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The Beginner’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing

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[Updated January 10, 2024]

If you are a B2B marketer, you probably spend a lot of time coming up with new ways to reach the right prospect, with the right message, at the right time.

Account-based marketing is generally used by B2B companies to maximize their marketing efforts with their existing customer base. Overall, account-based marketing, in essence, is a technique in marketing that was born out of necessity and is a technique that has proven itself to be extremely effective time and time again.

Although ABM has been in use for many years now, it is seeing a renewed rise in interest lately. This can be directly correlated with the rise of new technologies in marketing like targeted display advertisements, marketing automation, demo creation software, and other digital tools that help make ABM much more effective.

But, ABM, requires more than a bunch of cost-effective technology that is simple to implement. It requires in-depth strategic guidance and planning from a dedicated marketing team in order for it to be effective for your business.

There is no single one-size-fits-all ABM strategy that works for all organizations and scenarios. There is, however, a set of guidelines that you can follow to develop an ABM strategy that works for your company.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

The Information Technology Services Marketing Association (AKA the ITSMA) has a reasonable claim to coining the phrase “account-based marketing”, so let’s use their definition going forward. 

They define Account-based marketing, or ABM, as structured approach to implementing and developing a highly customized marketing and sales campaign for single prospects, partnerships, or accounts.

The idea you can deepen and broaden your relationships with individuals with important accounts by treating each of your clients as a market of one.

This ultimately increases the demand and awareness for your solutions and services as well as leads to generating greater revenue and more strategic sales. And, since it’s been around a while, experts agree that ABM can actually be considered “old-school.” 

As long as there have been companies trying to sell a solution, there have been account-based marketing campaigns.

However, these same experts theorize that the reason ABM has had a resurgence of popularity over the last few years or so is due to new technology allowing marketers to scale in entirely innovative ways.

There has been a rapid rise in searches for the term “account-based marketing” in the last year alone indicating that people are talking about it.

In fact, if you look closely at a lot of data providers and vendors, you’ll notice they’re now shoehorning the phase into their list of capabilities.

You could probably even spend a week doing nothing but attending ABM webinars!

The Fundamentals of ABM

You know what ABM is, but do you know how to implement it at your company? There are a few foundational pieces you’ll need before you can roll out an entire ABM strategy at your organization.

ABM treats all accounts as a market of one

Successful marketers who use account-based marketing embrace an end-to-end view across the entire journey of the buyer and across all channels. Some call this process of addressing each prospect account or company as a “market of one.”

Traditionally, automated campaigns for marketing are targeted to a large group of people who all share similar characteristics at a wide range of companies (like coming from the same department or having the same title).

Doing it this way, you might find yourself sending the same email or intro demo video to 500 Directors of IT at 500 companies, hoping that your general IT-focused message is good enough to get some of them to reply.

ABM is personalized to each decision maker

If you treat all accounts as a market of one, you need to think about the needs of all the influencers in the company.

  • What does the CFO care about?
  • What about the IT director?
  • Does the Vice President of marketing have a say in the budget for IT?

ABM looks at all the decision makers in a company, not just one general persona that is spread across many companies.

This approach makes it easy to truly understand each individual within an account. Because ABM focuses on providing value for customers, it is worth taking the time to make your pitch relevant to a relatively small but highly valued group of key people.

This is the way to go if you want to target prospective companies with the highest potential. It’s also saleable if you create shareable content like automated SaaS demos that apply to each persona.

ABM is suited to the needs of your customers

75% of executives will read marketing materials, even unsolicited ones, if they contain ideas that may be relevant to their business, according to ITSMA.

It’s safe to assume then, that the percentage of people who read unsolicited materials that irrelevant to their interests is around zero.

You probably already know this already just looking at your own inbox.

ABM encourages the marketers to do the hard work to ensure they engage their clients in a hyper-personal way. It is highly likely that your email won’t work if the subject line does not immediately address a need of a decision maker.

Don’t settle for something as general as promising your clients that you are going to drive more business for them. Aim at how you can solve one specific problem a particular area or department may have.

