Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
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
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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Account Based Analytics
Article | August 3, 2022
The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies is inevitable and necessary to achieve the potential of account-based marketing (ABM). However, I consider technology to be more of an enabler of ABM, while the driver always remains the same – enhancing the customer experience by helping clients sustain and grow their business in this dynamic digital era. The goal is not for AI to make marketing decisions but to enable marketers to make better decisions by leveraging the strength of AI in analyzing a large amount of data quickly to share action-oriented insights.
AI can be a friend or foe, depending on what decisions we make while evaluating and implementing AI. Following are key questions organizations should answer before deploying an AI-based marketing strategy.
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Core ABM
Article | December 18, 2021
ABM in Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is diametrically opposite of traditional marketing. Instead of targeting all kinds of customers with generic content, it targets only the most lucrative accounts using personalized content. This concentrated targeting results in more conversions, longer business associations, expansion, and account retention.
In an interview with Media 7, Clive Armitage, CEO of Agent3, said,
“If you are not utilizing the power of data, technology and content then you are failing to be a modern marketer.”
ABM leverages firmographic data (basic info), technographic data (data about the kind of technology the lead uses), intent data (lead behavior), and engagement data (data gained through form filling, and event attendance) to target accounts and segment them based on priority.
A 2020 benchmark study by the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) found that 76% of companies reported a higher ROI with ABM than other marketing types.
How Does ABM Contribute to Revenue Growth?
ABM drives higher ROI and measurable sales using marketing campaigns created by both sales and marketing teams.
A successful ABM strategy has components like these:
Targeting the right accounts and managing them
Cross-channel engagement
Measuring and dynamically optimizing the ABM programs using specialized dashboards to map targets, programs, and revenue metrics created by an account-based marketing software
ABM helps scale business revenue in the following ways:
Shows a Clear ROI
Businesses prefer precise results from their marketing strategies. ABM prioritizes ROI. It gives the highest ROI compared to any other B2B marketing strategy because it targets the highest-value accounts that meet defined criteria through custom campaigns addressing their needs and pain points.
Helps with Resource Allocation
ABM focuses only on high-value accounts. Consequently, companies can allocate their resources better and save time and money.
Engages the Audience
Personalized content means targeted accounts see only the content they can relate to so there is increased engagement and interaction.
Can Be Tracked Every Step of the Way
ABM metrics can be tracked every step of the way, so there is a clear idea of what is working and what isn’t. Important metrics include ROI, engagement, awareness, target account reach, and influence.
Aligns Sales and Marketing Teams
ABM aligns sales and marketing teams by helping them find common ground for their goals and objectives.
5 Must-ask Questions about ABM Strategy Implementation
Account-based marketing questions about ABM technology and strategy arise when businesses transition from traditional lead generation techniques to ABM. The following five must-ask questions about account-based marketing can be the keys to transitioning to ABM:
How to Create an ABM Strategy That Works?
To create an ABM strategy that works, follow these steps:
Define your target accounts.
Identify the key decision-makers of your target accounts.
Personalize your content to cater to your target accounts.
Choose appropriate channels to approach your target accounts.
Formulate campaigns to engage the target accounts.
Measure the success of your campaign using correct metrics.
What Things Should You Consider Before Allocating a Budget for ABM?
It is pretty challenging to find the correct answer to this question. The cost of tools, channels, and individual items keeps varying. Money spent on-field events, content creation to cater to target accounts, ads, trade shows, research, and intent data collection factors into budgeting.
To make budgeting easier, consider bifurcating the expenses into categories like technology (CRM, marketing automation systems, and data management platforms), human resources (data analysts, social media associates, and content strategists), events (one-on-one meets, trade shows, and webinars), media campaigns and direct mail.
How to Decide on the Size of the Target Accounts?
The size of your target accounts depends on your business goals (acquisition, retention, expansion), team size, and initiatives on an organizational level. Tiering accounts into three categories using data, technology, and thorough research has worked out for several businesses.
Tier 1: These are the accounts that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) bill perfectly and have high strategic value.
Tier 2: These accounts have an excellent ICP but lower lifetime value.
Tier 3: These accounts meet only some criteria of ICP. Pursue these accounts but don’t go overboard to get their business.
What Metrics Should Be Used to Map ABM Success?
The biggest advantage of an ABM strategy is that its success can be measured. To measure this success, you need to focus on important KPIs like:
Engagement: This includes email metrics, social metrics, consumption rates, and offline activity metrics.
Awareness: This KPI measures how aware your target accounts are of your brand, how credible they think it is and how they respond to it.
Influence: Measure how your ABM campaign contributes to the lead conversion rate, and increase the frequency and volume of your lead interactions.
Target Account Reach: With the help of ABM tools, this KPI measures the percentage of the target account’s engaged decision-makers.
ROI: Mapping ROI is essential for assessing the success of an ABM strategy. ABM gives better ROI as compared to other marketing strategies.
Other metrics to consider are value, customer retention, and sales metrics.
Who Should Be on the ABM Team?
To begin with, your ABM team should have leadership that knows ABM and its implementation. Key decision-makers from the marketing, sales, and operations departments should be on this leadership team. It should work on setting goals, overseeing the implementation of the ABM strategy, and mapping its success.
How DocuSign Used ABM to Increase Their Customer Engagement and Sales Pipeline by 22%
“We have more awareness and educational content that’s reaching our non-engaged accounts. And we will dedicate a lower level of spend to that program so that we are prioritizing our spend on our more engaged accounts.”
- Perri Gardner, Director of ABM, DocuSign.
By using ABM to target high-value accounts and categorizing their spending based on the value of those accounts, DocuSign increased their customer engagement and sales pipeline by 22%.
Conclusion
Transitioning from a traditional marketing strategy to account-based marketing is vital to drive ROI, engagement, brand awareness, and influence. Correctly implementing an ABM strategy contributes to revenue growth through quicker lead conversions, proper allocation of resources, and a targeted approach.
FAQ
What is the first step in implementing an ABM strategy?
The first step of implementing the ABM strategy is to define the accounts you want to target.
Is ABM better than a traditional lead-based marketing strategy?
Yes. As of 2021, 70% of marketers are using ABM and are seeing a remarkable increase in their ROI.
What does an ABM strategy depend on?
An ABM strategy depends on high-quality intent data. Content personalization, account segmentation, and lead nurturing cannot be achieved without it.
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