🕵🏻‍♂️ account list building

^{Written by Adechina ODJO, Content Marketer @Trenches}

Hey ,

Today I’ll share with you how to leverage intent and engagement data to identify engaged accounts that should be transferred to your ABM Team.

But before we get right into it, have you saved your spot for our 4th ANNUAL FULLFUNNEL SUMMIT?

If not, then click on the image below to grab your free ticket.

Now, let’s get to the meat of the matter. First, we’ll dissect the right versus the wrong way of developing an account list for ABM programs.

^{THE DOs and DON’Ts of account list building for an ABM campaign}

Marketers definitely get it wrong when they initiate an ABM motion or a pilot campaign without having much practical experience with it.

Most of them do so after just hearing about ABM from vendors, marketing agencies, or consultants.

Then the next thing they do is purchase ABM software, upload a list of accounts to the software, and run display ads promoting a landing page, gated content, or a webinar.

And what happens next? All those who engage and click on the display ads or download the gated content are forwarded to the sales team as qualified leads. Result? Their campaign flops.

But let’s get this straight. There’s no big deal about running display IP-based ads. But if you’re limiting your playbook to display ads, chances are your campaign is doomed.

Here’s why.

First, you won't be able to reach the majority of your buyers with display ads.

Second, there is much debate about the accuracy of IP-based targeting, and on top of that, there is no warm-up or interaction with potential customers.

That said, ads can enhance your ABM playbook, but obviously, the software comes in at a later stage of ABM maturity when you are scaling. But unfortunately, because many marketers are so obsessed with scaling fast, they believe they can upload a list of thousands of accounts and target them with very little personalization.

Another bad way to build a list of accounts is to focus strictly on a wish list that usually comes from key stakeholders.

Most often, they’ll be like: now we want to sell to Fortune 500 companies.

But here’s the rub: are you experienced in selling to this type of company? In fact, at this juncture, you need to be honest and understand where you stand, what your market share is, and what your brand awareness is. And in all honesty, if you are a brand that is unknown to Fortune 500 companies, then you need to readjust your approach and strategy. 

That is to say, ABM is by no means a foolproof system and there’s no shortcut to closing Fortune 500 companies.

Therefore, if your campaign is based solely on a wish list, it's high time to reconsider your strategy.

^{Lost deals}

If a deal was lost because of missing features that you now have, then it makes sense to include it in a specific re-engagement campaign. But if that deal was lost because of other reasons and although nothing has changed you still include them in your campaign, then it’ll flop again.

The rule of thumb when it comes to building a list of accounts is to leverage three sources of data:

1. Intent data;

2. Engagement data from your demand gen programs; and

3. Communities and associations

In case you don't have enough data coming from these 3 sources, you can leverage the existing network of sales and executives for a pilot campaign.

But that should be the last resort because there is not really any engagement or intent data.

Here are some sources of intent and engagement data you can leverage.

1- Website Visitors

There are many tools out there to help you track your website visitors.

Depending on your stack, you can leverage a solution that could be a good fit for you.

At FullFunnel, we use Albacross. It helps you see the companies that are visiting your website and engaging with different pages (services, pricing, resources, etc.).

Here’s what it looks like.👇

2- Search data

One of the most popular tools here is Bombora. It’s quite expensive but they do have a free version called Bombora Surge Alert.

It works almost the same way as the vendors that provide your website IP identification data, but the difference is that Bombora checks the searches that are coming from specific accounts, about specific topics and keywords.

Here, you can see the companies that are looking for ABM and B2B marketing, ABM sales development, etc.

So even if there is no clear buying intent, there's definitely a search intent that indicates that those specific accounts are looking for a specific topic that your ABM team can leverage to engage with them further.

3- Social signals

If you have ever done in-depth customer interviews, you should probably know the communities and associations your customers are members of.

In case you are serving conservative markets, you should pay special attention to associations.

Conservative markets include manufacturing companies and pharma. They’re the types of companies where people are not hanging out on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok all day long. And so, since you’re not able to engage with them on social media, associations are your go-to solution.

In this context, associations are niche communities (e.g., the Dentists' Association). It can be a non-profit, governmental, or sometimes private organization. It is not always an online community like a Facebook group or a Slack community. Instead, these are larger organizations that hold events, have their own newsletter (sometimes), and offer private perks to their members.

In communities, you can set up alerts and below you can see an example from one of the communities. I set up keyword tracking for ABM as you can see in the screenshot below.

This is actually a fantastic opportunity to leverage that signal and add this account ABM program.

You can also use mention.com, which is a pretty cool solution that allows you to track the same level of mentions of specific keywords on different social platforms.

Obviously, you don't need to pay attention to all the mentions but whenever you see someone asking for help, that could be a fantastic opportunity for you and your sales team.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Andrei and Stapho spent an hour diving deeper into this on our weekly podcast. You can watch the full recording here.

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Here’s what you’ll learn:

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QUESTIONS FROM FELLOW TRENCHERS

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

• Hello everyone! I'm glad to be part of this community. Can you suggest any good alternatives to ZoomInfo for data scraping? I'd appreciate your input.

• How do you usually plan your LinkedIn ad budget for ABM campaigns? Trying to estimate our total monthly spend for 2500 accounts and 12,000 contacts and what that looks like.

• Hi all! We're working on embedding Calendly on a post-web-form-submission page and it's been tricky to pass values (like name, email, etc.) from the web form to Calendly. Any ideas/suggestions? Thanks.

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina ODJO