a marketing - atomic€¦ · sales enablement tools: any sales leader knows the impact of strong...

How to get started with account-based marketing.A Marketing

Practitioner’s Guide to ABM

Contents

1. Marketing firmly in the middle 42. Does ABM come in your size? 83. How to get sales and marketing on the same page 104. Getting started with a pilot 165. 6 reasons why an ABM approach might be right for you 24

A Marketing Practitioner’s Guide to ABM | page 3

1.

It’s about getting the foundations right so you can move your pros-pects through the sales cycle faster. Part of that includes figuring out who you want to target and how. Yet many sales and marketing leaders today are still casting a wide net, leveraging every channel and pumping out as much content as possible to maximise the number of leads captured. The problem with that approach is simple: you’re never sure what you’ll get, or whether you’re even collecting the leads your company wants and needs, and ultimately you end up wasting time and money on prospects who will never convert.

That’s where account-based mar-keting (ABM) can help. Instead of a scattershot approach designed to reach the largest possible number of prospects, ABM is a B2B strategy that focuses sales and marketing resources on hyper-targeted accounts that will yield the most benefit for your business.

It’s about bringing your people, processes, and platform together to build a personalised value proposition for a key account and showcasing that with the right message, on the right channels, at the right time, in order to connect your sales team to the right audience. This will deliver high net gains and long-term revenue streams.

Every interaction a marketer has with a customer or prospect contributes to developing the sales relationship—and one of the best ways to do that is to ensure you make them feel understood, valued and important from the get-go

Section 1: Marketing firmly in the middle | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4 | Section 5

Marketing firmly in the middle.


Section 1: Marketing firmly in the middle | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4 | Section 5

That’s not to say that ABM should replace your current marketing strategy. Rather, it complements what you’re already doing, whether that’s email marketing, social media or display advertising. So if you currently have an inbound programme in place, an ABM approach can focus your strategy on a specific account, company or set of individuals, thus driving a well-qualified lead pipeline and pulling the desired buyer toward your sales organisation in a more understood way.

One of the key benefits of an ABM approach is that sales and marketing teams can demonstrate results with real business impact. By concentrating your resources on the most attractive accounts and offering a stronger differentiated solution, you will create customer value, increase market share and ultimately sell more.

Let’s take a look at how you and your sales organisation can work together to implement planning processes, targeted programmes and selling tools that can easily but effectively help you scale your business to grow with focus.

ABM is a B2B strategy that focuses sales and marketing resources on targeted accounts that will yield the most benefit for your business

Not convinced?

According to ITSMA research, 87 percent of marketers implementing ABM say that it delivers higher ROI than any other type of marketing. Meanwhile, a recent survey of CMOs and senior sales leadership by Sirius Decisions found that 91 percent of respondents said average deal sizes are larger for ABM accounts. In fact, 27 percent said average deal sizes for ABM accounts are more than 50 percent larger.


Section 1 | Section 2: Does ABM come in your size? | Section 3 | Section 4 | Section 5

ABM supports a targeted sales strategy across companies of all sizes, industries and maturity of business model

ABM supports a targeted sales strategy across companies of all sizes, industries and business model maturity. The approach takes a long-term view of building profitable relationships with customers but with a near-term measurement focus that helps indicate if things are on track and heading in the right direction.

Therefore it’s important to plan and work with what resources you have and from there strengthen the targeting, messaging and

2.

Does ABM come in your size?

contact building that will help support account plans and rev-enue goals. You can scale your ABM effort in line with your own business capability.

Scaling a business requires rigorous planning. ABM addresses the shared challenges of sales and marketing teams. Creating marketing plans that firmly put an account strategy in place will address many of the challenges in defining how you go to market.


Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3: How to get sales and marketing on the same page | Section 4 | Section 5

That alignment begins with an agreement on which accounts are in and out of scope and the criteria that understanding is based on. This joint assumption of responsibility is the bedrock of a solid working ABM model. (see figure 1).

No matter what model you choose, knowing how to focus is all about identifying the customer profile that best fits your business.Once you do that, your sales and marketing alignment can work to handle larger volumes of accounts while still being supported by inbound and out-bound marketing efforts. The key is getting the balance right.

An ABM approach can focus on both net new account acquis ition and upsell or cross-sell programmes.

