Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
When it comes to ABM vs. demand generation, most businesses struggle to find the right balance. Swinging too far one way or the other can completely derail your performance — and your organization's trust.
Here are some things you can do to get the best of both ABM and demand generation:
Check If You Are Too Heavy on Demand
If you are someone who focuses more on demand, then you should:
Gather insights from data, intelligence, and signals to develop a strong ICP. A strong ICP will help you target the individuals that make up the buying committee.
Keep your TAL (target account list) short and base it on buying intent.
Build an ABM program that encompasses teams, channels, and activities to gauge output and refine the use case.
Engage the double funnel to understand where you should draw the line between ABM and demand generation.
Are You Too Focused on ABM?
For the account-based marketer in you, it must be very hard to think beyond your target accounts. To balance this out, you should:
Get more information on the channels and tactics that your buyers respond to.
Draft messaging that creates urgency around your target account’s pain points.
Test your content on a large audience to see which gets the most engagement.
Use these insights to find the right balance between your demand generation strategy and ABM.
Beat the Odds When Implementing Strategies
Issues like no alignment between your sales and marketing teams and a superior insisting on implementing 100% ABM may arise. To address such issues, you should:
Expertly measure your data so all your responses are data-driven.
Chase directional improvements instead of trying to perfect your strategies right away.
Define a single metric for success, so your teams work towards achieving the same goal.
Keep your efforts balanced when implementing demand gen and ABM strategies.
Conclusion
If you do not strike a delicate balance between your ABM and your demand generation plan, your SDR teams will get overwhelmed and may not reach the level of efficiency you desire. Remember, your demand generation program should supplement your ABM efforts and not drive them.
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Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 2022
These days the challenges that the marketing and the sales team face are tremendous. The pressure to meet targets, deadlines, achieve revenue, and at the same time keep the clients satisfied is not an easy task. And to add to the woes, there is massive competition in the industry.
But there is one way to overcome all the obstacles and achieve targets while keeping clients happy and satisfied. This strategy is ABM- Account-Based Marketing. ABM campaigns have been a trendsetter in the B2B marketing field for a long time. As it ensures successful marketing, businesses are turning towards this thriving approach.
What Exactly Is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing is identifying the target, high-value customers and selling your product/service to them. This ABM approach allows you to concentrate on exclusive clients and guarantees the best ROI.
What Is B2B Account-Based Marketing?
B2B account-based marketing is targeting an organization with specific and personalized marketing campaigns. When you target the decision-makers of an organization, you need to tread with caution. When you design a marketing strategy for them, personalize it, and deliver everything to increase their brand value.
Thus, ABM is a marketing strategy wherein the sales and the marketing team have to put their heads together to deliver an impeccable buying experience for the best and valuable clients.
Tactics to Implement a Successful Account-Based Marketing
According to the Pardot site survey, 89% of businesses reported higher ROI in ABM than traditional marketing methods.
If you develop an account-based marketing plan, here are some tips to follow:
Collaborate working of the marketing and sales team to identify high-value clients and gather maximum data about them.
Use social media to gather data and create a personalized approach for the clients.
Try to sync in with the brand of the target company to develop relatable content and graphics.
Recognize the expertise, pain points, and challenges of the target account and frame communication.
Send personalized emails addressing the challenges your target account faces.
Host face to face or virtual events
5 Trend-setting Examples of Account-Based Marketing
ABM is a marketing strategy that has shown guaranteed success in the B2B industry. You have to sculpt unique ideas and have a personalized approach towards your targeted clients. The clients should feel that you have made efforts to know them, understand them, and address the challenges that they face.
Some companies have achieved an altogether different benchmark in ABM strategy. As a result, these are prominent examples of B2B account-based marketing.
Let us go through their account-based marketing case study and learn their ways of execution.
Snowflake- Excellent Use of Content Creation
“We needed to make sure that when you see an ABM campaign, it’s reflective of not only sales input but also product marketing, partner marketing, field marketing, and our SDRs. We needed a way to co-create one cohesive message for our key accounts.” — Hillary Carpio, Director of ABM, Snowflake.
Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehousing company, utilized its in-house services in the best way to create a library of high-quality content. This content is used to create personalized experiences for high-valued and targeted accounts. Then, this personalized content creates account-based marketing campaigns customized to reach the target customers.
Gumgum- Using Technology the Right Way.
GumGum collaborated and created an effective marketing product for the Clorox brand. They showcased this product at the Clorox annual iConnect Conference.
The product they created was turning a temporary tattoo into a fascinating 3D animation while incorporating logos of the concerned brands. It was a hit among the Clorox brand, and almost 200 attendees downloaded the GumGum app.
Intridea- Making the Right Confrontational Approach
Intridea did take a risk by implementing the direct approach of ABM advertising. They rented a billboard right across the advertising giant Ogilvy’s Manhattan office. The billboard said, “Ogle this, Ogilvy.” Intridea also placed its logo and company URL at the bottom of the quirky line.
And they succeeded in fixing a meeting with Ogilvy’s CEO.
Payscale- Utilizing Data to Gain Profits
Payscale helps employers manage compensations in the right way. They also aid employees know their correct market value.
Payscale collaborated with their sales and marketing team to gather the correct information about ABM target accounts. Once they had ample information about the company’s decision-makers, they targeted the client with their best ad campaigns.
As a result, their ROI was six times more compared to any other marketing strategy!
O2- Gathered Data to Create Personalized Reports.
O2 is a leading ICT service provider.
The organization targeted many high-value clients and created personalized reports for them. Their modus operandi was to curate personalized reports on how the organization will benefit by utilizing O2 for their ICT services. The dedicated teams also emphasized on face to face meetings for customized strategies.
As a result, O2 had a successful ABM strategy as they achieved 313% of their target pipeline.
The Bottom Line
Account-based marketing strategies are incorporated in unique ways. As a result, there are many ideas where you can implement account-based marketing to stand out and gain maximum ROI. All you have to do is gather data and make the correct use of it.
So gear up and come up with uncommon ideas and, you never know your company could make it to the list of trendsetting examples of B2B account-based marketing!
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best strategies for successful account-based marketing?
Enlist your high-value clients and gather maximum data about them(Social media can be of great help.)
Address their pain points and portray how well you know the organization
Collaborate with the marketing and sales team in the best way to provide appropriate solutions
Deliver 100% relevance in communication
What are the advantages of incorporating ABM?
Faster sales process
Guaranteed maximum ROI
Cost Efficiency
Shorter sales cycle
Deliver excellent value to high-value customers
When should you implement ABM?
ABM should be used in the B2B industry to sell to clients with high-value accounts. ABM should be implemented when an organization notices that certain exclusive clients can be easily converted with personalized strategies.
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Account Based Data
Article | August 19, 2022
Are you thinking about ditching your revenue team’s creaky, ineffective sales approach and embracing ABM … but aren’t sure of what you need to know? You’ve found the right blog post.
Today, we’re providing some mind-blowing highlights from a recent webinar hosted by Kerry Cunningham, our Senior Principal of Product Marketing.
The webinar unpacked what matters most for launching an effective ABM program and offers actionable tips for sales and marketing teams. It’s well worth a watch. But if you’re short on time, here are some insights. Kerry started the webinar by sharing some hard truths about the state of selling:
Hard Truth #1: If They’re a Lead, You May Be Too Late
B2B sales used to be all about leads. Even now, many revenue teams lean heavily into the lead-based mindset. But the emergence of Account-Based Marketing brought many revelations to revenue teams, including that account opportunities are far more important than individual leads.
When you turn your (obsessive) attention from solo buyers and instead examine the full spectrum of interest or intent that an entire organization is expressing in your solution, you’re able to dramatically increase the quantity and quality of your sales intelligence.
Without this analysis, your team won’t be aware that buyers are conducting so much research on their own that by the time your team determines that they’re an early-stage “lead,” they may in fact be much farther down the buyer’s journey than expected.
