Account-Based Marketing: How to Scale your Business in Digital-Only Marketplace

ANUSREE BHATTACHARYA | June 4, 2021 | 301 views

There’s a new business world evolving—a digital-only marketplace driven by the recent global pandemic. It impacted every company, forced them to change the way they operate, market, and sell. Proven best marketing practices, such as Account-Based Marketing (ABM), are commonplace for B2B marketers. That said, the new reality and new normal is forcing companies to rethink how they can optimize their strategy to be more accurate and direct with a one-to-many engagement model.

As COVID-19 continues to be spreading, B2b marketers (you) should take advantage of the downtime to assess and scale your business in the evolving digital-only marketplace. This is because once you exit from this crisis, businesses would be ordinary.

So, one of the most effective ways to keep your marketing strategy dynamic is to look for fresh ideas, tactical approaches, get creative with adding personalization, and include some empathy in messages to help customers during this period of uncertainty.

With account-based marketing, set a relatively new concept of marketing strategies to scale your business. Understanding this, you can better deliver the right solution to your targeted and potential customers.

As you are defining and refining your ABM marketing strategy, how can you help customers more with solutions precisely? It’s time to explore new ways to communicate and engage more and more accounts.

Get Creative with Your ABM Strategy

ABM may not be a new concept in the B2B space. Still, there’s always an opportunity to freshen up your strategy and get creative with different aspects. The most influential and budding trend of being creative is personalization. Yes! Personalization will let you focus on your target audience and achieve brand recognition and higher conversions.

Identify a List of Ideal Target Audience

As ABM is about tailoring campaigns to specific accounts, the first thing you need to do is to identify a list of important accounts for your campaign. The easiest way to begin is by asking your sales team to pick accounts from the existing customer data.

Finding companies matching your ideal target customer helps narrow down your focus for a longer period. Once you have a list of companies, use the same social media strategies to search their profile pages and find similar companies. But, sometimes, there might be some companies on social media that do not match your ideal customer profile. In such cases, you can research for each of the “similar” accounts you find.

Want to know how to proceed? Read further.

Research Each Account

Unlike research for personas, ABM is not about targeting an individual. Instead, it requires proper account-based research! So, what information you need to get initially and collect to start your research? It’s recommended to start with the following:
  • Market-wise: Includes industry, company size, and competitors
  • Company-wise: Marketing share, revenue, and past revenue records
  • Client/Audience wise: Buying power, designation, influencers, and management

In most cases, this information will be visible on the company website, press releases, social media pages, or annual reports. One of the most critical aspects of the research phase is identifying and getting access to key decision-makers. The more you identify them, the more successful will be your ABM campaign. It is because, today, the number of people involved in decision-making is growing. According to Gartner, in a typical firm with 100-500 employees, approximately 7-8 people stay engaged in the buying decisions. But you need to convince. How? Good content plays a crucial role here.

Content? How? Read the next point to understand.

Use Dynamic Content

Creating dynamic content is a great way to have personalized communications with your target accounts. Whether emails, newsletters, subscriptions, websites, blogs, and videos, among others, are the best ways to initiate personalization in your marketing strategy when doing ABM.

Demand Gen Report’s survey found that 95% of B2B buyers choose a solution provider through content. This helps them navigate each stage of the buying process. Here are ABM’s most effective content-based marketing tactics:

Personalized content: 78%
Emails: 68%
Social media: 57%
Targeted display ads: 50%
Search engines: 50%
Mobile ad: 48%

To understand how dynamic content plays a key role, hop to the next level.

Generate Relevant Content

What kind of content engages B2B buyers? It is relevant and informational content because such contents are more attractive, which interests a buyer is to engage with you. Also, in terms of the most effective ABM strategies, personalized content ranks number one!

So, how you make relevant content? The standard approach in ABM for B2B marketers is to create tailored content for a specific industry. But you can also customize content for particular accounts. It is an excellent practice to review the existing content before you customize content for any specific account. It will give you more ideas and insights.

For example, blog posts, case studies, white papers, and e-books are the most considered relevant content for your ideal target account. Then, categorize by stage in the sales funnel. Whether they fall under the top of the funnel (includes blogs, articles, videos, and infographics), middle of the funnel (includes eBooks, case studies, white papers, and video tutorials), and bottom of the funnel (includes free blogs, blog samples, quotes, etc.). This way, you know accurately the type of content (a relevant one) that needs to be sent to a buyer based on the funnel stage.

