Account-Based Marketing
The most commonly used strategy in today's B2B marketing landscape.
Key Takeaways
Account-Based Marketing allows you to improve efficiencies by grouping leads based on accounts, which helps to focus, and then in turn increases lead conversions.
To engage your target leads more effectively, figure out who your best customers are, identify which prospects look like your best customers, and then rank those prospects and lead contacts based on data.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
Account Based Marketing is a strategic approach in which sales and marketing join forces to focus on a group of stakeholders rather than an individual. The goal is to have full visibility about buyer needs and build relationships with specific targeted accounts.
So how is this different from traditional funnel based marketing?
Traditional funnel based marketing focuses first on:
what needs to be said
where to say it
who to say it to
Account Based Marketing instead focuses on:
who you are trying to target
what you want to say to them
where you want to say it
If you have multiple salespeople targeting different leads for the same company, they can combine their efforts and take a more personalized and strategic approach with that account.
Here is a simple five step process to kick-off an account-based marketing strategy for your business:
Analyze your customer base (particularly your best customers). What you're trying to do is find more prospects that look like your best customers. The first thing I recommend doing is getting with your operations team or your finance team and create a list of the top 20-25% of customers in terms of the: revenue they bring to your business, the retention rate and their profitability.
The trick is to figure out what is it about those customers that separates them from everybody else? There's a variety of tools that you could use for this discovery. For example, platforms like DiscoverOrg, LinkedIn, and The Org help you find this information and map out characteristics like their revenue base, industry base, and technographic characteristics (the technologies and softwares they have installed).
The technology or software a company has installed is vital becausae you may learn that their existing softwares may work well with your product or service. By knowing these characteristics it well help you paint the picture of your best customer looks like.
Identify more companies that look like your best customer. Those customers who have the same kinds of attributes, the same revenue base, the same employee size, the same technologies installed. Not only do you identify who the companies are, but who are the contacts that exist at those companies. For example, if you sell to the sales team, or you sell to the marketing team, you will want to find out who are the contacts within the departments at those companies.
You might have a list of 3000 companies and 10,000 contacts at those at the companies that look like your best customers. However, it might not be the list you want to do a really comprehensive Account-Based Marketing Program towards. You may want to tier your Account-Based Marketing Program and do something that's more personalized and more specialized at a sub segment of that list.
Segment your list. The first thing you have to do is expand your insights and understanding of those target accounts and contacts.
You can do this by asking questions like: did this company just have a funding event recently, that might indicate that they would move up higher in the list? Did they just have a recent executive move within the department that you sell to? Do they have a new chief sales officer or a new chief marketing officer, or a new CTO? Within the contacts, you want to find out things like, what's their responsibility? How do they actually structure the organization? Perhaps looking at their org chart so that you can really start to hone in on who the right contacts at those accounts are.
Rank your targets. Once you have the intel about the account, and you have intel about all of the contexts within those accounts, rank your target accounts and rank your target contacts. And again, you can do this within a variety of tools, including DiscoverOrg, LinkedIn, and The Org.
Essentially, what this is will do is it will answer who is most likely to buy or engage with me? You will answer that question based on all of the information you have. You might want to determine the quality of some of these contacts using something like a five star rating. So, for all your 3000 target companies, write them on a scale of one to five. Within those companies. You want to rate your contacts also on a scale of one to five so that you can start to hone in on who are the three to six contacts at the companies you would want to start with first.
Start with your top targets, then expand out. Build out an account based strategy and then refine it as you get bigger and bigger.
Engage. So now you're ready to engage. This is important to make sure that your sales team, your marketing team, and even your customer success teams are aligned around those target accounts and around the place that you're going to use against those target accounts. It could be things like email campaigns, direct mail campaigns, phone call campaigns, and ad retargeting.
There's a variety of different ways to build your Account-Based marketing strategy. But the key is that if you haven't done steps one through four (you have great data to figure out who your best customers are, who prospects are that looked like those best customers, and how to rank those prospects and those contacts based on data so that you can go after them effectively), if none of that is in place, then it doesn't matter how great your engagement is, your company's marketing strategy is going to fall short.
So what does this all mean for businesses?
Traditional funnel based marketing efforts are broad in nature and can quickly overload B2B sales and marketing organizations with leads that have not been converted into customers. Account-Based Marketing allows you to improve efficiencies by grouping leads based on accounts, which helps to focus, and then in turn increases lead conversions. It enables you to offer a hyper personalized message to the right people at the right time. This means more relevant, targeted efforts that can result in higher conversions for your business.