🕵🏻‍♂️ Supercharge your ABM program

Written by Adechina Odjo, Content Marketer @Trenches

Hey ,

In this newsletter, we'll show you how to supercharge your ABM programs with marketing and sales playbooks.

Specifically, you’ll learn how to create a playbook and how to use the research cascade method to generate revenue for your ABM campaigns (+ practical examples).

Let’s dive in.

How to create a playbook?

Most B2B marketers are obsessed with "more leads" without really caring about the quality of those leads. As a result, when they do ABM, one of the biggest mistakes they make is to build a long list of accounts (often with little personalization) and expect their campaign to produce mind-blowing results.

Most of them want to sell to Fortune 500 companies, and they upload their list to ABM software and target accounts with ads, ebooks, and gated content. Then they track clicks and downloads and send the contacts to the sales team saying, "Hey, these are MQLs, now it's your turn to generate opportunities."😅

But typically, this creates a gap - and even tension - between sales and marketing teams.

So what is the right way to go about creating a playbook for your organization?

As a reminder, a playbook is a guide that defines the following point for a campaign:

• Key message;

• Types of communications;

• Best strategies;

• Optimized techniques.

When created well, a playbook should outline the process through which a company or a brand will manage their teams (both marketing and sales) over the course of a period with the ultimate goal to maximize their ROI.

So when creating an ABM playbook, it is very important to look at the ultimate goal rather than just applying retention — because, as Andrei always says “retention is for existing clients”.

The next thing you need to do is to identify the metrics and the stats because a lot of people don't think of the metrics until the very end of the process.

So starting with the end in mind, you should look at KPIs based on:

1. The goals you are pursuing

2. The efficiency of the tools and tactics you use to run your whole campaign

3. The performance of your marketing and sales teams

Actually, the concept of incorporating your team in the decisions and the creation of strategies is a very important point because “people endorse what they co-create”, said Missy Shopshire from Compelling Clarity. So, there has to be an equal partnership between sales and marketing when you're diving into your playbook execution and creation. But a pre-work has to be done, and that is:

• Determining your ICP criteria — based on the recent wins (and losses) within your company.

• Building a target account list — assuming that you already have an ICP created and scoring into your CRM.

• Creating content, based on the KPI for the specific goal of the business need that you're trying to meet.

Above all, you might start to filter by some of the firmographic, technographic, and psychographic points, and then, look for the commonalities to build your inclusion criteria as well as your exclusion criteria.

Moving from there, you should also keep in mind that there is a risk while bringing a small unknown vendor into the process. Nobody got fired for bringing IBM, McKinsey, or whosoever of the well-known vendor agencies, right? But if you bring unknown vendors and the project fails, then you’re in trouble.

And here is the bitter truth: just because you want to sell to Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe and any other Enterprise account doesn't mean that they are willing to buy from you, especially when you are a small organization. So you need to look for ways to raise awareness and engagement with your potential customers.

Leverage the power of the research cascade method (+ practical examples)

Quite often, when companies want to build an ABM motion and launch an ABM campaign, they always think about net revenue. But to generate for example $300k revenue for your ABM campaigns you might need to settle the research cascade method.

Here’s how.

Stage 1: Account Research

The process of account research consists of collecting insights about your target accounts. From Jim Gilkey’s perspective, when going through account research, it’s important to start uploading your top accounts into LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Actually, LinkedIn has a great tool that shows you when individuals have switched companies. So specifically, you should look for:

1. The intent, which helps you know why the companies are engaging with your company's content on LinkedIn

2. The top goals and needs, which are actually a great way to personalization

3. The strategy to move from the account level to the buyer or individual level (looking at what they post on LinkedIn, the podcasts they are on — and Sales Navigator is perfect for that).

However, if you don't have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can still use impressions in the sense of an advertisement. Impressions are used to define the number of views on a specific content — even if it is just a glance. Though it might be quite tough to track conversions with impressions, they provide effective insights when completed with other metrics such as engagement.

Picture it like every time you engage with customers or prospects online, you have created an impression — so that when the time comes for a campaign you already have a relationship established.

Stage 2: Buying committee

What you should do here is to look for the core roles of the buying committee members such as:

1. Champions: also known as purchasing managers, they set the environment for the success of your campaign

2. Decision-makers: they make the final decision to purchase

3. Influencers: they can have an impact on the decision of other members of the buying committee

4. Blockers: as their name suggests, blockers can stop the whole process from moving forward.

These are 4 categories of people that somehow influence your opportunity. That said, reviewing their KPI, areas of responsibility, goals, and potential challenges is of great help.

Stage 3: Value proposition mapping

The value proposition mapping can come through a number of different sources:

1. Google Analytics: what is the journey on our website?

2. Segments of markets (pages or products); so that you get to know their interest

3. Top problems and pain points through Zoom recordings, interviews with the sales team, etc.

This may also include frequently asked questions. Why?

FAQs are going to be your greatest point of content creation. So make sure you understand the prospects’ and customers' words of how they describe their pain.

That said, one of the things you should do is to create your own priority metrics, as John Barrows, a sales trainer recommends. You can literally search for the top CFO and CEO priorities — that will definitely lead you to a one-to-one level.

It then becomes a win-win deal for both sides as you're getting good content, you're making a meaningful experience for them and they definitely feel like you are being helpful!

From there, the personalized solution is going to be anything from your marketing automation that you set up with:

• Nurtured cadences;

• Sales agent tools like sales Locker Outreach;

• Podcasts, microsites, direct mails, or some kind of event that you distribute on different channels.

But you have to keep in mind that it’s not just about the buying process — it’s also the top of the funnel where you can actually attract attention.

Stage 4: Personalized solutions

The next step after looking into some of the accounts is personalized solutions. Currently, we are far beyond a decade where personalization was just about inserting a token to have a company's name on your list.

We are now in a world where people are inundated with messages and it is hard to cut through the noise. That’s exactly where ABM comes into play — ABM is not just about advertising. It rather focuses on personalized solutions on a vertical level. So how do you personalize and how do you scale?

As a B2B company, you need to have:

1. A clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) because “not all companies were created equal, even if they fit some of your criteria”, Andrei Zinkevich 

2. A warm-up and activation strategy — along with awareness inside target accounts so that they will become aware of your brand and your personalized solutions.

The ultimate goal here is to show the prospects and the existing clients that you know them. 

Let’s use some examples to break it down.

1. Mickey’s case

If you've seen the episode of Mickey Mouse where they are both buying each other an item they both need but had to sell, you might get to know that level of I know you and I know what's most important to you.

In Mickey’s case, he had to sell his harmonica to buy the necklace that would match. But let me tell you what. Minnie had sold her jewelry to buy the keys for the harmonica and that’s exactly that level of “I know you”.

2. Manchester City or Manchester United?

Here’s an example to give you an idea that in Manchester almost everybody is a football fan and they either support Manchester United or Manchester City. But not to make a mistake, you need to understand who your target account supports.

In our case, after a quick search, we found a guy on Twitter sharing a picture with his young son, in a Manchester United's tee-shirt. And that was a great insight that we used for personalization.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

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

BEST SHARES FROM THE TRENCHES COMMUNITY

• How we landed a sales opportunity in 50 minutes by running a simple ABM campaign [step-by-step breakdown] (Read here)

• 30-day sprint to document in real-time our process for implementing an ABM motion at N.Rich (Read here)

• New definitive, 11k-word guide on LinkedIn ABM (Read here)

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina ODJO