However, if you have no content that rings with your ideal customer, interview existing customers that match their profile to understand their top business challenges. This becomes extremely powerful and results in attracting more and more potential customers in the future.

In this context, only 42% of marketers communicate with their customers as part of their content research phase. Without interviewing existing customers, the content created might not be relevant. Thus, it becomes one primary reason buyers don’t engage with brands.

Use Personalized Content

Today, content personalization is playing a pivotal role in the new digital marketing landscape. It is working on customizing the content-based interests of audiences and their challenges. It can help you target your specific market segments more accurately and enable more chances of conversion. Personalization of content aims to ultimately understand how the businesses will benefit from your products and services.

To increase the size of your marketing net through ABM strategy, it is vital to be sure that your target accounts resonate with your content across the following touch-points:
  • Use personalized content on social media platforms to gain maximum outreach
  • Utilize advanced programmatic ads to communicate directly to your target accounts
  • Develop landing pages precisely to one target account or multiple accounts that have similar needs within a similar industry

Tell your Story to Connect

If you want to stand out from the crowd, your ABM strategy must be unique instead of being cut and dry. Storytelling is a perfect opportunity to be creative in showcasing your business (brand). Such an approach gives a broad perspective to your audiences. Hence, they learn more about your brand, the solutions you provide, and the benefits they might gain from the collaboration.

Storytelling in your content-based ABM strategy can take on many forms, such as:
  • Combine product videos with case-studies related to the target account’s needs.
  • In case-studies, use relevant success stories during targeting. Allow them to see themselves as the business in the case study.
  • Highlight the past customer experience to the target account.
  • Share your company culture and milestones.

These points attribute holistically to create proper storytelling— one of the most critical aspects of content-based ABM strategy for marketing.

Personalize Your Website

Creating a dynamically personalized and highly relevant website is extremely important to target accounts. Based on their behavior, location, profile, and other attributes, a website provides a different experience to your targeted accounts. Imagine browsing a website and seeing your industry on its homepage—wouldn’t you be intrigued to browse further? This is how a part of personalization works. So, personalize your website by tailoring content, gathering events, webinars, discussion forums, and collaboration with your industry leaders. These attributes help personalization become more powerful, as you gain the ability to catch target account’s interest the moment they click on your website.

To create a personalized website, remember these points:
  • Diversify your content through blog posts, infographics, video or slide presentations, etc.
  • Your website’s structural flow should accommodate a straightforward user experience.
  • Easy navigation of the website to encourage leads
  • Perform testing on keywords, pricing info, placement of CTAs, layout, images, landing pages, and contact forms.
  • Boost the quality of your content for accuracy, coherence, and tone.

Distribute Content to the Right Person

The foremost goal of ABM strategy to scale your business is to reach the right person at the right account. It is necessary so that you can engage, nurture, and build a strong connection.

What’s the most effective way to create content to reach the right person?

It’s an Email. Emails still work efficiently than any other content form when it comes to campaigns. The content for it needs to be highly relevant to contact a single account or a group of accounts that match your ideal customer’s profile.

E-mail is not just limited to marketers. Sales representatives can use email too! 92% of businesses pay attention to emails even if it’s sent from a company that they have never done business with. They read an email that contains ideas that might be relevant to their business. Also, 78% of decision-makers have taken appointments or attended an event inspired by cold emails.
So, do not be mistaken with email marketing dead just yet!

To understand it more, know-how a direct mail can be effective:
  • 80% of mail gets attention and opened.
  • 56% of buyers initiate contact with the help of direct mail.
  • 59% of buyers enjoy receiving direct mail from brands they like.
  • The average ROI for mail campaigns is between 18-20%.

Therefore, with mails, you can target a particular account and tailor the content particularly for them. Also, you can tailor the content to include personal details such as company logo, names, and job titles. Because this helps clients remember your company details than of others on top of their minds.

Explore Experimental Marketing

Experiential marketing in ABM strategy can combine real-world and virtual touch-points to promote higher campaign engagement. Refining your ABM campaigns around the tenants of experiential marketing can increase the likelihood of a conversion and strengthen your brand loyalty with target accounts.

