🕵🏻‍♂️ How to do ABM (for real)

Hey ,

In today’s newsletter, we'll reveal some truths about ABM and share foolproof tactics that will help you hit your target goals.

Spoiler alert: The tactics shared in this newsletter are easy to apply and you can reverse-engineer them to create your own winning campaigns.

Let’s start first with the definition of ABM.

What is ABM and how does it work?

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a targeted growth strategy in which your right hand (marketing) and your left hand (sales) work together to create personalized buying experiences for a pool of highly qualified accounts that they have both identified.

Among other things, you can use ABM to:

• better personalize your marketing approach: with ABM, your team can customize marketing touchpoints directly with key contacts in target accounts;

• better align your sales and marketing teams: with ABM, marketing and sales teams can work closely together to develop a scoring and targeting system;

• accelerate sales cycle: by targeting key contacts in high-potential accounts, ABM gives you the opportunity to nurture the key decision-maker and all relevant prospects individually in order to facilitate and expedite the sales process;

• focus on the right accounts: ABM only targets the accounts that are most likely to close. Why spend half of your team's energy and resources on low-level leads, when a single deal with the right type of prospect can account for half of your revenue? The right leads generate more revenue than hundreds of low-quality leads combined.

With ABM, you basically have 3 tiers.

• Tier 1: companies with the highest revenue potential. One-to-one tactics. 100% personalized campaigns.

• Tier 2: companies with medium revenue potential. One-to-few tactics. Here, you can personalize by vertical and job roles.

• Tier 3: mass market campaigns. One-to-many tactics. This is a normal marketing campaign, with little personalization.

Depending on how many target accounts you’re including in your pilot campaign and the internal resources you have, you can pick the approach that makes the most sense for you. But keep this in mind, the more personalized your ABM approach is, the bigger lift it will be for your team.

How to ABM like a boss?

Here are some tested and trusted tactics that will help you get more out of your ABM campaigns.

First step: Select The Right Accounts

The importance of distinguishing between different types of accounts cannot be overstated. Why? Because not all accounts are created equal.

You should identify and pick your ideal set of high-value target accounts to invest your time and resources in.

Here’s how:

• Create LinkedIn search alerts for your Ideal Customer Profile: basically, this is a one-page document that clearly outlines the type of companies you are targeting as part of your ABM initiative;

• Create a workflow that filters incoming qualified leads based on specific criteria. This can be the company size, the vertical, the budget, etc., and tag them as an ideal customer type in your CRM;

• Ask yourself this question: "If you could replicate one deal from last year, what would it be?" Then, use the characteristics of that deal (the vertical, the company size, the budget, among others) to identify similar best-fit customers;

• Choose target accounts based on a particular industry or geographical location;

• Identify the major companies and leads that are engaging with your inbound content but do not have a deal attached (yet!);

• Find out which lighthouse accounts you can use for reference;

• Ensure that each sales representative focuses on a maximum of 10 accounts at a time.

Second step: Do Intent Data Analysis

Intent data analysis is all about making sure the account is really willing to buy your product. But how do you do that? By ensuring there’s a certain engagement threshold.

The engagement threshold here can be them spending 30 minutes on your website, checking out your product page, pricing page, or whatever key page is there and you consider this is enough of a signal, for you to decide that there may be some buying intent.

If you are doing your approaches on LinkedIn for example, what you need to do is to check if the account is interacting with you. What are they saying under your content? Have they clicked to book a call or a demo with you? That can be a signal that they want to buy from you.

Third step: Account Segmentation

Account segmentation involves dividing your list of accounts into appropriate segments, allowing you to target them with highly relevant messages that address their specific challenges.

See, not all accounts have the same value. Yet, there are marketers who still treat them all the same way. They use the same tactics, the same calculation cost of acquisition, and the exact same budget. As a result, their campaigns do not perform as well as they should.

To help you avoid this, here is what you need to understand: the bigger the account, the more you should invest in it, and the more personalization and work it will require to generate the desired opportunity.

As mentioned above, typically we have 03 tiers in ABM:

• Tier 1: One-to-one

• Tier 2: One-to-few

• Tier 3: One-to-many

But practically, what's important is to decide which tier you want to focus on in your initial ABM campaign.

According to Mandy Hanson, you can have a mix (i.e. 1:1, 1:few, 1:many) which allows your teams to not only create customized experiences for a handful of top target accounts but also scale with 1:few/1:many, especially if you have a small team.

Fourth Step: Team Alignment 

HubSpot Academy professor Jepson put it best when he said "If your marketer is targeting one list of companies, and your salespeople are working on a different list, you’re going to end up with an account-based mess."

While the initials of Account-Based Mess is still ABM, it is clearly different from the ABM (Account-based marketing) we are talking about. 😅

Josh Shulman from our B2B marketing community echoed Jepson's words, saying:👇

Without an aligned and cohesive team, achieving a common goal becomes difficult. So, you first need to set your goals and then have your teams aligned on them. Speaking of goals, it can be:

• generating a net new revenue ;

• generating new accounts ;

• generating new opportunities ;

• expanding some deals ;

• accelerating your pipeline or activating frozen leads in the pipeline ;

• entering a new market ;

• etc.

After fixing your goals, you now need to figure out the metrics that you are going to track. In other words, what will you define as success in the course of your ABM campaign? What are the leading metrics?

Leading metrics can be :

• the number of accounts that are engaging ;

• the number of conversations you are generating ;

• How deeply you are penetrating different accounts: what are you learning about them, are they landing, is there traction with the way that you are talking about your product or service ;

• etc.

Figure out who your best customers are. Then dive really deep in understanding the most profitable verticals that you have. You can spend time studying and analyzing things like :

• the fastest deals you won ;

• the biggest deals you won ;

• the biggest fastest deals you won ;

• the biggest fastest deals you lost and why you lost them ;

• etc.

The truth is, when sales, marketing, and execs are aligned and engaged, you will benefit from increased productivity, better communication, higher engagement, and a faster decision-making process.

Fifth Step: Personalize your content

Whatever type of content you deliver, it needs to match your ideal customer profile. Whether you use email, blogs, webinars, eBooks, white papers, or any other media, you have to customize the content for each customer. Generalized content will not cut it in ABM; you need to drill down to the specific information that you know your customers need. 

Join now the community of B2B marketers who are in the trenches every day getting their hands dirty growing B2B companies with high ACV and long sales cycles.

Upcoming Community Event

[Full-funnel live] How to measure ABM and demand gen across the full funnel

Join Andrei and Stapho next Thursday (11th May: 4 pm CET - 10 am ET) for our new live episode.

They'll be covering:

⚡️Core ABM metrics to track across the full funnel

⚡️Core demand gen metrics

⚡️Revenue reporting

⚡️Community questions

Feel free to drop your questions in the comments, I’ll cover them as well.

Save your spot below👇

BEST SHARES FROM THE TRENCHES COMMUNITY

How to go from siloed marketing and sales to shared and joint campaigns across the full funnel (Read Here)

Before you build ABM, you need to fix your Demand Gen programs (Read Here)

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina D. ODJO