I’m sure you’ve heard the golden rule: “treat others the way you want to be treated.” It’s a great rule to live by, but it is truly the most important rule for salespeople.
Nobody wants to be just another means to an end, especially not your customers. That’s why focusing on building relationships through your sales and marketing efforts is so important. One technique for building and nurturing strong relationships is account-based marketing (ABM).
Account-based marketing is a B2B strategy that focuses on select high-value accounts rather than trying to reach as much of your market as you can. Instead of quick conversions, ABM is focused on building several relationships within the account and keeping customers around for the long-haul. And while only 22% of companies have an account-based marketing strategy, 34% plan to add one in the future. That’s because successful ABM efforts can lead to stronger, deeper customer relationships and more loyal customers. Why have a one-time customer when you can have a lifetime customer?
For ABM to succeed, you must create personalized content and dedicated strategies for each account, and ideally having a prospect specific messaging track for your different personas. When you can demonstrate that you understand their business and their needs, that effort encourages them to purchase from you. You’re building trust with your lead. Taking the time to invest in their experience also opens the door to cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
Account-based marketing works best when selling to larger businesses with multiple contacts that have high growth potential or a high value to your company. These high-value customers ensure the return from your personalized marketing is greater than your investment.
You create a customized journey through ABM by targeting, nurturing, and converting each account individually. This process saves you valuable time and resources because you only focus on quality leads and don’t waste time working to filter out weak and low-value leads.
About 91% of ABM marketers saw greater deal sizes from these accounts. And as a sales leader, so have I. That’s why I want to share these six proven ABM strategies, which you can use to help increase sales at your own company.
Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams
Account-based marketing is primarily a marketing strategy, with 28% of marketing teams managing their ABM strategies. However, it requires a close alignment of your marketing and sales teams to create a smoother transition from nurturing and relationship-building to conversion.
This alignment is also essential for sharing data between departments. For example, while marketing might know what types of content brings in leads, your sales department understands customer pain points and conversion factors necessary for sales. Sales teams also have different insights around the companies and contacts themselves which should be fed back to Marketing. Marketers should use that sales data from the start to create a more personalized journey that takes those pain points, insights and needs into account from the first point of contact.
Create a Targeted Accounts List
Your target accounts are what will guide your account-based marketing efforts. These accounts are B2B decision-makers with a high buyer’s intent.
You can create your list of targeted accounts through inbound marketing techniques and account-based marketing lead generation. As you generate B2B leads and qualify them, move the highest value leads to a separate list. However, before you can separate high-value leads, you must first create buyer personas that outline ideal target buyers, including demographics, budget, industry, and job title.
In addition to your current leads, you can also find target accounts through research. Using your buyer persona as guidance, research specific businesses that could use your products and services or who currently have a need you could fill. Even though those businesses haven’t expressed interest in your brand, you can add them to your target accounts list and reach out to them to turn them into a lead for further nurturing.
Over half of marketers target fewer than 1,000 accounts in one campaign to ensure they can provide a personalized experience for each one.
Get to Know Your Accounts
If you treat your accounts like a number, your efforts won’t end in sales. Relationship building is an essential component of account-based marketing. To build a relationship with the people behind your accounts, you must get to know them and their needs.
Collect customer data through surveys, personal interactions, and online research. Use this account-based marketing data to learn about key decision-makers within the company, what products they are already using, possible challenges they face, and needs they are looking to fill.
Group Your Targeted Accounts
Using the data you collected on your target accounts, sort them into groups based on key factors like the decision-maker, where they are in the buyer’s journey, and their industry. As you send out your marketing content, you can customize your message for each group.
For example, you might target accounts with financial officers as a key decision-maker who might require content that heavily focuses on costs and revenue rather than end-users who are concerned about how the product helps them perform their job.
Use a Variety of Sales Channels
Account-based marketing works across any channel that you can use to provide a personalized experience. About 68% of marketers use digital advertising in their ABM campaigns. Digital advertising includes blog posts, social media posts, and guest posts. Other popular channels include email, virtual events, direct mail, in-person events, gifts, and custom landing pages.
Measure Your Success
Most marketers use ROI as a key metric for measuring the success of their ABM strategies. In addition, about 97% of marketers say ABM yields higher returns than other marketing strategies. Understanding how your ABM strategies performed tells you whether your investment is worth the return. If your accounts don’t buy products from your brand, you’re wasting valuable time investing in relationship building.
Mapping their journey is one way to measure your success and see where you can improve. Your target account’s map shows what content or channels they engaged with, and which tactics yielded the best results. You can use that data to streamline your subsequent ABM campaigns. However, it can also tell you where target accounts abandoned their journey, which helps you identify potential issues in your processes.
ABM may not be part of your sales and marketing strategies right now, but you can see how it can be incredibly lucrative when it comes to building brand loyalty and seeing more sales conversions. Sales is all about effort, and you can only get back what you put in. With a strong ABM strategy in place, you can focus your efforts and give your most valuable accounts the attention they deserve. And when sales and marketing are able to work in tandem to build and nurture strong customer relationships, you may be surprised at how great the results can be.
Author
Get our newsletter and digital focus reports
Stay current on learning and development trends, best practices, research, new products and technologies, case studies and much more.
