Account based marketing
Building relationships is at the heart of a successful sales strategy. Whether you are looking to target an individual or specific team or move from a transactional procurement relationship to engaging with senior stakeholders, you want to catch their eye and ignite the conversations that matter.
Account Based Marketing (ABM) provides a communication strategy that can achieve this cut through and influence an identified opportunity.
So where do you start?
Well, from our experience, we know that most customers and prospects don’t really know exactly what you can do for them. The formation of the story you need to tell, based on the people you need to tell it to, is the secret to ABM success. Here are some core principles we follow:
UNDERSTANDING
Context is key. We start by trying to establish as detailed an understanding of the actual people you want to target. Persona and intent data should come second if you have existing insight about your targets.
MESSAGE
Put the customer first. It’s obvious really, but you never do well by opening an engagement by talking about yourself. The story must be compelling for the customer.
TACTICS
If you own the channel, you own the engagement. Wherever possible, creating dedicated communications channels between yourself and your customer will create the greatest return. And the greatest amount of valuable data.
Vertical focused
As we move out of ABM, if we are targeting to a persona or industry type, we would class this as vertical marketing.
ABM can also act as a precursor to Deal Based Marketing (DBM). By educating, advising and enlightening customer and prospects before the RFP stage, you put yourself in a much stronger position to implement a successful DBM strategy in response to a bid. Find out more about Deal Based Marketing here >
Where do we differentiate you?
Research and strategy
We deep dive into your customer, getting under the skin of their goals, strategy and motivations. We want to understand your customer as well as they know themselves. We use this insight to recommend a strategy for the ABM programme.
Creating a story
Once the strategy is agreed, we set to work in crafting the story that will make them sit up and take notice of you, providing the info they need to understand how you can help them and what could potentially be the outcome for them.
Supporting the execution
This is a team effort. The sales team need to be driving this from the front, but where we help is providing the guidance on ‘how’ and the tools they need to be successful. The execution can be multi-faceted or focused on a specific tactic, dependent on the objective.
As the popularity of ABM has skyrocketed, it has led to differing opinions on how ABM is defined, which can be confusing. Here is our simple guide to how we approach the different ABM tactics:
One-to-one
We devise, create and execute bespoke strategies, targeting an individual customer brand – focused on expanding your network of contacts and opening up new opportunities.
One-to-few
More one-to-few than one-to-many, we work with customers to apply the core principles of ABM to a wider customer base. Our definition of ABM is that if its ABM, we‘re working with a defined set of known accounts and for one-to-few it’s accounts with common priorities.
One-to-one at scale
The one-to-one approach doesn’t fit every budget, so it’s difficult to roll out beyond a few brands. However, scale can be achieved by providing ABM skills and tools to your sales community, creating more ABMers across your organisation.
Here are just some of the brands we have successfully provided ABM programmes to, on behalf of our customers:
“The combination of in-depth research to understand the customer’s business and the industry sector, through to the choice of digital and direct mail marketing activation tools enabled us to cut through to the most senior people decision makers. It has transformed the relationships with this customer and led to significant opportunities of which the sales team are continuing to build on today.”
“The ABM assets gave us an impressive starting point to demonstrate our long-term commitment and how we can help them navigate their digital transformation journey. It opened up doors to other parts of the business we previously had no routes into.”
Take the next step
The beauty of ABM is that it can be launched at multiple stages of a prospect or customer’s relationship but the sooner you start the better.
Identifying a business to target with ABM not only gives your sales team invaluable conversation starters and relationship building content, but it also demonstrates your investment and commitment to them as a potential customer. You are showing you’re willing to go above and beyond for them and this pays dividends.
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