Top 5 Tips To Kick-Start Your Account Based Marketing
The ABCDEs for ABM
Your prospecting has stalled, and your inbound efforts aren’t generating enough ROI. Your sales and marketing departments blame each other for the slow pipeline growth, and you want to try Account Based Marketing (ABM). Cool! But you don’t know where to start. Right on; you came to the right place. Today I’ll be covering 5 essential tips to kick-start your ABM initiatives.
1) Assemble & Align
The success of ABM depends on the alignment of all stakeholders more than anything. You first need to assemble an ABM team and ensure each member is allocated sufficient hours per week for ABM activities. A full-time ABM manager should ideally lead the team. If you cannot afford a full-time manager, the core ABM team should consist of at least a demand generation rep, a sales operations rep and a marketing operations rep. Sales and marketing leadership should sponsor the core team with visibility from the CEO.
Your extended ABM team should include enterprise sales reps and digital and field marketing managers. All parties should be aligned with clear-cut roles and responsibilities.
2) Build Goals
The goals should be set, agreed upon and communicated to everybody before any ABM activity. There should be team-specific and individual-specific goals with set KPIs and a timeline. I suggest weekly status meetings where all stakeholders meet and discuss the progress towards the goals and the issues encountered.
The ultimate goal, like in any other initiatives, should be acquiring new customers, yet you have to set specific ABM goals related to your business strategy. Is your goal to acquire 20 new customers per quarter, or is it to create 100 new engaged accounts per month? Or is it just simply to increase awareness in your Top-of-The-Funnel prospects?
Whatever goals you set, you have to set them as early as possible and communicate them to the entire team.
3) Create Account Plan
After goals are set, you need to identify the right accounts for you. Not every company is a target for your business. Is the company part of your TAM? Do they have budget and pain point? Most importantly, do they have any intent to purchase your product or service? To answer these questions, you have to study the accounts and evaluate each for ABM fit.
Account execs should prepare the initial plan for each account they own, and the ABM leader should decide how to target them. Some of the key accounts require one-to-one ABM programs. For instance, say you are targeting Macy’s. You might create an ebook, landing page and ad targeting only for Macy’s. For other accounts, you might need a one-to-few ABM approach, where you bucket accounts by similar features and create programs for each “bucket.” This could be a webinar targeting all healthcare companies in Fortune 500, or all investment banks in Los Angeles.
4) Deliver With Right Channels
Once you finalize the ABM accounts, you have to select the right ABM channels. Contrary to common belief, ABM is more than just targeted ads. It’s building a unique relationship between your company and your relevant prospect. Based on your core market, your channels might be industry-specific ads, account-specific content, custom designed emails, direct mail, or persona specific real-time personalization. In most cases, it’s a cross-channel approach where you touch your accounts from multiple angles.
Parallel with inbound activities, your outbound team should prospect each account with a coherent messaging, eventually creating a 360-degree coverage for each of your target accounts.
5) Evaluate Technologies Carefully
Since ABM is a hot buzzword right now, there are many companies claiming to be your ultimate ABM solution. I have to tell you that unfortunately not all of them are right for you, and some of them are right for nobody.
First, you need to understand what parts of ABM you need external support in, and for each of these areas (content, advertising, reporting, direct mail, etc.), I encourage you to try multiple vendors before choosing one. In my current company, for ABM advertisement we selected to deploy Demandbase after trying some other ad vendors. Never purchase any vendor solution before testing it.
The ABCDE Framework
ABM is not difficult if you follow the simple ABCDE framework:
Assemble & Align
Build Goals
Create Account Plan
Deliver With Right Channels
Evaluate Technologies Carefully
Don’t forget the ABCDE approach and optimize as you proceed with your programs. Good luck!
