In Focus: Account Mapping in ABM

Account Mapping in ABM
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.

Spotlight

ANNUITAS

ANNUITAS is a demand generation firm that helps B2B marketing and sales leaders at enterprise organizations build and execute demand generation that is more buyer-centric, revenue-optimized and operationally-minded. ANNUITAS delivers this via its Demand Process methodology. ANNUITAS works with clients to determine their demand strategy and process, drives execution and then helps clients achieve self-sustainability and longer-term optimization.

OTHER ARTICLES
Core ABM

The 5 Things to Know About Account-Based Marketing

Article | June 21, 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 | July 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 | June 20, 2023

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

ANNUITAS

ANNUITAS is a demand generation firm that helps B2B marketing and sales leaders at enterprise organizations build and execute demand generation that is more buyer-centric, revenue-optimized and operationally-minded. ANNUITAS delivers this via its Demand Process methodology. ANNUITAS works with clients to determine their demand strategy and process, drives execution and then helps clients achieve self-sustainability and longer-term optimization.

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Highspot Launches Highspot Copilot for Sales Enablement

PR Newswire | October 23, 2023

Highspot, the sales enablement platform that increases sales productivity, today announced its Fall '23 release, delivering Highspot Copilot, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) digital assistant that accelerates companies' ability to equip, train, coach, and analyze revenue teams' execution. These new capabilities come as adoption of Highspot continues to accelerate worldwide, with the platform connecting more than 15 million users in the past 12 months. Businesses worldwide are prioritizing sales productivity, driving investment in sales enablement. According to research from Gartner® "The sales enablement subsegment grew strongly once more, rising 35.7% in 2022, after growth of 19.7% in 2021" (Market Share Analysis: CRM Sales Software, Worldwide, 2022, Oct. 2023. Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.) Highspot is accelerating the adoption of sales enablement technology by offering new generative AI and analytics capabilities, as well as expanded technology integrations that give customers a unified platform for defining, executing and measuring their strategic growth initiatives. Ease of use, governance and high adoption rates are key reasons why companies including Baker Tilly, Deluxe, Qualtrics, Ritchie Bros., and more have switched to Highspot. Sales productivity is a consistent board room topic but until now, sales enablement often hasn't been, said Robert Wahbe, CEO, Highspot. Today, that changes. Highspot Copilot injects powerful and easy-to-use generative AI capabilities into our unified platform, which, when combined with new analytical depth on leading indicators of success, empowers enablement teams to turn go-to-market strategy into revenue outcomes. Highspot Copilot turbocharges velocity and impact of enablement programs Generative AI is poised to take sales enablement to a new frontier of efficiency and impact in consistently turning businesses' growth initiatives into revenue performance. Highspot Copilot is a digital assistant that will help salespeople, marketers and enablement practitioners to: Automate:Generate accurate content descriptions, meeting summaries and action items, and much more in just seconds. Advise:Easily assess seller skills, delivery and readiness at scale with analysis of real-world sales meetings. Co-Create:Deliver personalized emails, digital room experiences and tailored meeting preparation documents with a single button click. Answer Anything:Leverage instant answers to questions in natural language based on your Highspot content. Initiative Scorecard drives growth initiative success by analyzing leading indicators in unified view Strategic growth initiatives – from launching new products to entering new markets – have historically been measured by lagging indicators, such as pipeline conversion and win-rates, which limits success and hinders agility. Highspot's new Initiative Scorecard shares the leading indicators of success for revenue teams, helping companies analyze the impact of enablement programs. This technology breakthrough unlocks new insight into how an initiative is performing to drive effective C-level strategy. Highspot's recently released Meeting Intelligence capability – which works with Gong, Microsoft Teams and Zoom – delivers meeting transcriptions, rubrics, summaries and more, and provides a key data source for the Initiative Scorecard to show how the initiatives perform in buyer conversations. Expanded Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration Highspot is delivering many new capabilities that improve its existing Dynamics 365 integration, including Engagement Genomics – AI-driven inferencing that automatically relates sellers' shared content to the appropriate accounts, leads, contacts, and opportunities in Dynamics 365, delivering a complete picture of influenced revenue for content, plays and initiatives. In addition to bringing the entire breadth of Highspot's platform to Dynamics 365 users, the company is also expanding integrations across the broader Microsoft ecosystem, from Microsoft Teams to the Azure OpenAI Service.