But before you get started, you need to have a clear vision on what success should look like. Is it:

— Pipeline growth?— Customer engagement?— Industry penetration?

Knowing what results you want to see will drive better planning. The number of accounts in an overall ABM programme will vary depending on the ratio of accounts held per sales manager, size of opportunity and alignment to the overall business strategy of your company.

No matter the size of the accounts, ABM marketers understand they are no longer targeting just leads or individuals but teams of people within an account, all with buying power.

The single most important step-change in an ABM programme is that it will truly align a sales andmarketing effort in any company

How to get sales and marketing on the same page.

3.


Some questions to consider to ensure you are creating the right level of cover and breadth:

— How many buyers will be required to influence, meet with and complete a needs analysis on?

— Are buying decisions taken centrally or in independent buying centres?

ABM programmes thrive when the needs of the target accounts are documented, shared, analysed, and constantly revisited by all supporting teams in your organisation. The outcome of this is a highly person-alised inbound and outbound selling effort based on an agreed value proposition that works to meet the identified need of that client.

Sales and marketing can work together to agree on the definitions of what types of accounts are attractive for sales to engage with based on success criteria, buying cycle stage, needs and the relevance of decision makers. It’s important to establish if there are one or more active buying centres or decision-making units within the account. Leave no stone unturned or you may risk missing the real influencers and budget holders.

Remember, the customer buying journey is not linear. At any point during a buying cycle, the relevant employees in your key accounts will assess the pain points they face in performing their role day to day. As they seek to understand what solutions are available to them they will research content online, network with peers, enlist external advisories and evaluate how similar companies overcame comparable challenges.


No matter what model you choose, knowing how to focus is all about identifying the customer profile that best fits your business


Large accounts: These are often your most strategic accounts, your largest current customers or high-value prospects, and could be an international operation with multiple decision-making units across the globe. Often referred to as must-win deals. Much of the marketing effort here will be to assist sales in building brand awareness.

Named accounts: Typically mid-sized organisations in mature markets where the size of opportunity can be forecast based on employee size, revenue and turnover. A named-account programme will often comprise elements of programmatic market-ing using automation, nurturing and account scoring before critical activities to warrant the engagement of a dedicated field sales manager.

Industry accounts: Named accounts clustered together within industries or specific segments.

Fig 1. SiriusDecisions identifies three account-based models to consider when deciding the right approach for your business:

That’s why it’s critical to ensure your brand and solutions are available at these vital watering holes. Well-applied segmentation, personas, behavioural and intent data will attract decision makers to digital and inbound marketing efforts early in the research phase of a buyer, culminating in better engagement throughout the journey.

For the marketer, this will mean better communications, channel selection, offerings and knowing what the sales team really need in the later stages of the sale.

Marketing teams that focus on a structured, planned and systematic roll-out of creative content, engagement strategy, data gathering, and sales enable-ment reap the benefits of truly partnering with sales teams to deliver a pipeline of qualified leads with higher conversion rates for sales acceptance and opportunity development.

Here are some key action points when starting your ABM journey:

Explore your data points to drive account selection: Billing, event and marketing data can be pure gold in the account selection process. Understanding how people

behave when they engage with your organisation is important to capture and analyse for relevance to buying signals.

Qualify the level of engagement of multiple buyers at the account level: Each purchase decision typically includes various buyers and influencers. Having a system for tracking and aggregating these connected leads at the account level can provide actionable insight to mobilise a selling team.

Spend time creating powerful sales enablement tools: Any sales leader knows the impact of strong sales coaching supported by good discovery tools. Marketing should work hand in glove with product teams to provide strong messaging that handles initial objections, identifies buying signals and gently but firmly squeezes out competitor positioning.

Drive buyers to consume relevant stage content: Use the right tactics at the right time to engage with your audience in a way that brings them the information they need on their terms as they reach for it. For example, ensure any effort to drive attendance at webinars is relevant to roles and ultimately early-stage meet and greets.

ABM marketers understand they are no longer targeting just leads or individuals but teams of people within an account, all with buying power


page 14 | A Marketing Practitioner’s Guide to ABM

Getting started with a pilot.

