Guide to account-based marketing

Step One: Identify

Targeted account selection is required to identify prospects using top-down and bottom-up analytics. Begin by determining someone to own the list. The list owner must ‘champion’ all targets on your final list. 

The three main types of ABM:

Too many targets will stretch resources and almost certainly dilute results. However, too few targets (less than three) could be a high-risk strategy but might be favourable for exceptionally high-value deals. The One-to-Many ABM strategy is useful for further validation before personalising and focusing your list. 

One-to-few ABM is ideal when you have a cluster of target accounts with prospects sharing similar characteristics. This allows you to address shared characteristics and personalise them according to management and decision-making structures unique to these companies.

Key questions when building your list can include:

To what extent would winning company ‘X’ help us achieve our revenue goal?

• Is there a positive or negative budget connotation with this list?
• Does anyone know why we may need to remove a target?
• What might Sales already know about a target which might influence inclusion?
• Does our sales cycle preclude a company on the list?
• Is the list balanced for risk or simply cherry-picking?

The objective is to compile a risk-weighted target list that satisfies marketing, sales and service goals and responds to the overall business revenue objective. Segmentation is sensible. You should aim for a mixture of known accounts previously targeted by the sales team and new (unknown) targets. Some will be lower-hanging fruit.

Top-down and bottom-up scorecards can be useful at this point. Consider the target’s profitability and the stability of the management team. Uncover their incumbent supplier arrangements, risk appetite and perceived willingness to make a decision or pay a given price. 

Step Two: Attract

Map out as many buyers and influencers in each target account as possible. Understand where the real power and decision-making authority lies. It’s common to classify these as “Champions”, “Decision Makers”, “Budget Holders”, “Influencers”, and “Blockers”. 

This process is known as Account Penetration. Your goal is to deliver relevant messages to everyone involved in the purchase decision over time. It’s a mapping and storytelling exercise. The more relevant contacts you can identify and engage with, the more help you give the sales team when they have conversations with the buyer.

Attracting these target accounts should lead to formal or informal ‘face-time’ with multiple stakeholders. You can use online and digital levers as well as offline and low-tech. The following tools might typically be used: sponsored events, field marketing, webinars, attendance at trade shows, email marketing, content syndication, direct mail, search engine marketing, social media and PR.

Sounds expensive? It shouldn’t be—because of the 40:60 rule. Remember, this activity is highly targeted.

You might want to employ some of  the following:

Marketing automation systems:

You need a good CRM platform that helps you maintain the marketing database and launch and manage email campaigns; it should also provide useful campaign performance analytics. HubSpot, for example, allows you to leverage powerful tools such as:

• Company profiles: Provide useful data (and sync with SalesForce)
• Custom segments list tool: Allows you to place contacts from a target account into a field. You can customise, re-order, and add lead score, conversion date or type of engagement to immediately see the most qualified records in your CRM.
• Analytics: Includes the number of emails opened, clicks and much more
• Automation: Permits you to create workflows to follow up leads based on account information. Each sales rep can add what they feel is important. Sales reps can send personalised content only to those who meet their requirements.

Advertising

1-2-1 LinkedIn advertising can be very powerful. Nowadays, marketers can target ads by geography, job title, interest and recognised company email address—even if a contact is not in their CRM. You can engage decision-makers at your target accounts with precise digital advertising and LinkedIn Sponsorship Content. Savvy digital marketers can leverage ad networks and over 200 million data points to engage the right people proactively. 

You can also personalise messages and CTAs (for example, a Financial Director in a target company can be sent a slightly different message to the Operations Director in the same company). This is very powerful.

When you combine ABM advertising with company-data-enhanced web analytics, you can observe visitor behaviour and engagement without them having clicked on anything and know what traffic comes from target accounts. 

ABM advertising is typically used to:

• Attract the right contacts within target accounts at scale
• Engage contacts using ‘push’ and ‘pull’
• Capture active buying signals
• Identify highly engaged target accounts
• Re-target engaged accounts with personalized messages
• Accelerate prospects closer to revenue

Remarketing
Used for contacts who do not fill out a form and conveniently ask for a demo or call-back. This can also be used for prospects who meet the target account criteria and visited your site but did not convert. It can provide a powerful awareness opportunity at the contact level.

Field marketing
Sales teams can work together and focus their efforts geographically, concentrating on a cluster of accounts. With training, scripts and mentoring, this type of collaborative field marketing often yields extraordinary results. 

Paid social
Sponsored content on platforms your target contacts like and trust can be immensely powerful. You are not aiming for likes, comments or retweets but to acquire insights that build bridges through empathy and common interests. This is part of the ‘Attract’ toolkit that helps build trust. 

Events
Organising events can be extraordinarily expensive and, therefore, must tangibly influence the pipeline to justify the time and expenditure. 

• Consider sending delegates rather than exhibiting
• Consider sponsoring exhibition bags, gift content, floor graphics signposting to a meeting point, breakfast or dinners around events and speaking slots 

Being visible, however, will help build trust and subject matter authority.

Webinars
Proprietary or shared platform content is powerful and popular. Webinars are easy to set up and market and can be created cost-effectively. They’re a great way to reach audiences who are tired of or don’t consume blogs.

Content marketing
Highly personalised, strategically written content expressly written for the target audience and their personas are required to take target accounts on a buying journey through to decision. Make sure to focus on quality, relevance, tone and directness.

Key questions to consider about the content you plan:

• What are the needs of my target accounts
• What challenges are they currently facing
• How do they consume content?
• What types of content do they prefer?
• What types of personas are involved?

Ensure you have the right content for all personas at every buyer journey stage.

Awareness: Content pieces are thought leadership – blog posts, books, eBooks, videos, and infographics (i.e., big picture).