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Core ABM

Demandbase Gets Named 2023 ABM Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant

Demandbase | November 06, 2023

Demandbase, an AI-driven account-based go-to-market (GTM) leader, has been named a leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Platforms. The recognition is based on Demandbase's completeness of vision and ability to execute and follows being named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for ABM earlier this year. Demandbase's CEO, Gabe Rogol, attributes the recognition to product innovations and positive customer reviews. Demandbase, a pioneer in AI-driven account-based go-to-market (GTM), announces its recognition as a leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Platforms. This honor, which follows a comprehensive evaluation of nine vendors, is a testament to Demandbase’s comprehensive vision and its ability to execute effectively. Earlier this year, the company also received the Gartner Peer Insight Customers’ Choice for ABM. Gartner defines ABM platforms as software that empowers B2B marketing and sales teams to implement ABM programs at scale, including account selection, planning, engagement, and reporting. These platforms facilitate the creation of target account lists by integrating first- and third-party data. Additionally, they may engage audiences by activating channels such as display advertising, social advertising, email, and sales engagement, using a combination of native capabilities and integrations. Gabe Rogol, CEO of Demandbase, expressed his praise for the innovations the team had worked on by exclaiming, We are honored to be recognized as a leader in the Gartner ABM Magic Quadrant once again this year. We believe this recognition is a reflection of the dedication and effort we’ve invested in our product over the past year, including innovations in connected TV advertising, non-English intent, new integrations, continuous improvement of our account intelligence, the release of workspaces for enterprises, simplified dashboards, UI improvements, and more. We also believe this recognition mirrors the consistently positive reviews we receive from customers through Gartner Peer Insights and on G2. We extend our gratitude to Gartner, our customers, and our entire team. [Source – Cision PR Newswire] According to the Magic Quadrant report, the essential capabilities of ABM platforms include: Account-level intent data (proprietary and/or licensed) to understand customer behavior and buyer interest. Multi-channel campaign orchestration and activation drive engagement and progression in the buyer’s journey. Monitoring accounts and measuring analytics to quantify progress and performance across channels, campaigns, and programs On the downside, Demandbase may face stiff competition from other vendors in the ABM market, such as 6sense, Terminus, and Roll Works. It may need to invest more in product development, marketing, and customer support to maintain its leadership position and customer satisfaction. Additionally, it may encounter challenges in integrating its platform with other systems and data sources, such as CRM, marketing automation, and analytics tools. On the upside, Demandbase can leverage its recognition as a leader and a customer’s choice to attract new customers and retain existing ones. It can also showcase its product innovations and customer reviews as proof of its value proposition and differentiation in the market.

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Intellimize Joins Forces with Demandbase to Revolutionize ABM

PR Newswire | October 19, 2023

Intellimize, the leading AI experience optimization platform, today announced their partnership and integration with Demandbase, the leader in AI-driven account-based go-to-market. Shared customers of Intellimize and Demandbase can now use firmographic attributes to build custom audiences that deliver personalized experiences. For example, customers can target specific accounts, or groups of accounts based on company size, industry, revenue, and more, to show a dedicated experience on their website. This integration enables marketers to deliver dynamic website experiences across the buyer's journey, a critical element to account based marketing (ABM) program success. Coupa, a SaaS company, is using the integration to deliver personalized landing pages to target accounts in specific industries and has seen great success. By breaking out their campaigns not only by industry, but also revenue tier, they're able to further tailor experiences to key accounts and deliver messages that resonate with each visitor. We used the Intellimize integration with Demandbase to personalize pages on our website by industry and by revenue tier, and as a result we were able to boost conversions by an average of 8.4% (and for a certain industry it was a 227% boost in conversion rates!). We were also able to figure out which messages work best for which industry and which revenue tier, which is extremely valuable across all of our marketing efforts. Ally Vandenherik, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Coupa Software This integration will not only enable users of both products to curate highly personalized experiences for target accounts, but will also allow them to ensure those experiences are consistent across all website properties, landing pages, and other content, better educating buyers across all points of their journey. Additionally, the integration will unlock significant upsell and cross sell opportunities for brands looking to create account-specific special offers, amplifying countless revenue opportunities. "We are excited to partner with Intellimize, so our joint customers can create more meaningful experiences for their customers," remarked Michael Wilczak, chief strategy and development officer at Demandbase. "We're all about using data and AI to light up the buyer journey and remove friction for both the buyer and seller. Our partnership with Intellimize is a perfect fit for this vision." 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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Highspot Launches Highspot Copilot for Sales Enablement