To do experiential marketing in your ABM strategy program, keep the focus on the following tactics:
  • Create new content messaging to connect to the new focused target audience.
  • Create a client value proposition on an account-by-account, including content marketing tricks.
  • Focusing on an emotional connection between the target account and your brand to give solutions is essential
  • Apply your content marketing strategies to a digital and real-world customer experience framework.
  • Include all of your standard digital marketing channels, in-person events, and one-on-one meetings

Lastly, Re-think Everything

While the COVID-19 pandemic has left a wake of loss and misfortune in the B2B business world, the new digital-only reality will accelerate digital transformation across every B2B enterprise. More importantly, this will catalyze to resolve puzzling technology, skills, and organizational challenges that have prevented marketing teams from fully delivering a rich customer experience through their ABM programs. So, you should re-think everything at this time, including your tech stack, to increase the number of marketing technology.

Leveraging a one-size-fits-all approach to ABM does not work, especially in a COVID-19 affected world. Now, more than ever, you need to include and demonstrate empathy and engage target accounts with the right content and message in your ABM strategy. By this, marketing organizations can quickly understand which accounts are in a buy-cycle and contribute to the virility of your campaigns within your accounts to expand coverage and conversion results.

Frequently Asked Questions


How effective is ABM?

ABM helps companies to align their sales and marketing functions with increasing revenue. 60% of them using ABM have increased revenue by 10% in a year. Also, other companies have seen a 30% and more increase in business revenue. Therefore, by implementing account-based marketing, B2B marketers will have a technology stack that can scale their new business.

How does personalization help ABM strategy to scale?

  • If you have included personalization, here are ways that help your ABM strategy to scale:
  • Create a strategic design, including creating empathy maps for each target audience segment or customer personas.
  • Create proprietary datasets according to patterns of customer profiles, get insight, and include personalization messages, content on social media platforms, blogs, websites, and more.
  • Use Tech integrations such as voice recognition and augmented reality, which is mobile-friendly, to reduce the cost of managing millions of data points.
  • Automate process: Campaign creation, content creation through emails, and more.

How to prepare ABM strategies?

  • Follow these steps to prepare ABM strategies:
  • Build the sales bridge to establish alignment between sales and marketing leadership.
  • Define your segments.
  • Align marketing and sales processes.
  • Empower sales and marketing, including technology stacks like artificial intelligence, machine learning, chatbots, VR, and AR.
  • Host consistent planning sessions with territory-level managers.

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OTHER ARTICLES
CORE ABM

The 5 Things to Know About Account-Based Marketing

Article | July 5, 2022

If you’ve been keeping up with new terms in B2B marketing, by now you’ve likely heard of account-based marketing (ABM). The term itself has been around for years, but with recent advances in technology, this tactic is now being adopted at a much larger scale than ever before. Still, surprisingly, I find that many B2B marketers are in the dark when it comes to ABM. So here’s a quick look into the future of B2B enterprise marketing, and why I think account-based marketing will be one of the biggest revenue drivers for B2B businesses in the very near future.

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5 Steps for Succeeding in Account-Based Marketing

Article | August 5, 2022

Relative to the mass-market approach of the B2C world, B2B promotion requires a much more targeted approach. The customers are fewer and more discerning but commensurably more valuable and enduring so whether you’re trying to win over a new client or simply keep an existing client on your side, you need to be very careful with what you’re putting out. This is the reasoning behind account-based marketing, otherwise known as ABM. Instead of distributing generic marketing materials, it picks out specific prospects (or sets of prospects grouped by various shared elements) and creates personalized campaigns to suit them. It can be extremely cost-effective, but it needs to be done smartly (which isn’t easy). To help you run a flourishing account-based marketing campaign, we’re going to look at five steps you should take along the way.

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How to Successfully Set Up and Measure Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy

Article | July 27, 2022

The first lesson in this article is to stop thinking differently about ABM and B2B. Sangram Vajre is spot on when he exclaims that “ABM is B2B.” There is no real difference. Whether named or unnamed, every single campaign you launch as a B2B marketer caters to personas in different accounts. Another reality about account-based marketing is that due to the nature of omnichannel marketing and the fact that every prospect does its own research, you’re going to have to process different sets of traffic no matter how much control you think you have over your funnels. With these two things in mind, let’s look at what’s common in a successful ABM strategy, and also how to segment your audience in a way that tells the story of all the steps in your user acquisition models.

