel. But how?
According to digital marketing strategist, Sujan Patel, there are three levels of marketing alignment:
The Emotional Level: Your Sales and Marketing teams should be working cohesively together and supporting each other. They should not be working at cross-purposes.
The Process Level: There need to be clear, measurable, sustainable, and repeatable processes in place to ensure that everyone within both the marketing and sales teams is pulling in the same direction and working in the same way.
The Feedback Loop Level: Marketing doesn’t always produce awesome leads. Sometimes they might suck. Nobody’s perfect. That’s why sales need to communicate back to marketing so there is a feedback loop between the two teams to either encourage good leads or stop wasting company resources on bad ones.
An effective partnership between sales and marketing is the #1 success factor attributed to achieving revenue goals. (Source: Heinz Marketing - Performance Management Report)
So, how can we get sales and marketing to work better together? It starts with having a project plan in place.
The first step is for sales and marketing to agree on what the ideal customer profile (I.D.C.) of a target customer should be. They need to agree on the characteristics that define the type of company (not the individual buyer or end-user) that will find the most value in their product or service offering. If done correctly, prospects that are aligned to the company’s IDC are most likely to become long-term customers who will give significant value back to the business in the form of possible subscription fees, upsells, and referrals. An easy way to identify the IDC of a company is to look at a list of their current best-performing customers and determine what attributes they have in common.
The next step is for sales to explain to marketing the steps of the sales funnel, how it works and what marketing resources are needed to migrate the prospective customer through it. Too often, marketing is concerned with branding and outreach, and they do not allocate sufficient resources to the sales team to give them the resources and collateral they need to expedite their sales.
Once sales and marketing are aligned regarding who the IDC of a company is and what marketing resources should be allocated to support the sales team, an organization can take its game up a level and begin to pursue account-based marketing (A.B.M.) opportunities.
Account-based marketing is when marketing and sales teams work together in a focused approach to target best-fit accounts and turn them into customers. When done correctly, marketing and sales teams meld their expertise to locate, engage with, and close deals with high-value accounts that offer a high ROI to their company.
The primary components of account-based marketing include:
Reaching the right accounts
Engaging across marketing channels
Determining effective metrics and measurements
According to LinkedIn research, businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are 67% more effective at closing deals, 58% more effective at retaining customers, and drive 208% more revenue as a result of their marketing efforts.
So, whether an organization is pursuing a traditional marketing approach or a more targeted account-based marketing strategy, it is essential for marketing to work more closely with sales in vigorous and meaningful ways.
Today’s buyer is more knowledgeable and has access to more information about a prospective seller, their competition, and the marketplace than ever before. As a result, sales leaders need to demonstrate subject matter expertise in their area of commerce and leverage the content, tools, and resources that the marketing department can provide them to enhance their sales efforts.
Although good salespeople will find a way to close business, having the support of a well-synchronized marketing team behind them will help accelerate the sales process, increase revenue, boost profitability and facilitate greater customer satisfaction.
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Core ABM
Article | August 5, 2022
Account mapping is the process of identifying and structuring your target accounts, as well as the important individuals within them, for your ABM strategy. This stage comes after you've established the objective of your ABM strategy. After you've chosen and sorted your target accounts, you can develop a communication and engagement strategy to influence them.
Account Mapping for B2B Marketing
For B2B marketers like you, account mapping comes in handy to gain insights into the budget cycles of target accounts. This helps your marketing teams run their campaigns based on the time of year where customers are more likely to have the budget to spend on new solutions. Apart from this, once you identify target personas and buyer personas relevant to your ABM strategy, your marketing campaigns can precisely target these personas. As a result, your campaigns will be relevant and successful and can bring you the conversions you desire.
Effective Account Mapping for ABM Success
While mapping account for ABM strategy, you need to follow these four crucial steps:
Identify the Target Account’s Key Decision-makers and Influencers
Target accounts with department structures are usually complex and have multiple influencers. The larger the company and the account, the more difficult it is to identify the decision makers or the buying group committee that makes the purchase decisions. Collecting contacts, documenting details, and understanding the buyer roles and responsibilities of these decision makers is the first step. Once you get this information, create a visual map of the decision markers for your team and the sales teams so your targeting strategies align.
Investigate Your Target Account’s Critical Pain Points
Gather information on the key accounts and stakeholders in the target account. Determine their requirements, pain points, challenges, and frustration. Discovery calls, search intent, social listening, Google Alerts, and press releases are some ways to find out this information. You can also engage ABM platforms and solutions providers to get deep insights into the account and the group of decision-makers. You should closely collaborate with sales so they can share insights on the challenges customers and prospects share with them. Once you have all the data you need on the target account’s pain points, move to the next step: designing a content strategy to address these pain points with solid solutions.
Develop Content and Messages that Appeal to Decision Makers
Find the right channels to approach decision makers; determine what time of the day or what days of the week they prefer to connect; and when they are likely to consume content on a particular channel. After you find this information, you know when and where to connect with them and how to engage them in a productive conversation.
Create Content and Messaging that Aligns with the Decision Makers
Each person in the decision-making group (buying group committee) may consume content differently. You need to tailor your content to target each of the decision makers to influence their buying decisions. You might not need to create all the content from scratch. Repurposing existing content in a relevant way can save you time, money, and effort. However, you need to make sure that your content is convincing enough to influence the buying decisions of the buying committee members.
Final Thoughts
Account mapping is vital for ABM success and to maintain market competitiveness. It helps you determine who the decision makers are in your target account, so you can build the right communication plan and content to convert the account into a long-term customer.
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