4.Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4: Getting started with a pilot | Section 5

Once you have selected the relevant accounts you want to focus on and gained the commit-ment of sales, marketing and supporting teams within your organisation, you are ready to plan a pilot to learn and grow from


1. Building the team

2. Selecting accounts

3. Compiling account insights

4. Developing the ABM plan

5. Executing the plan

6. Tracking results

Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4: Getting started with a pilot | Section 5Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4: Getting started with a pilot | Section 5

1. Building the team

Picking a team that brings the right level of skills and talent together will be your first step in getting closer to a potential client. A mix of different perspectives and knowledge from across your organisation will help form a better understanding of your key customers, thus ensuring the success of an ABM programme.

Many companies today successfully involve sales, marketing, business operations, sales operations, and customer success teams to review all stages of account intelligence gathering and programme design to ensure that account is acquired and retained for the long term.

2. Selecting accounts

First review your organisation’s business goals and objectives and align your ABM strategy to drive performance toward that end goal. Select your top prospects and customers. Determine if you will execute a one-to-one strategy focusing on a select handful of high-value accounts or a one-to-many approach. Consider prioritisation based on the level of opportunity, achievability and co-operation present in target accounts.

3. Compiling account insights

Once you identify your target accounts, you need to understand them. Gather as much insight as possible by reviewing all account plans from sales in detail and conducting a competitor presence review and stakeholder mapping. It can help to enlist technology to provide insight on buying behaviours, account-related web traffic, brand views, digital ads and retargeting mapped to each stage of the buying cycle.

Draw on personas for individual buyers and buyer groups and explore opportunities to use an-alytics to predict future business potential. Establish if there is any sense of urgency affecting those targets accounts that may impact decision-making time.

4. Developing the ABM plan

A tailored marketing plan for a large account or a cluster of named accounts will require a clear outline of the measure of success in both the near and long term. This is essential to ensure progress is clearly understood and levels of investment are met wherever progress is clear. Let’s examine what’s needed in that plan.

— Persona mapping: Identify who in the account should be approached, how frequently and what reach out method will work best for them. This brings your potential client closer, faster.

— Custom messaging: This must be determined throughout the different stages of the buying cycle, from research to problem-solution fit to final selection. Align these messages to the mapped personas and then consider the number of touch points along the buying journey.

Your customers or prospects will ultimately engage with you on their own terms, so an effective ABM programme will recognise high-value accounts in your current lead processes and loop in all relevant account insight at each touch point so you can monitor and understand what’s working for who. Doing so will create awareness of the identified problems, drive urgency for a solution and help the buyer identify their needs in solving that problem.

As your sales team moves toward tailoring the solution specific to that customer’s needs, it will best position your company as a

A Marketing Practitioner’s Guide to ABM | page 19page 18 | A Marketing Practitioner’s Guide to ABM

Key strategic questions when assessing an account for ABM investment:

— How much share of wallet do you currently hold?

— Can you estimate the category spend of that account based on similar existing customer profiles?

— Are efforts likely to succeed?

— Are there any external factors affecting change in the account that would influence a compelling reason to buy, such as legislative changes or compliance requirements?

— How achievable is it to win or invest further in this account?

Draw on personas for individual buyers and buyer groups and explore opportunities to use analytics to predict future business potential

Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4: Getting started with a pilot | Section 5

valid choice in the final selection phase. Customised creative and engaging content is critical. This is the time to re-evaluate what you already have and fill gaps and re-purpose wherever possible.

— Marketing tactics that resonate: Identify what marketing support you have to wrap around your account targeting. Review PR, account-based advertising, digital and video content, social selling tools, retargeting, landing pages, personalised reports, events and those all-important rich content nurture flows.

Which tactics could best

increase awareness, credibility or relationship development? Integrate all marketing efforts to support your ABM efforts. The more brand recognition you can create in those accounts the more grease is applied to get sales through the door.

— A regular cadence of

communication: Integrate different tactics and channels when designing your programmes and consider how buyers will seek out information and advice. For example, if brand recognition is low in some target accounts, consider investing in high quality C-level engagement like disruptive 3D mailers or

ebooks that can act as a foot-in-the-door attention grabber.

When buyers are in the research phase, before they commit to making any change in their organisation, the role of marketing will be to first establish credibility for your brand. Inbound marketing can deliver high levels of engage-ment within an account, from SEO to virtual events.

Later, as buyers start to explore possible solutions across multiple vendors, content with deeper messaging and self-diagnosis is often required. Here we start to personalise and refine the messaging to support that all the way through to the selection process.