Your team plays catchup after that, putting them at a competitive advantage.
Hard Truth #2: B2B Buyers Aren’t Even ‘Buyers’ Anymore
These days, buyers are no longer individuals, but rather teams of people. On average, buying teams often include 10 people, Kerry explained.
“Not everybody involved in the buying process is going to be sitting at the table at the end of that last meeting when they sign the deal,” Kerry said, “but all of those folks are doing some research.”
How big are these teams? From the webinar’s transcript:
Kerry: “For bigger deals, there may be as many as 20 or more people involved. And again, all of those folks are having interactions. In fact, Forrester Research did a study recently that showed that on average, post-pandemic, buyers are having 27 interactions each. So when you have 10 people or 20 people, and they’re having 20-something interactions each, that adds up.”
But there’s an upside to all this activity, Kerry said. As buyers conduct research, they leave behind digital “breadcrumb trails” or “footprints in the snow” across the internet.
Sellers armed with leading account engagement technologies can track, aggregate and de-anonymize these intent signals. ABM tools help them better understand the buyers’ research and buying processes.
Hard Truth #3: You Might Deal with Multiple Buying Teams
Depending on the scope of your solution’s capabilities, your sellers may contend with more than one buying team.
Here’s an example: Let’s say a company is looking for a solution to handle the needs of many departments or divisions. Each division may task its own buyer or buying team to conduct its own research to find solutions that effectively solves its own business problems.
If your solution can serve the needs of multiple divisions, your revenue team is in a good position, especially if your team can proactively identify the divisions’ unique needs. (Account engagement platforms do a great job of this.)
However, don’t assume that your solution can be everything to every division, Kerry warned.
Kerry: “If you sell multiple solutions — say you’re a big tech company and you have three, four, five solutions — you may be selling to multiple buying centers. But those buying centers may not all be great prospects for your solution. So take into account the fact that some of the buying centers inside those specific accounts may or may not be good prospects for you.”
Hard Truth #4: Buyers Think They Know Everything About Your Solution (But Actually Don’t)
Many buyers believe they can get all the information they need about your solution (and your competitors) exclusively through online research, Kerry said. This is super-convenient for buyers, but sellers can’t fully control the narrative. That leads to big problems.
Kerry: “Not all the information that they get is going to be accurate. It certainly may not be how you’d like to present yourself. So one of the things that’s really important is you have to understand how your buyers are finding out about you.”
This requires identifying other likely sources of information — such as content from competitors or unreliable analysts — and proactively engaging buyers with data and talking points that counter this misinformation.
Conclusion
Pivoting to an account-based approach isn’t always easy, especially for revenue teams that are entrenched in a older sales approaches. But making the change to ABM can revolutionize your business, Kerry said.
“Within the first year, 6sense clients who take all of these new techniques on board are able to produce substantially better results, bigger deal sizes, better win rates, and even shorter sales cycles,” Kerry said. “This is really the way B2B ought to be done.”
We’ve covered a few hard truths in this post, but come back tomorrow for Part 2 of this series. We’ll provide some helpful and actionable ABM tips then.
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Account Based Analytics
Article | August 3, 2022
Inconsistent language in B2B marketing is becoming a growing hurdle for collaboration.
I attended a workshop recently that brought together members of different marketing functions to train them on ABM. The task was simple enough: Act as the agency and put together an ABM brief. We didn’t have any trouble understanding the assignment. We just couldn’t seem to speak the same language.
We were discussing the same topics and working toward the same goal. But the variations in how each of us used established B2B marketing terms made collaboration harder. And so, it got me thinking. How often have you sat in a meeting and understood what someone has said but not what they’ve meant? Sure, you understand that impressions measure how many times someone’s seen your ad. But why does it matter? How does it contribute to revenue growth and the overall performance of the campaign? What does it mean to me?
