Don’t overlook your current customers with your ABM strategy

Account-based marketing is the new black for B2B marketers, who are leveraging the strategy at nearly every stage of the buying cycle to attract and engage targeted prospects. It’s an effective way to grow sales and speed up the cycle using data from both first- and third-party sources. However, B2B marketers are missing a huge opportunity with ABM: retaining, engaging and upselling current customers. The beauty of ABM is that it allows companies to focus on accounts, rather than leads. This, in turn, helps teams align across the entire customer journey — even after a lead has become a customer. What’s really important about this practice is that, rather than identifying as many leads as possible, it puts the priority on best-fit customers, which makes it ideal for both new and existing clients. With this data-driven approach to sales and marketing, there is an opportunity to identify purchase intent at the account level, then apply machine learning to figure out where the prospect’s buying committee is within the sales process, as well as what problem they’re endeavoring to solve with that purchase.