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ABM IS ESSENTIAL FOR THE ALIGNMENT OF SALES AND MARKETING TEAMS

Article | February 10, 2020

Account-Based Marketing has been one of the most preferred B2B strategies for marketers. More than 90% of marketers believe that ABM is essential for the alignment of sales and marketing teams. ABM is all about fostering a better relationship with your target accounts. And especially in this digital transformation era, it’s evident that people aren’t buying products but experiences. As per a recent PwC survey, “73% of consumers cite customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions”. This shift in consumer behavior is what B2B companies/marketers should take note of. Also, ITSMA reports that of the companies that adopted ABM in the past two years, 55% are seeing a significantly higher ROI than with traditional marketing.

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Spotlight

incite new business

incite generates leads and creates growth for businesses in the marketing services, technology and professional services verticals.We have been established for nine years and have grown to be one of the most successful businesses in our field in terms of client retention, growth and turnover.

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Intellimize Enables B2B Marketers to Drive More Efficient Pipeline from Key Accounts

PR Newswire | June 07, 2023

Intellimize, the leading experience optimization platform, has released a turnkey Salesforce integration that makes it easy for B2B marketers to target website visitors from any account and deliver personalized experiences on every page. The release also includes the ability to deanonymize visitors from key accounts and arm sales teams with personalized outbound experiences for target prospects. ABM success requires a deep understanding of each target persona to deliver the right personalized experience at the right time. However, the bane of every ABM marketer has been to identify which anonymous website visitors are from key accounts so they can show personalized content right from their first page view. Intellimize's Salesforce integration with Enhanced Match solves this, making it easier to show personalized content for each prospect at every opportunity stage, to satisfy the individual needs of the entire buying committee. "This is a real game changer for ABM Marketers – to be able to personalize for the entire buying committee, even the anonymous ones, is huge," said Tracy Sestili, Intellimize Chief Marketing Officer. "Plus it really creates synergy among the sales and marketing teams to deliver account based experiences (ABX) at scale." Marketers no longer need to rely on manually setting up campaign UTMs or manually building hundreds of personalized landing pages in order to deliver the content their buyers need to move through the funnel. Using Intellimize, they can create targeted outbound landing pages enabling sales teams to confidently send emails, texts, or direct mail and be certain that each key account will arrive on a landing page personalized just for them. "I'm thrilled that we can provide B2B marketers with everything they need to deliver 1:1 ABM experiences throughout the buyer journey," said Guy Yalif, Intellimize CEO. "With a few simple clicks, marketers can connect their valuable Salesforce data to automatically generate personalized experiences for each unique visitor, within each unique account." This Salesforce integration compliments Intellimize's existing behavioral targeting capabilities which allow marketers to create personalized experiences using on-site visitor behavior so companies can meet prospects where they are in their purchase journey. Marketers have, for example, tailored homepage content for target prospects who visited a product page twice in the past week to highlight that product of interest. Intellimize is the only codeless platform that uses AI to optimize for 1:1 personalized website experiences across the entire buyer's journey. Marketing teams at Gong, Okta, Drift, Coupa and Sumo Logic gain a competitive edge when using Intellimize to drive efficient pipeline and revenue growth in a cookieless world. About Intellimize Intellimize is the only codeless SaaS platform that uses AI to optimize for 1:1 personalized website experiences across the entire buyer's journey. Marketing teams gain a competitive edge when using Intellimize to drive efficient pipeline and revenue growth in a cookieless world. Leading marketing teams at Gong, Okta, Drift, Sumo Logic, Coupa and more trust Intellimize to inspire, test and learn faster, drive revenue, and be more efficient. Intellimize is backed by Cobalt Capital, Addition, Amplify Partners, Homebrew, and Precursor Ventures. Learn more on the Intellimize website or follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

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Business Wire | June 08, 2023

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ABM Trailblazer Demandbase Announces Buying Group AI, the Next Breakthrough in B2B

