The Road to ABM

Growth Architects

Introduction

When it comes to B2B marketing; nothing can compare to the ROI you can expect from a marketing campaign informed by an ABM strategy, according to a recent ITSMA Survey. If you think that Account Based Marketing (ABM) was restricted to elite Enterprise level businesses, you would be amongst many who do; but you would still be wrong.

ABM, thanks largely to marketing automation software and savvy marketing agencies, has now hit the mainstream, and providing you have the right agency behind you, anyone can take advantage of this very effective marketing technique. If you’re ready to start focusing both your marketing and sales efforts on a more targeted approach to finding, engaging and doing business; then you’re at the very exciting start of the road to ABM success.

In this document, we’ll take a tour of the basic steps needed to get your ABM strategy and tactics rolling.

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Process

Chunking down the process into easy steps

Where do you start?Like every strategy; making it actionable is a big priority. You must be able to apply resource upfront in order to create a plan where both marketing and sales can collaborate; as they both have a big role to play in ABM.

ABM is really Account Centric Marketing, whereby it’s all about identifying and targeting an organisation as a market of one and subsequently making that the centre of everything you do. It’s not complex, but you do need process, strategy and design thinking to do it well.

There are three elements to a successful ABM rollout; targeting, engagement and control. By defining these three components, we can start thinking logically about what’s needed to generate more effective B2B sales.    

ADVOCATE

IDENTIFY

EXPAND

ENGAGE

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1. TargetingWho are you selling to?

2. EngagementHow do you reach customers with the right message across channels?

3. ControlHow do you measure and refine any tactics to maximise ROI?

Let’s go…

Targeting

It’s important to remember that at this point, you're getting to grips with the organisations that you want to target, not the actual people who will be making the buying decisions. The target accounts will be the ones who will be driving the sales potential for your business. Where do you start?

You’ll not be surprised to learn that it’s the age old parameters that form the basis of any strategy – industry type (or vertical if you’re from the US), business size, location, market influence and revenue. Both marketing and sales teams will have a view on this and getting them into a stakeholder workshop to hash out the targeting is a priority. At this meeting you can get to the issue of ‘who does what?’ Getting everyone on the same page, so that your tactical rollout is effective, equals greater success and ROI and ultimately less drama and infighting down the line.

If you were targeting tech companies, it would probably look like this:

VerticalTECHSUB verticalFINTECHNamed AccountsStripe, Yapstone, Braintree

If you were targeting Stripe; it might be because they could bring bigger deals (which is great for everyone), they have pain points. Most of our clients prefer to tackle the amount named accounts depending on the size of their sales team. As the emphasis is on being Account Centric; then more effort needs to go into that one account. With both marketing and sales involved it’s essential to give everyone a view of the target accounts; providing a great platform for which to discover and manage the accounts that will drive future sales.

Targeting

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Once you’ve created your lists of key accounts and the key decision makers in those accounts you need to review the current data set you have and consider the following:

- How much do you have?- How accurate and up to date is it?- What does it tell you about your accounts?

You ideally want your data to be rich enough so you can precisely target your accounts in a transparent and strategic manner. This would include holding all communication information from their postal address to social media channels. The more information you can capture and learn about your targeted accounts and key personnel will allow you to create a detailed buyer persona.

Overall by taking an ABM approach you are targeting your key accounts that have the biggest revenues to date, or the companies which will have the biggest revenues. You are aligning your marketing with sales so you can give your sales team the support they need to continue to develop and nurture the existing accounts they have, or the specific ones they want to go after.

“97% of marketers achieved higher ROI with ABM than any other marketing initiative Alterra Group

Engagement

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So you’ve completed the first step and done all your homework and created your targeted lists, plus no doubt you will have profiled your accounts further to gain further insight. So how do you reach customers with the right message across channels?

Let's get your ABM sales strategy in place first. This should be based more on educating and adding value to your targeted accounts through content marketing (blogs, eBooks, product guides, white papers, vlogs, webinars). Remember, ABM is more of a marathon than a 100-metre sprint, so be patient when waiting to close those deals. I would use the following as a base outline for timescales.