Content needs will evolve further

in the final stages of solution assessment and validation. Buyers will seek proof of concept and wish to engage at customer events and in online communities. That’s where the role of your customer success managers and company advocates will play a vital role in shaping messaging and outreach activity. Be sure to factor this in when creating early-stage and late-stage market-ing collateral, all of which can be personalised at an account level.


Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4: Getting started with a pilot | Section 5

— Budgeting: A pilot often can be supported by both sales and marketing investment. It’s less about how much you spend and more about calculating the revenue per account, then investing appropriately to achieve that return. Large strategic accounts can often support a re-investment of 1-2 percent to grow and retain ABM programmes.

It’s advisable to define time to revenue and measure budget allocation against projected deal sizes. If you are running ABM for the first time you may wish to consider a training budget to support staff learning and any automation and technology investment.

Any spend you make on engage-ment within the account is going toward delivering a defined and relevant message based on the quality of your account insight. You will need to balance the investment between account insights and engagement spend. For example, if your target accounts are all very similar, you may spend less on insights as you get a feel for the market. However, if your target accounts vary you will need to invest more in insights so you provide more relevance for each account.

Scaling a best practice approach on winning accounts can accel-erate your speed to market and increase confidence levels for selling teams based on proven ROI.

5. Executing the plan

Once you have engaged the right people in your ABM team, meet regularly to report back on progress, reflect on short-term results and agree on next best actions or changes to any original plans. As account intelligence builds and improves, the directions taken will modify, so keeping a team motivated and open to flexibility and responsiveness is key. Stay focused by utilising sales forecast figures and reviewing weekly pipeline performance. A well-executed ABM plan takes effort but the results will speak for themselves.

6. Tracking results

Depending on the length of your typical sales cycle, the course to winning an account can be long. Therefore, it’s advisable to take a snapshot of the account before you execute the plan and identify upfront health indicators toward progress so you can clearly see the ABM impact.

The ultimate metric to monitor is conversion across your sales funnel, so the percentage of pipeline influenced and the number of opportunities uncovered

Remember, you are not counting the number of people you reach, but reaching the people who count. Some indicators to keep an eye on include: — Third-party content provider

platforms: How much content your target account consumes

— Volume of visitors from an IP address: To measure engagements with your brand

— Number of new contacts at the account

— Number of decision makers reached by sales development representative team

— Increases in consultative conversations

The ultimate metric to monitor is conversion across your sales funnel, so the percentage of pipeline influenced and the number of opportunities uncovered.

Measurement in ABM should factor in tracking results in account coverage, awareness levels, engagement levels, account penetration and influence.

It’s worth mentioning that it’s advisable to update systems to track the movement of contacts and leads within accounts. Every interaction with your marketing and sales effort is therefore tracked back to the account level and, over time, metrics pertaining to the cost of customer acquisition and customer lifetime value will guide better investment decisions.

Whether you’re currently practising inbound, outbound or content marketing—or a blend of all three—ABM can work in tandem with your existing processes and help you hook the accounts that will yield the most benefit for your business.

A Marketing Practitioner’s Guide to ABM | page 23page 22 | A Marketing Practitioner’s Guide to ABM

6 reasons why an ABM approach might be right for you.

5.Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4 | Section 5: 6 reasons why an ABM approach might be right for you

1. You’re faced with competition that relentlessly knocks on the door of both your customers and your desired prospects and you don’t know which accounts to focus on and with what investment.

2. Your sales cycles are lengthy and you never know if you are speaking to the real decision makers.

3. Sales aren’t certain that they are connecting with the right people in the right way or whether there are other opportunities within the account.

4. Multiple channels for buyers to engage with mean that sales struggle to keep an eye on what’s relevant all the way from cold to close.

5. You’re not sure how to get to and meet the real needs of the client to bring about a stronger differentiated solution while creating real customer value.

6. You know you need to cut through the noise in the market as you target your largest and most important customers but you’re struggling to do so with a personalised touch.


Are you ready to get started with account-based marketing? Click here to sign up for our webinar.

Atomic Beta

15a Bishop StreetDublin 8, Ireland.

T: +353 (0)1 407 0700E: [email protected]: www.atomic.ie/beta

https://www.atomic.ie/beta/abm-webinar/

a marketing - atomic€¦ · sales enablement tools: any sales leader knows the impact of strong...

Documents