I was reminded of when we were learning a foreign language in school. You could try directly translating a sentence to English, but chances are it wouldn’t make much sense. A translation would only add up when you understood its grammatical and syntactical context. So, if we (no matter how humorously) consider B2B marketing a language of its own, why aren’t we as rigorous in policing our use of terminology?
Growing pains
In the past, B2B marketing departments were seen as single-focus, cost center arms of a business. Since then, the Marketing remit has grown considerably. Tools and technology allow us to work on everything from insights and analytics to bespoke, hyper-personalized 1:1 ABM programs. Sales and Marketing alignment is helping prove our contribution to the bottom line. And we’re finally becoming a revenue center.
But I think there’s a catch. The same increased responsibilities that allow us to connect our marketing activity to revenue have made the language we use more inconsistent. Teams are more specialized than ever. And the size of the marketing department has expanded massively. There are even employees in the same functions who’ve never said a word to each other.
This creates bubbles of intradepartmental dialects. Linguistic nuances that create collaborative hurdles between teams, departments, and even organizations. Time that should be spent planning, producing, and activating is lost to soul-destroying email chains and inane meetings clarifying points of uncertainty. Things I’m sure we’d all be happier without.
The effects on business
Then there are the impacts inconsistent language has on your business. Brief your teams unclearly and budget/resource that could be used more productively is squandered on multiple revisions. Chains of stakeholder questions that could have been easily avoided with greater context can result in strained working relationships. Levels of employee stress can increase out of fear of asking a question and sounding stupid. And perhaps the scariest of all – misunderstandings of key deliverables that find their way through to your final outputs.
Standardizing our use of language can help alleviate these challenges. Key performance metrics will always differ between functions. KPIs like leads generated and engagement will be valuable to your Marketing or social teams, but not Sales whose sole focus is accelerating pipeline. But it’s context that helps tie everything together.
It saves you questioning why everyone’s talking about split testing and not A/B testing (before realizing they’re the same thing an hour into the discussion). It clarifies why certain conversations are happening, sets clear expectations of what needs to be done and by whom, and breaks down siloes between departments. It stops important points of discussion from being lost in translation.
Speaking the same language
Driving revenue through a more unified marketing and sales function is becoming core to what we do. But we need to take a step back and evaluate our use of terminology. Before considering Sales and Marketing alignment, our marketing teams have to speak the same language.
Collaboration is a product of good communication. But siloes across your marketing department can stand in the way of productivity. Making a concerted effort to convey the scope and role of specific marketing functions, core metrics necessary for success, and ways of working for each team helps promote a more collaborative work culture.
It’s our responsibility to ensure we’re all on the same page before starting group projects or aligning with other branches of business. Recognizing the inconsistencies in our language and addressing them in advance helps reduce wasted time and resource. It sets us up for success by reducing the number of roadblocks in the way of our work and path to revenue growth.
Marketing departments in B2B industries will likely continue to grow. And for organizations like B2B tech enterprises, the challenges associated with inconsistent language are only exacerbated by teams spread by geo, mother tongue, and culture. Creating clear and consistent rules for the language we use as B2B marketers can help overcome these barriers, allowing us to focus on creating exceptional marketing.
Some ways forward
So, how do we create guidelines for more consistent marketing language? I won’t say I have all the answers. But I do think there needs to be a shift in employee education and training with a view to standardizing nomenclature. Glossaries that include company-specific frameworks can be a great way to provide context and meaning to your business’ use of terminology.
Pre-recorded video resources with your subject matter experts can be paired with an intranet site to offer a more interactive, always-on education and training solution. Or, better still, regular workshops across departments to promote cross-functional understanding of why terms are used at certain times.
I’d also recommend reviewing your corporate team structures to see which stakeholders have a seat at the table. Changes in how your teams communicate can only come from the top down. And a reflection on how your use of language affects those you work with, through researching communication processes/best practices or otherwise, can be a step toward fostering a more collaborative work culture.
Establishing clear definitions for common language allows us to work closer together. It breaks down barriers to collaboration and lets us focus on common business goals. If Marketing really wants to become a revenue center, we need to start speaking the same language.
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