PR Newswire | June 06, 2023

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This is a revolution for B2B GTM teams that will unlock efficient growth, and those that adopt will be the CMOs and CROs of the future." The industry has recognized the need to target and reach buying groups, with Forrester Research saying that the goal of this approach is to "better align with the true buyer in virtually all B2B buying decisions — a group of people (the buying group) all working together to solve a business issue." "Identifying and engaging with the buying committee is the key to winning deals but it's really hard," commented Craig Rosenberg, chief platform officer at Scale Venture Partners. "That's why the introduction of AI-powered buying groups is so powerful for GTM teams. It eliminates the manual guesswork for B2B GTM teams thus allowing these teams to focus on driving increased demand." Historically, teams have relied on guesswork, manual processes, and missing and inaccurate data, resulting in systematic under-estimation of all personas that make up the full committee. With Demandbase Buying Group AI, this will all change. For the first time, companies will be able to use AI to automatically generate their ideal buying groups, create different buying groups for different products and journey stages, find the right contacts for each persona — adding them to their CRM, if not already there — and engage them with accurate contact information. The result will be fewer missed, lost, or delayed deals and vastly superior go-to-market execution. Demandbase pioneered the ABM movement and is now leading the way in this latest evolution of B2B go-to-market. 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Intellimize Enables B2B Marketers to Drive More Efficient Pipeline from Key Accounts

PR Newswire | June 07, 2023

Intellimize, the leading experience optimization platform, has released a turnkey Salesforce integration that makes it easy for B2B marketers to target website visitors from any account and deliver personalized experiences on every page. The release also includes the ability to deanonymize visitors from key accounts and arm sales teams with personalized outbound experiences for target prospects. ABM success requires a deep understanding of each target persona to deliver the right personalized experience at the right time. However, the bane of every ABM marketer has been to identify which anonymous website visitors are from key accounts so they can show personalized content right from their first page view. Intellimize's Salesforce integration with Enhanced Match solves this, making it easier to show personalized content for each prospect at every opportunity stage, to satisfy the individual needs of the entire buying committee. "This is a real game changer for ABM Marketers – to be able to personalize for the entire buying committee, even the anonymous ones, is huge," said Tracy Sestili, Intellimize Chief Marketing Officer. "Plus it really creates synergy among the sales and marketing teams to deliver account based experiences (ABX) at scale." Marketers no longer need to rely on manually setting up campaign UTMs or manually building hundreds of personalized landing pages in order to deliver the content their buyers need to move through the funnel. Using Intellimize, they can create targeted outbound landing pages enabling sales teams to confidently send emails, texts, or direct mail and be certain that each key account will arrive on a landing page personalized just for them. "I'm thrilled that we can provide B2B marketers with everything they need to deliver 1:1 ABM experiences throughout the buyer journey," said Guy Yalif, Intellimize CEO. "With a few simple clicks, marketers can connect their valuable Salesforce data to automatically generate personalized experiences for each unique visitor, within each unique account." This Salesforce integration compliments Intellimize's existing behavioral targeting capabilities which allow marketers to create personalized experiences using on-site visitor behavior so companies can meet prospects where they are in their purchase journey. Marketers have, for example, tailored homepage content for target prospects who visited a product page twice in the past week to highlight that product of interest. Intellimize is the only codeless platform that uses AI to optimize for 1:1 personalized website experiences across the entire buyer's journey. Marketing teams at Gong, Okta, Drift, Coupa and Sumo Logic gain a competitive edge when using Intellimize to drive efficient pipeline and revenue growth in a cookieless world. About Intellimize Intellimize is the only codeless SaaS platform that uses AI to optimize for 1:1 personalized website experiences across the entire buyer's journey. Marketing teams gain a competitive edge when using Intellimize to drive efficient pipeline and revenue growth in a cookieless world. Leading marketing teams at Gong, Okta, Drift, Sumo Logic, Coupa and more trust Intellimize to inspire, test and learn faster, drive revenue, and be more efficient. Intellimize is backed by Cobalt Capital, Addition, Amplify Partners, Homebrew, and Precursor Ventures. Learn more on the Intellimize website or follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

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6sense Unveils Generative AI Email Writing Feature That Generates Pipeline