ABM encourages an alignment in marketing

Many marketing teams are juggling multiple projects at once without knowing who’s doing what or why.

One group in your marketing department might be developing paid lead-gen campaigns. Another group might be creating your e-books and blog posts. nd yet another might be updating your website copy and images.

You should ask yourself: Are all of these efforts aligned around one recognizable, clear message? If they are not, then they should be.

ABM forces marketing and sales alignment

Account-based marketers always try to enable disconnected audiences by making sure that their sales teams already know what questions they should ask. Aligning marketing with sales while planning your accounts is one of the most important ways to transition into ABM.

Marketing and sales should be aligned as you map your accounts in order to identify quality targets, then focus on the leads that align with those accounts with priority.

Marketing and sales need to agree on the engagement strategy for accounts, meet daily to check on progress, and agree which metrics indicate success in order to make ABM work.

Traditionally, metrics that are lead-based like impressions, lead volume, and traffic present challenges in ABM. Since these figures do not necessarily correlate to revenue, many of the leads that have been generated are not targeted. ABM is not just about getting more leads, but rather focusing on the right ones.

A few of the best ways for a marketer to measure success in ABM include the number of key relationships with contacts, acceleration of pipeline, reduction in the sales cycle, number of accounts identified, and ultimately, a reduction in the revenue cycle.

Named accounts

Traditional marketing and sales strategies focus their efforts on chasing leads. At first glance, this seems entirely logical. After all, you need to generate leads to make a sale. But pursuing one lead at a time is probably not the most effective strategy to employ, which is why smart marketers focus on named accounts.

What is a named account?

Named accounts refer to a single company account that is assigned to either a sales or marketing rep. That single account may contain several potential leads within the organization. Essentially, named accounts are the building blocks of a focused marketing effort.

Aside from making your operations more streamlined, named accounts tend to be ready to buy and hotter (or more engaged if you don’t speak sales). You can be confident that the leads resulting from named accounts will be interested in what you have to offer once you identify the needs of your customers.

Named accounts for use in ABM

Named accounts require an even more careful approach when used with ABM. According to industry leaders, putting together a list of a hundred accounts and throwing them against the wall is not truly ABM.

A list of named accounts for ABM needs to include more than just contact information. You need to have insight into those accounts in order to build a targeted value proposition.

You also need to understand the issues each business each account is facing on a specific level in order to show the decision makers how you can help solve them.

Remember, you are creating a marketing plan specific to one account and that you then integrate with the sales plan. In other words, the marketer becomes a part of the account team.

Focusing on named accounts can improve efficiency in two ways:

  1. The vast majority of companies will have multiple decision makers in a modern B2B environment. Therefore, it is important for you to first identify all the relevant decision-makers and build your marketing and sales strategy accordingly instead of switching from one lead to another.
  2. It reduces the possibility of reps duplicating efforts and stepping on each other’s toes. There is no point in assigning two people to sell to the same company.

Employing Account-based marketing with Consensus

By now, you’re probably asking yourself, “Why should I employ ABM?” This question can be answered with one statistic from Forrester Research: less than 1% of all leads can turn into customers that generate revenue.

More and more marketers are going after the same target market using the same tactics. Traditional email marketing worked well until the spam filters and legally required unsubscribe options started being enforced. It is even harder with more organizations bypassing email communication altogether using internal messaging tools.

Content marketing also worked well until everybody started doing it. The days when you could own a particular phrase or word on the internet just by publishing good content about that term are gone. While inbound marketing still works for a lot of companies, it is just not bringing in the results it once did.

Companies who employ ABM tactics from Consensus see real ROI

Marketers who adopt account-based strategies with Consensus are more likely to be successful and competitive than their peers who market solely to individuals. According to ITSMA, 84% of B2B marketers say that ABM delivers a higher ROI than any other approach.

At Consensus, we work very hard each day to help our customers improve and achieve buying agreement. Both large and small companies have used our interactive product demos and demo automation solution to solve even the largest challenges in B2B sales.

Not only that, we also specialize in other services that focus on sales automation and sales enablement. Click here to learn more about account-based marketing and other services Consensus offers so you can drive agreement and drive sales today!

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