Account Based Marketing (ABM) comes to solve one of the most excruciating pains in the corporate reality, the misalignment between marketing and sales.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a new paradign in B2B marketing strategy, with a customer experience-centric approach requiring a higher collaboration between sales and marketing teams, targeting specific buying groups inside carefully selected accounts and using innovative technology and data.
The basic idea behind it is to generate a coordinated and personalized account-based experience for key stakeholders, or buying groups, within each account.
This higher level of collaboration required is definitely one of the most trickiest aspects of ABM and needs a mindset change to achieve it. Marketers should shift their way of thinking from massive, random individuals to specific personas and buying groups or for sales people to trust marketing technology and data to make sales decisions, to mention some.
Why Account Based Marketing is important?
B2B marketing teams works on a lead-based inbound marketing model, driving awareness and engaging the largest number of potential individual leads, then nurturing those leads and guiding them down the funnel toward sales.
Account Based Marketing is not designed to eliminate this, but to complement the go-to-market, helping the marketer to keep in mind that scaling is not always the best fit to target strategic, large or tier 1, tier 2 accounts.
Some benefits of Account Based Marketing
Since we are designing activities to specific accounts, we should be able now to drive attributed revenue. We are also contributing to the alignment of the most important customer-facing actors of the company; sales and marketing teams. And we are also providing a better customer experience and increasing the likelihood of boost revenue, by increasing cross-sell and upsell (incremental revenue) or by discovering new market segments or verticals (new revenue).
Execution and Tactics
- Account Scoring: involves the analysis and evaluation of the accounts to be considered in the plan, a common language and an alignment of priorities. The criteria can be based on multiple factors like high yielding accounts, quick wins, strategic importance, clients with the competitors… Then you can group them in diferent Tiers or segments.
- Identifying Personas and Buying Groups: Working close with the Account Manager or Account Lead will help to identify key personas like the decision-maker, the sponsor or influencer, the guru or the nefarious “no-noway-notime-nomoney”.
- Define the best tactics for each Tier: in-person programs, sales outreachs, direct and personalized emails, dedicated events, appointment setting, content syndication… Once you have a solid understanding of the accounts, you can even engage them with personalized content in multiple channels in consistent and complementary touchpoints.
- Measure, analyze and iterate. Know what is working and how this accounts are performing is key to iterate your model and look constantly for improvements.
While ABM is not a new way to target tiered accounts, it is in its practice. Tools and data now make it scalable and let us focus on whole lifecycle marketing for key accounts, providing a superior account-based experience to leads by automatically delivering relevant messages. Today’s buyers demand personalized content and engagement and customer experience is a major competitive differentiator.