🕵🏻‍♂️ ABM Tactics

Written by Adechina Odjo @Trenches

Hey, ,

In this newsletter, we'll debunk some myths about ABM and share foolproof tactics that generated millions of dollars in revenue. The tactics shared in this guide are easy to apply and you can reverse-engineer them to create your own winning campaigns.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• What is ABM?

• The DOs and DON’Ts of ABM

• How to develop an ABM content strategy?

• ABM tactics

Let’s dive in.

What is ABM?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B growth strategy that implies a coordinated effort between your left hand (marketing) and your right hand (sales) to create highly-personalized content for a specific audience that’s an ideal fit for your business.

In other words, your marketing and sales teams collaborate to create a tailored buying experience for a set of target accounts. These accounts are usually your tier 1 and tier 2 accounts.

The end goal of ABM is to present the targeted prospect with the most enticing content that will prompt them to engage with your company. In contrast to spray-and-pray strategies, ABM emphasizes personal engagement with high-value accounts.

What are the DOs and DON’Ts of ABM?

Let's start with this powerful assertion that Andrei made during one of our weekly webinars.

What that means is, your ads are still part of the thousands of ads your prospects will see on a daily basis and your email is still part of the hundreds of emails that will land in their inbox.

And that’s where it gets interesting.

At its core, ABM is all about having a limited pool of people you're going after. That means you should be creative in your outreach and ads. Avoid generic marketing and come up with a different approach that cuts through the noise. Think innovatively and do not always cling to the standards. 

Here’s what Danielle Annis, a member of TRENCHES B2B Marketing Community, had to say when we asked her about what she learned with ABM over the years:

ABM tactics

It is important to understand how ABM works and how to get the most out of it before investing money, time, and resources.

That's why, in this section, I'm taking you through 5 practical steps you can follow to get the most out of your next ABM campaign.

Step 1: Identify and pick your ideal set of target accounts

We can never say this enough: not all accounts are created equal. So, 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;

• 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 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.

Step 2: Build your ABM team

Marketing and sales leaders will need to align on how to build your ABM team. They should identify a minimum of one marketer and one sales rep who will be completely dedicated to the accounts you’re working with.

These people will create and publish content for accounts as well as work to manage and close business deals with each account’s buying committee. As a rule of thumb, limit your team size to no more than 10 sales reps and 01 marketer.

In addition to the marketing manager and sales rep(s), don't forget to identify other key internal players - such as customer success reps - who need to be aware of and adhere to your ABM strategy.

Step 3: 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 will still give you ABM, it is clearly different from the account-based marketing (ABM) we are talking about.😅

Josh Shulman from our B2B marketing community echoed Jepson's words, saying, "A successful ABM strategy is made (or broken) by the amount of communication and alignment between your Sales<>Marketing teams.”

Without an aligned and cohesive team, achieving a common goal becomes difficult. So, you first need to set your goals and 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?

It 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?

Figure out who your best customers are. Then dive really deep into 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.

Furthermore, do not focus too much on firmographic data while you think too little of the buying process. Understand how your current customers discovered you and more importantly, how they buy from you.

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.

Step 4: Account Segmentation

“The core of my ABM campaigns is focusing on ICP and account segmentation. For each target region (APAC, India, UK, and MEA), I always ensure that the lists are segmented as per the ICP and the result is tremendous,” said Shikha Pakhide, a B2B marketer from Trenches Community.

See, not all accounts are equally valuable. Yet, some people treat them all the same way. They even use the same tactics, the same calculation cost of acquisition, and the exact same budget. As a result, their campaigns are not successful.

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.

Step 5: 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.

Want to learn more about ABM? Sign up now for our 6-week ABM Playbook.

It’s an actionable ABM playbook and training that will help you land sales opportunities with your dream clients in 6 weeks or faster.

BEST SHARES FROM THE TRENCHES COMMUNITY

• Don’t try to sell high ACV B2B products as you sell Netflix subscriptions or $5 CRM. Here are the necessary changes in the marketer’s skillset. (Read here)

• The role of content execs has changed (Read here)

QUESTIONS FROM FELLOW TRENCHERS

Your help is needed. If you can answer any of the questions below, please click on the link and share your ideas.

• We're a product without a well-defined category targeting a list of 136 companies. We're relying on long-tail keywords, and specific copy on the ads, and we're already excluding a bunch of bad search terms every week. Is anyone here in the same context having success with search campaigns on Google or Bing?

• Does anyone have an amazing integrated marketing framework that they're willing to share?

• Does Demandbase give technology installed base for a given account? I am looking at the ones which are not tags on websites

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina ODJO