PR Newswire | October 23, 2023

Highspot, the sales enablement platform that increases sales productivity, today announced its Fall '23 release, delivering Highspot Copilot, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) digital assistant that accelerates companies' ability to equip, train, coach, and analyze revenue teams' execution. These new capabilities come as adoption of Highspot continues to accelerate worldwide, with the platform connecting more than 15 million users in the past 12 months. Businesses worldwide are prioritizing sales productivity, driving investment in sales enablement. According to research from Gartner® "The sales enablement subsegment grew strongly once more, rising 35.7% in 2022, after growth of 19.7% in 2021" (Market Share Analysis: CRM Sales Software, Worldwide, 2022, Oct. 2023. Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.) Highspot is accelerating the adoption of sales enablement technology by offering new generative AI and analytics capabilities, as well as expanded technology integrations that give customers a unified platform for defining, executing and measuring their strategic growth initiatives. Ease of use, governance and high adoption rates are key reasons why companies including Baker Tilly, Deluxe, Qualtrics, Ritchie Bros., and more have switched to Highspot. Sales productivity is a consistent board room topic but until now, sales enablement often hasn't been, said Robert Wahbe, CEO, Highspot. Today, that changes. Highspot Copilot injects powerful and easy-to-use generative AI capabilities into our unified platform, which, when combined with new analytical depth on leading indicators of success, empowers enablement teams to turn go-to-market strategy into revenue outcomes. Highspot Copilot turbocharges velocity and impact of enablement programs Generative AI is poised to take sales enablement to a new frontier of efficiency and impact in consistently turning businesses' growth initiatives into revenue performance. Highspot Copilot is a digital assistant that will help salespeople, marketers and enablement practitioners to: Automate:Generate accurate content descriptions, meeting summaries and action items, and much more in just seconds. Advise:Easily assess seller skills, delivery and readiness at scale with analysis of real-world sales meetings. Co-Create:Deliver personalized emails, digital room experiences and tailored meeting preparation documents with a single button click. Answer Anything:Leverage instant answers to questions in natural language based on your Highspot content. Initiative Scorecard drives growth initiative success by analyzing leading indicators in unified view Strategic growth initiatives – from launching new products to entering new markets – have historically been measured by lagging indicators, such as pipeline conversion and win-rates, which limits success and hinders agility. Highspot's new Initiative Scorecard shares the leading indicators of success for revenue teams, helping companies analyze the impact of enablement programs. This technology breakthrough unlocks new insight into how an initiative is performing to drive effective C-level strategy. Highspot's recently released Meeting Intelligence capability – which works with Gong, Microsoft Teams and Zoom – delivers meeting transcriptions, rubrics, summaries and more, and provides a key data source for the Initiative Scorecard to show how the initiatives perform in buyer conversations. Expanded Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration Highspot is delivering many new capabilities that improve its existing Dynamics 365 integration, including Engagement Genomics – AI-driven inferencing that automatically relates sellers' shared content to the appropriate accounts, leads, contacts, and opportunities in Dynamics 365, delivering a complete picture of influenced revenue for content, plays and initiatives. In addition to bringing the entire breadth of Highspot's platform to Dynamics 365 users, the company is also expanding integrations across the broader Microsoft ecosystem, from Microsoft Teams to the Azure OpenAI Service.

