Fine-tuning your Account Based Marketing (ABM) Program.
You’ve launched your Account Based Marketing program focused on attracting your sales team’s most desirable accounts. You are well past the launch, and you are seeing some results from your analytics platform with respect to your tactics: email, engagement with your website, banner ads, direct mail, and telemarketing. You are aware that these large accounts will take 12 to 18 months to close, and while winning just one of these “whales” will more than pay for the program, senior sales, marketing, and operational management, they need to be told frequently what you are doing, how it is working, how you plan to improve its efficiency, and why they should keep on funding it this year, and beyond.
How to make it all better.
Account Based Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. As you begin the race, you’ll be using all the tools of marketing, multimedia content creation, marketing automation, and analytics. Your sales team is starting to follow up on the first leads, and with their help you are beginning to flesh out the buying influences in the accounts they have identified.
Universal truth about ABM: Everything (no matter how good) can be improved.
Because you are in this to attract your company’s dream accounts with a focused effort backed by substantial resources, you are always learning what is working, and what is not. Expect to be surprised. Large accounts, with their multiple buying influences and various viewpoints that each influencer/user/manager brings to the purchase decision, may respond differently to your marketing—differently to your emails, your webinars, your telemarketing, your direct mail, your banner ads. And timing plays a big part in their decision to consider a new vendor. This is where your analytics will really pay off. What appears to be working? What seems to be in need of bolstering up? If you’re less than six months into your program, it’s early days, and you should not make any rash decisions—but you should be constructing tests that will give you a clue as to where fine-tuning will be useful.
Universal ABM truth #2: You are in for some surprises! Read More →