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 →

Part IV of our ongoing ABM series, “Making your dreams come true.”

Set up your analytics platform to learn what’s working and what is not.

Because Account Based Marketing is a highly focused program with a small number of (very) large prospects to be targeted, and because it is unlikely you will experience significant revenue from your ABM efforts within the first 12 months of the program, you need other ways to measure progress besides sales. Next year, you’ll have sales to look at. This year, you have engagement.

Measure engagement with a marketing automation platform.

Marketing automation allows you to measure engagement—if you set it up correctly. Whether you use Hubspot, Pardot, another platform—or Verdi’s favorite, Sharpspring—you need to begin with your list of dream prospects, the list of job titles within each prospect account. It’s helpful to create a persona for each job title and to articulate (if you can) the buying continuum for each job title. Eventually, you’ll want to evaluate your available content to match each situation, and to have the content available in your platform media library so it can be used as an offer for your marketing efforts.

Sample content matrix for content and analytic set-up.

You’ll want to set up your analytics, so you’ll know when one of your ABM prospects opens an email, clicks through to an offer, fills out a form, consumes content, and where he/she goes on your website.

In the early days, you’ll have little to go on, so be prepared to adjust your analytics platform as you gain information about your prospects and their response. Take a hard look at your email response, clicks, and conversions. Look at your banner ads to determine level of interest in your messages.

In the beginning of your ABM pilot, data is limited, but precious. Plan to meet as a team no less than weekly to share results from all sources—feedback from telemarketing, sales team input, prospect response to social media—especially LinkedIn, web activity, emails, direct mail, banner ads, and show activity—to see if you can spot an early trend. In large companies, you may notice a surge in their interest in your communications—leading to multiple Marketing Qualified Leads from targeted organizations. We know that not everything is trackable, but you should track what you can. As the program proceeds, you’ll be grateful for every morsel of information you can squeeze out of the data from your analytics engine.

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Part III

Offer development for Account Based Marketing programs: Next to the list of dream accounts, offers are the most important contributor to success.

Account Based Marketing is an intense effort to engage with your most desirable prospects. These can be accounts you know well, or accounts you’d like to get to know. Often, they bear a close resemblance to your best customers—those you are happiest about—customers for whom you do a great job, customers who are profitable, customers with growth potential.

We’ve talked about the importance of collaboration between sales and marketing teams in structuring your ABM program. That collaboration will once again pay dividends in the development of offers. The first step is to outline the sales cycle for this group—from the time the prospects first learn about you to the time they add you to the consideration set to submit a proposal.

Understand the sales cycle for your ABM prospects.

This is an example of why it’s so important to have your sales team available for input. They can tell you how you won the desirable accounts you already have. They will also help you define the process your dream accounts will go through to reach a decision to engage with you, to understand your products/services, and to consider you seriously. In most B2B businesses, the buying cycle is complex. It can often take 12 to 18 months from start to finish—from the time a need emerges to the time the prospects ask for a proposal or quote.

Things are changing. But that’s not bad for marketers.

Read More →

Part I.

Account Based Marketing can prospect your dream B2B accounts. But what are your dream accounts?

These days, demand generation is highly segmented. You carefully construct offers to attract each cohort. The content you create and serve up to your prospect list segments is based on the personas you have constructed, the industry and buying cycle stage of your prospects, and (where possible) on buying intent. Marketing automation makes this not only feasible, but automatic.

But are they jellybeans?

But what is happening to the leads you generate? How excited is the sales team to follow up? Are the prospects from your marketing program followed up with the eight or nine touches it often takes to monetize them? And at the end of your campaign, do you carefully measure conversions to marketing qualified leads, then to opportunities and sales?

Finally, when you track leads back to your various campaigns do you know which are truly the most productive, does the sales team give you the feedback you need to improve the program with continuous input to make it even more effective?

No more silos!

In many large companies, sales and marketing are siloed, possibly even pitted against one another in competition for dollars and other resources. These separate empires, while traditional, are no longer viable in today’s collaborative multichannel world. To be most effective, the goals of marketing and sales need to be aligned, and the sales and marketing programs need to be implemented in lockstep, so that marketing is generating the leads that sales will salivate to follow up.

(Indiana Jones music cue here!)

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a focused marketing effort that concentrates marketing resources to target the prospects your sales team wants most. These should be the dream accounts for which your company is an ideal solution. Dream accounts are the ones your sales team knows will be profitable, your solution successful, your relationship long-lasting.

In B2B, these dream accounts often take a long time to close—sometimes 12 to 18 months. That’s because their buying committees are complex, with many disciplines involved in the decision: purchasing, engineering, quality control, often plant management, and sometimes even corporate. Compound this with COVID, which has many senior decision makers working from home, sometimes far from each other, and impossible for your sales team to reach in person. Does this mean that you shouldn’t try to find and target them? Of course not. That’s what ABM is all about. That’s what we’ll talk about in Part II.

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