Month 1 - Build AwarenessMonth 2 - Build Awareness & Engage via LinkedinMonth 3 - Engage Via Linkedin & Other Comms (DM)Month 4 - Sales Engagement via call

Overall this is 90 to 120 day process from engagement to going in for the direct sales touch which is still soft.

So you have your strategy in place, what channels do you use?

Don’t make the common mistake and only focus on email. Email is a channel you should use but it's one tactic so why limit your reach and engagement? You want to get in front of your targeted accounts and key personnel that are part of the decision making process. To do this effectively you need a wider reach so you can position yourself as an industry expert, thought leader, credible source and most importantly a problem solver.

You should consider the following channels:

• Website personalisation• Targeted Ads via Social• Remarketing• Email• Mobile• Direct Mail• Webinars• Social media e.g. Linkedin & Twitter• Events

We’ve listed 9 channels that you can incorporate as part of your engagement strategy. As you can see this gives you the opportunity to increase your reach and create additional touch points. Remember for your ABM to be successful you need to engage with all contacts across all channels.

Personalising Ads can lead to conversation rate goals increasing by 13xMarketo

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Control

Low Account

Penetration

Low Number of

Accounts

% O

F K

EY

NA

ME

S ID

EN

TIFI

ED IN

TA

RGET

AC

CO

UN

TS

TOTAL NUMBER OF TARGET ACCOUNTS

High Account

Penetration

Low Number of

Accounts

High Account

Penetration

High Number of

Accounts

Low Account

Penetration

High Number of

Accounts

OK

OK

BEST

WORST

Like with any marketing you need to test, analyse, and optimize in order to see better results. But, let's focus on the key objective of ABM - ‘Engaging with your targeted accounts and the key personnel within them through your content/rich media’. It’s key to measure this because you will understand who you are engaged with, how much engagement it took, what type and what roles they played within the targeted account and their influence on the deal. CoverageIn a nutshell you're measuring your coverage which is key to building a sustainable ABM campaign, as is refining your coverage to ensure your messaging and product offering align with your targeted accounts and personas. You don’t want to have great coverage and then have your investment engaging these accounts end up as wasted time and resource because no refinement was done. See the table below

- Account Penetration: Reaching as many stakeholders in an account as possible

- Number Of Accounts: Identifying all the accounts you should target

The chart above should give you a clear indication of what opportunities are available for you and what your budget can handle.

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Control

EngagementYou know need to understand what gets your targeted accounts to take action and engage with you, as this is a vital indicator for success and tells you whether your ABM campaign motivated action.

So what do these look like? We’ve listed a few engagement metrics below:

• CTR - Click Through Rates• Product/Landing Page Visits• Content Downloads/Form Fills• Answer rates to sales calls• Call Length• Email Reply Rates• Direct Mail Reply Rates• Webinar/Event Subscriptions• Comments On Blog• Inmail Reply Rates

Engagement tells you whether your ABM campaign has motivated action which is one of the most difficult things to do in the marketing and sales world.

TouchpointsWhether it’s online or offline you need to track every touchpoint as it can tell you in real time who in each account is being engaged with. By constantly reviewing and tracking your touchpoint metrics you have the ability to attribute engagement and revenue back to these marketing activities so you can identify your highest performing campaign.

By taking on board the suggestions above and following a regimented procedure of tracking, reviewing and refining your ABM campaigns you will increase your focus, performance and overall ROI.

When ABM has been in use for at least a year, 60% of users reported a revenue increase of at least 10% & 19% reported a revenue impact of 30% or greaterDemandbase in eWeek

Final note

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We hope you find this guide of use. You are now ready to get your Account Based Marketing started and focus on your best fit accounts.

If you want to know more about any of the topics in this guide or any ABM related matters, we’d love to help. If there is anything in this guide you wish to discuss further or if you have any questions, get in touch with me by calling (0)7764 993 622, emailing sud@origingrowth.co.uk or drop me a message on LinkedIn.

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