Read More

Core ABM

Demandbase Gets Named 2023 ABM Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant

Demandbase | November 06, 2023

Demandbase, an AI-driven account-based go-to-market (GTM) leader, has been named a leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Platforms. The recognition is based on Demandbase's completeness of vision and ability to execute and follows being named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for ABM earlier this year. Demandbase's CEO, Gabe Rogol, attributes the recognition to product innovations and positive customer reviews. Demandbase, a pioneer in AI-driven account-based go-to-market (GTM), announces its recognition as a leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Platforms. This honor, which follows a comprehensive evaluation of nine vendors, is a testament to Demandbase’s comprehensive vision and its ability to execute effectively. Earlier this year, the company also received the Gartner Peer Insight Customers’ Choice for ABM. Gartner defines ABM platforms as software that empowers B2B marketing and sales teams to implement ABM programs at scale, including account selection, planning, engagement, and reporting. These platforms facilitate the creation of target account lists by integrating first- and third-party data. Additionally, they may engage audiences by activating channels such as display advertising, social advertising, email, and sales engagement, using a combination of native capabilities and integrations. Gabe Rogol, CEO of Demandbase, expressed his praise for the innovations the team had worked on by exclaiming, We are honored to be recognized as a leader in the Gartner ABM Magic Quadrant once again this year. We believe this recognition is a reflection of the dedication and effort we’ve invested in our product over the past year, including innovations in connected TV advertising, non-English intent, new integrations, continuous improvement of our account intelligence, the release of workspaces for enterprises, simplified dashboards, UI improvements, and more. We also believe this recognition mirrors the consistently positive reviews we receive from customers through Gartner Peer Insights and on G2. We extend our gratitude to Gartner, our customers, and our entire team. [Source – Cision PR Newswire] According to the Magic Quadrant report, the essential capabilities of ABM platforms include: Account-level intent data (proprietary and/or licensed) to understand customer behavior and buyer interest. Multi-channel campaign orchestration and activation drive engagement and progression in the buyer’s journey. Monitoring accounts and measuring analytics to quantify progress and performance across channels, campaigns, and programs On the downside, Demandbase may face stiff competition from other vendors in the ABM market, such as 6sense, Terminus, and Roll Works. It may need to invest more in product development, marketing, and customer support to maintain its leadership position and customer satisfaction. Additionally, it may encounter challenges in integrating its platform with other systems and data sources, such as CRM, marketing automation, and analytics tools. On the upside, Demandbase can leverage its recognition as a leader and a customer’s choice to attract new customers and retain existing ones. It can also showcase its product innovations and customer reviews as proof of its value proposition and differentiation in the market.

Read More

Core ABM

Intellimize Joins Forces with Demandbase to Revolutionize ABM

PR Newswire | October 19, 2023

Intellimize, the leading AI experience optimization platform, today announced their partnership and integration with Demandbase, the leader in AI-driven account-based go-to-market. Shared customers of Intellimize and Demandbase can now use firmographic attributes to build custom audiences that deliver personalized experiences. For example, customers can target specific accounts, or groups of accounts based on company size, industry, revenue, and more, to show a dedicated experience on their website. This integration enables marketers to deliver dynamic website experiences across the buyer's journey, a critical element to account based marketing (ABM) program success. Coupa, a SaaS company, is using the integration to deliver personalized landing pages to target accounts in specific industries and has seen great success. By breaking out their campaigns not only by industry, but also revenue tier, they're able to further tailor experiences to key accounts and deliver messages that resonate with each visitor. We used the Intellimize integration with Demandbase to personalize pages on our website by industry and by revenue tier, and as a result we were able to boost conversions by an average of 8.4% (and for a certain industry it was a 227% boost in conversion rates!). We were also able to figure out which messages work best for which industry and which revenue tier, which is extremely valuable across all of our marketing efforts. Ally Vandenherik, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Coupa Software This integration will not only enable users of both products to curate highly personalized experiences for target accounts, but will also allow them to ensure those experiences are consistent across all website properties, landing pages, and other content, better educating buyers across all points of their journey. Additionally, the integration will unlock significant upsell and cross sell opportunities for brands looking to create account-specific special offers, amplifying countless revenue opportunities. "We are excited to partner with Intellimize, so our joint customers can create more meaningful experiences for their customers," remarked Michael Wilczak, chief strategy and development officer at Demandbase. "We're all about using data and AI to light up the buyer journey and remove friction for both the buyer and seller. Our partnership with Intellimize is a perfect fit for this vision." 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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