Consideration: Content pieces are more granular and can include case studies, white papers, product or service-focused collateral (Fact Sheets, etc.)—presented as PDFs, webinars or email sequences.

Decision: Content is more specific. It should reinforce and include demos, free trials and pitch decks. 

The priorities are engagement and outcomes (meeting requests, proposals, wins). Map awareness (company level opens) and engagement (clicks, opens, chat interactions, etc.) against the target accounts list on the contact level. 

Refine your ‘Attract’ planning based on what delivers the biggest contribution to the pipeline. Remember to repurpose content by changing the front-page title and key takeaways to personalise it for different personas.

Here are some tips:

• If you have little awareness and want to change perceptions or build a brand, focus more content effort on the awareness stage.
• If you have plenty of leads but they are not converting, consider content effectiveness for the consideration stage.
• Leverage Sales information and refine as you go.

Step Three: Engage

Moving people through the buyer’s journey and to the desired outcome (ideally, ‘buy’) is crucial. Here are some ideas you could use in the Engage phase:

• Segmentation (for added relevance)
• Personalisation (familiarity will considerably drive conversion rates)
• Use alternative delivery mechanisms (text-heavy, infographics, video messages) because people prefer different formats
• Use podcasts (said to be overtaking blogs in popularity among some audiences)
• Optimise your website user experience (Home page, clear navigation, dynamic content)
• Live chat can also turbocharge engagement (you can direct it at target accounts only and supply real-time company data to reps, so they have added context)
• Leverage data – by analysing viewing and engagement preferences, you can amend email sequences and workflows
  • Ensures you are pushing your message to decision-makers
  • Educates multiple decision-makers who may be at different stages of the buying process
• Always-on advertising – delivers two benefits
• Company Development Plans (CDP) - create CDPs that map all contacts and their relationships (orgcharthub.com can help and is a native integration in HubSpot). 

Sounds complex? It’s both science and common sense. However, if you apply just a few tactics, your target accounts will engage more. You are looking for a contact to ‘raise their hand’ and signal they want to take things to the next stage. So, give visitors every opportunity to engage and ample reasons for doing so.

Step Five: Close

What really counts is catching the fish you intend to catch. This means Sales report “order promised” or “PO received”. Sales are happy. Marketing has assisted. The Financial Director is happy. It’s good news all around. 

However, closing deals is no longer only the preoccupation of Sales. For Sales or BD teams to reliably close large near-term deals, they need as much relevant information on each deal opportunity as possible. 

Organisations need to think about the entire customer journey and lifecycle - not in terms of research, marketing, sales and service silos. You can deliver on ABM objectives by taking a more holistic view. 

Marketing can make a discernible difference through ABM by providing information in three groups to Sales:

Background – basic account information such as size, locations, industry vertical, key drivers, list of targeted opportunities, key contacts, telephone, email, etc.

Activity – website engagement, webinar and event attendance, downloads 

Insights and intent – this is the most significant and critical tool designed to help win and close deals. True insights and intent are based on recognised behaviour. 

• What are target contacts researching?
• What search phrases are they using?
• What do chatbot conversations reveal about interest, intent, fears or focus?

This can make the difference in whether a deal closes. Significantly, it can also provide an important uplift opportunity in deal value—adding a target account’s second site needs to the deal, for example.

Useful measurements to consider may include the following:

Measurement metrics will vary by company and by stakeholder. Dashboards can be configured to precisely capture what is important for you.

At a simple level, the following metrics may be useful barometers:

You can also carry out more in-depth analysis and create leader boards that show the following: top sales rep or BD member performance, distribution of major opportunities by brand, product, company, and geography.

1. Alignment of Sales and Marketing and reversal of disconnect and former inefficiencies (i.e., fewer missed opportunities)
2. Compelling ROI
3. Significant revenue generation
4. High-quality leads
5. High conversion rates
6. Growth plan enabler (game-changer within one to two years)
7. Up-sell to existing customer accounts
8. Turbo-charge Partner, Affiliate and Referral opportunities

What are the implications for Marketing, Sales and Service teams?

ABM means working in a completely different way. It takes data, lead generation, inbound, marketing-led sales support, sales team hunting, major proposal opportunities and conversion rate performance to new heights.

Service teams should not be excluded from ABM programmes. Remember, the objective of ABM is to bring about a significant change in revenue contribution by successfully engaging a small number of key accounts. 

These accounts must meet your acquisition criteria and be sustainable. Therefore Marketing, Sales and Service need to collaborate and learn from what is won and lost. This will positively impact the wider business.

What can go wrong?

A lot. ABM should not be underestimated. These are the three most common errors:

• The poor initial choice of target accounts
• Failure to invest in the proper and full suite of assets and ‘Attract’ and ‘Engagement’ levers. Programme cost should not be a big issue. Companies need to focus on the Opportunity Cost (i.e., the cost of not hitting the growth targets because a competitor may make a move on the long-term opportunity)
• Failure to allow sufficient time to gain traction

Three tips to avoid disappointment:

When should you use ABM?

ABM is a particular blend of inbound marketing for organisations serious about scaling sales enablement and driving predictable, transformative sales outcomes. Companies best suited should be able to recognise many common denominators. How many can your business tick?

• Enterprise business
• B2B
• Can identify a cluster of target accounts with common characteristics
• An industry with long, complicated sales processes
• Company with high-value service or product offering
• A small number of big-value deals can be a game-changer
• Management understands and values inbound marketing principles and methodology
• The company is at an inflexion point and wants significant long-term growth
• The sales team is busy, hungry and capable of handling significant high-value leads
• The company can commit to a 12-24 month investment
• The organisation is ‘thinking big’
• Full buy-in from the Financial Director
• HubSpot or equivalent software is mandatory