Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Guidebook & Resource Hub
Table of Contents
Account-Based Marketing Resources
What is ABM?
An account-based marketing strategy is a revenue-based marketing approach that targets and engages prospect accounts (aka prospective customers) that are the most likely to quickly win-close, generate the most revenue, or both.
The most effective ABM programs require marketing and sales teams to align in lock-step to deliver perfectly timed outreach and relevant content to accelerate the B2B sales cycle.
The best ABM strategies leverage AI and buyer intent data to help B2B organizations achieve — and exceed — their business goals. Let’s take a closer look.
ABM Strategy: The 5-Step Process
Step 1: Identify
The first step in ABM marketing is identifying prospective customers that match your organization’s Ideal Customer Profile and are conducting research on products and solutions like yours. This is often challenging for B2B revenue teams because buyers spend about 70% of the sales cycle conducting their research anonymously —and they’re often doing it in ways that marketers and sellers can’t detect through conventional means. Buyers spend this time exploring information found on such resources as…
- Websites and digital trade publications
- Forums
- Social networks
- And more
…and, armed with gobs of information acquired through third-party sources, usually engage with B2B sellers much later in the sales journey than before. Sellers are at an immediate disadvantage because they don’t know:
- How much the buyer (and by extension, their company’s TK-member buying team) knows about the actual extent of their problems, or the landscape of available solutions
- How much the buyer/buying team knows about the seller’s solution
- What issues are important to the buyer, or if the buyer has had access to accurate information
- And more
Without this crucial information, sellers can’t attempt to proactively control the narrative; they’re often simply reacting to circumstances, bad info, or competitor-crafted FUD. Using a sales intelligence tool that can detect this anonymous research, and collect and analyze it, will illuminate buyers’ needs much earlier in the sales process. It even empowers B2B marketers and sellers to:
- Engage prospects with the right message and content at the right time
- Which puts revenue teams back in the drivers’ seat in properly educating a buyer
Additionally, revenue teams can study the path of previous clients through the sales funnel to better understand demographics and activities that occurred when customers made purchases. This can also inform how to best engage prospects earlier in their sales journeys.
Step 2: Create
Once you identify primed prospects, you can curate content to meet their needs. This means knowing as much as you can about your customer, their problems, and the solutions they’re seeking. These details often dramatically differ among key stakeholders, which is where an ABM strategy really shines. Done properly, an ABM approach addresses the unique needs of each stakeholder whenever possible. This is especially important when buying teams represent constituents from several different company divisions.
Again, analyzing buyer intent data with revenue AI — especially across the activities of several buying team members, if possible — is the best way to illuminate, understand, and cater to a prospect’s bespoke needs.
Step 3: Collaborate
In ABM, few things are as important for success than seamless alignment between marketing and sales teams. ABM marketing is revenue-focused; the efficient use of all teams is necessary to elevate revenue streams. Any redundancies or disconnected messages (or business goals) can alienate prospects and wreck conversions.
Step 4: Engage
The timing of engagement is the secret to ABM marketing. Perfect timing is possible with the use of data analytics and predictive logic. Armed with the right information, a sales team knows who to target, which messaging and content are relevant to their concerns (and stage in the buyer’s journey), and when they’re ready for engagement. The actual engagement should provide value to the prospect and encourage them to share that value with other members of their buying team.
Step 5: Optimize
Once sales are completed, your revenue team’s business metrics (KPIs) should be re-analyzed and optimized for continuous improvement. Doing so ensures that in-market ideal customer profiles become more exact, and revenues increase. Further, this optimization helps increase efficiency and success with each sales cycle.
ABM Best Practices
Adopting the best practices of account-based marketing will help your organization see how detailed and specific each ABM strategy can be. Approaching ABM subjects from multiple angles reveals how one company can implement best practices for its specific ABM application. Here are some great ways to implement an ABM strategy:
Target Accounts Based on Value
Remember, ABM is revenue-based. That means that the most effort goes toward sales activities that produce the highest revenue. This differs from traditional marketing, which focuses on visibility and attracting leads. Modern B2B clients already know what they want. It’s the sales team’s job to find them, offer solutions at the right time, and make them convenient to purchase.
Know the Stakeholders
One of the greatest challenges of B2B marketing is reaching all the buyers in an account’s buying team. The only way to do this is by communication and building relationships with these buyers.
Sales teams should know:
- Everyone involved
- Stakeholders beyond the buying team who’ll be consulted during the sales journey
- When new stakeholders join the buying team
This crucial intelligence will dictate the creation of highly relevant messaging and content creation. It also influences the success of customer retention and upselling. For instance, if the decision-making team changes, the ABM strategy integrates new decision makers into its touchpoint plans.
Understand the Entire Strategy
The cross-departmental collaboration required by ABM ensures a much broader reach than traditional marketing. As such, sales teams risk becoming disjointed if they don’t understand the actions of their marketing colleagues (and vice versa). Coordination and seamless communication result in higher sales.
Focus on the Person
Whether your sales communications are with teams or individuals, each person responsible for buying decisions must feel individual attention. This makes all the difference in the success of an ABM strategies. Personal attention and individual solutions, such as employing an AI email assistant to help scale personalized email marketing campaigns, win accounts.
ABM KPIs
Everything in an ABM strategy is data-driven. There is no guesswork. Instead, you have a planned pathway to increased revenue. As such, marketing and sales teams should focus on different key performance indicators than traditional B2B marketing KPIs like MQLs or SQLs. Focus on these ABM KPIs:
1. Marketing Influence
Optimize marketing activities by noting how ABM channels affected a close. What content were clients engaging with before a sale? Did your ABM channel have an impact? If certain channels were not accessed, then they may not be valuable components of the ABM strategy. Other components may benefit from increased use.
2. Target Account Coverage
How well your team knows each account is vital to understanding how successful outreach will be. How many contacts do you have in the company? Has that list grown? Have you seen increased engagement? This kind of information offers clues as to the cost of marketing channels and their success rates. It also has a role in targeting clients because increased coverage generally leads to increased results.
3. Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI tells a revenue team if its marketing expenses are producing a net positive. If it isn’t, then it’s time to reimagine or cut back on the strategy. Even in situations with revenue growth, optimization is still a goal.
4. Sales Cycle Length
Efficiency is another differentiator of an ABM strategy. ABM typically shortens sales cycles because less time is spent in areas that don’t produce revenue. This should constantly be monitored using a sales cycle length metric.
Sales cycle length is the time an account spends from the beginning to the end of the sales pipeline. Identifying any lulls in that cycle provides an opportunity for improvement. Measure and optimize every opportunity stage to make the sales pipeline as seamless and as short as possible.
5. Pipeline Velocity
There are endless KPIs available to marketing teams. But ABM marketing and sales teams are finding that a crowded dashboard may not be as useful as one filled with choice KPIs that directly impact revenue. Choosing the right KPIs to monitor and address based on performance is one part of achieving optimal ABM strategy results.
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