Business Wire | June 08, 2023

6sense, the leading platform to revolutionize the way B2B organizations create, manage and convert pipeline to revenue, today announced significant enhancements to 6sense® Conversational Email with the launch of its AI Writer functionality. This new functionality expands on the generative AI capabilities customers are currently using within 6sense Conversational Email to maximize the effectiveness of email outreach and marketing. Leveraging the power of intent, predictive, and other first-party signals with the latest advancements in generative AI, demand generation teams can use AI Writer to efficiently create personalized, targeted, and on-brand email campaigns that engage prospects, and ultimately build pipeline. Emails that compel a response are more engaging and targeted than the informational tone of typical marketing automation emails. Using AI Writer functionality within 6sense Conversational Email, demand generation teams quickly craft tailored emails aimed to trigger a response. The Conversational Email assistant then manages replies, routing conversations to the appropriate seller at the right time. This combination of personalization and scale allows demand generation teams to generate more pipeline more effectively and efficiently. Today’s announcement builds on the 6sense Conversational Email launch in October 2022 which transformed one-way email sends into engaging conversations that book meetings at scale. Leaning on powerful AI models, including GPT-4 combined with intent data and predictive analytics, 6sense Conversational Email delivers hyper-personalized, hyper-relevant emails to qualify and convert leads to sales meetings. “Conversion rates are down across industries, it takes more touches across more buying team members to advance opportunities, and prospect expectations for a deeply personalized experience feel unrealistically high with the tools marketers have been given,” said Latané Conant, CMO at 6sense. “Leveraging our 6sense Conversational Email product and this new AI Writer has been a game changer for our own demand generation team as the generative AI capability has delivered real results, building 10% of new pipeline from accounts engaged.” Maximize Efficiency with Self-Service Capabilities 6sense Conversational Email with AI Writer functionality offers a self-service platform for demand gen teams to quickly create highly engaging email campaigns, saving time and energy currently spent on multiple rounds of writing and editing email content with low conversion rates. Demand generation teams can utilize 6sense Conversational Email and its AI Writer functionality to: Take on the heavy lift of creating contextual emails for various demand gen plays, such as educating low-intent leads, prospecting in-market accounts, and re-engaging lost opportunities. Engage in back-and-forth conversations with prospects via email during hours when time zone constraints might otherwise hinder communication or early in the prospecting cycle, leading to more engaged prospects, better-qualified leads, and significant pipeline, allowing BDRs to instead focus on social touches and live conversations. Link traditional marketing automation and sales engagement platforms together, without replacing existing systems or relying on generic mass-market emails Establish Your Own AI Brand Voice With 6sense Conversational Email and AI Writer functionality, email content always sounds on brand. Each customer trains and customizes their model by uploading their brand style guide, product messages, and contextual content. Designed with B2B sales and marketing email best practices in mind, AI Writer ensures that content is tailored to individual recipients by combining customized product and brand content with predictive intent data to improve the quality and relevance of email campaigns. Next-Gen Email Metrics in the Age Of AI Using 6sense Conversational Email with AI Writer functionality, demand gen teams finally have useful insights that have been difficult to access before, enabling them to evaluate and report on the actual effectiveness of email campaigns in building a net new pipeline. Measuring and reporting impact is critical as current email metrics, such as open rates, are misleading and don’t provide the useful information demand gen teams need to evaluate the efficacy of their campaigns and contributions to pipeline reliably. "The team I'm working with is incredibly hardworking and dedicated, averaging 50 calls daily to new and existing businesses. But with the help of Conversational Email, we've been able to exponentially increase our outreach,” said Walker Smith, Custom Truck Manager of Sales Development. “It's like having five more of us working simultaneously - saving us time and allowing us to reach thousands more potential customers in a single day." Use Generative AI in a Safe and Secure Environment Teams can confidently upload brand documents, pre-release product details, and other internal communications in combination with intent, technographic, firmographic, first-party or other data sources, knowing that content and data are stored in segregated, highly secure environments and not used to train any other models. The systems that deliver 6sense Conversational Email and AI Writer functionality are SOC 2, Type II certified, undergoing rigorous third party security audits confirming infrastructure, systems, applications, data and networking controls. About 6sense 6sense is on a mission to revolutionize the way B2B organizations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AITM is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and a 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything. Do anythingⓇ, with 6sense.

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ABM Trailblazer Demandbase Announces Buying Group AI, the Next Breakthrough in B2B

PR Newswire | June 06, 2023

Demandbase, the Smarter GTM™ company that helps B2B organizations hit their revenue goals, today introduces the biggest breakthrough in B2B since ABM — AI-powered buying groups. Demandbase One™ will be the first and only platform to use cutting edge, generative AI to analyze millions of data points, drawing from more than 150M B2B contacts combined with the industry's deepest advertising, intent, and engagement data to generate dynamic B2B buying groups, assign roles and personas, and recommend new contacts. It also will aggregate buying signals across the group and streamline engagement, unlocking a clear competitive advantage and saving hours of manual research and guesswork to drive greater revenue growth. "As a company that heavily relies on ABM, Demandbase's new Buying Group solution will be a game changer," said Dan Cafiero, senior program manager, Account-Based Marketing and Paid Media at Seagate. "The ability to automatically identify and engage with accurate buying groups, understanding their personas and roles, will revolutionize our sales and marketing efforts. This tool truly understands the complex dynamics of B2B decision-making processes, cutting through the noise to reach the right people at the right time. We can't wait to get our hands on it." "B2B GTM teams have known for a long time that the traditional lead-based approach really misses the mark, because individuals don't buy solutions in the enterprise — that focus is too narrow," says Brewster Stanislaw, chief product officer, at Demandbase. "That's why account-based marketing came into existence… but the reality is an account-based approach has its drawbacks as well. It's too broad because it's not every person at an account that participates in a buying decision. The sweet spot is in between; it's the buying committee, made of influencers, champions, blockers, etc., that actually determines where and when an enterprise will invest in a given solution." Stanislaw continues, "Until now, it's been too hard to implement buying groups because companies had to rely on manual guesswork and faulty data. Our AI-powered buying groups solve this once and for all by delivering on the audience that is 'just right.' We're using artificial intelligence to analyze massive behavioral data sets to generate accurate buying groups and automatically assign roles and personas to each of their constituent members. This empowers our customers to be optimally efficient across their entire GTM motion. By focusing on the buying group as their core GTM object, they can generate more demand with greater velocity through the customer journey, while minimizing waste by investing resources where they are most impactful. This is a revolution for B2B GTM teams that will unlock efficient growth, and those that adopt will be the CMOs and CROs of the future." The industry has recognized the need to target and reach buying groups, with Forrester Research saying that the goal of this approach is to "better align with the true buyer in virtually all B2B buying decisions — a group of people (the buying group) all working together to solve a business issue." "Identifying and engaging with the buying committee is the key to winning deals but it's really hard," commented Craig Rosenberg, chief platform officer at Scale Venture Partners. "That's why the introduction of AI-powered buying groups is so powerful for GTM teams. It eliminates the manual guesswork for B2B GTM teams thus allowing these teams to focus on driving increased demand." Historically, teams have relied on guesswork, manual processes, and missing and inaccurate data, resulting in systematic under-estimation of all personas that make up the full committee. With Demandbase Buying Group AI, this will all change. For the first time, companies will be able to use AI to automatically generate their ideal buying groups, create different buying groups for different products and journey stages, find the right contacts for each persona — adding them to their CRM, if not already there — and engage them with accurate contact information. The result will be fewer missed, lost, or delayed deals and vastly superior go-to-market execution. Demandbase pioneered the ABM movement and is now leading the way in this latest evolution of B2B go-to-market. The company is uniquely positioned to deliver on AI-generated buying groups with its massive data set that combines the customer's engagement data with Demandbase's B2B data — including AI-validated contact data on more than 150M buyers plus expansive advertising and behavioral data — to see how individuals interact across products and with each other. Demandbase Buying Group AI will launch out of beta in Q3 of 2023. See how it works to learn more and discover why buying groups are the foundation of a modern, Smarter GTM™ platform. About Demandbase Demandbase helps B2B companies hit their revenue goals using fewer resources. How? By using the power of AI to identify and engage the accounts and buying groups most likely to purchase, powered by combining your sales and marketing data with our validated B2B data — what we call Account Intelligence. Better data makes better AI, that's Smarter GTM™.

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