Account-based selling has been around forever, with B2B businesses focusing their sales efforts on specific, existing accounts to generate recurring revenue. Within the past two decades, however, B2B marketers have also come to embrace an account-based model of creating more opportunities to sell their products and services by marketing them to select customers.
Best practices in ABM evolve not only with the times but also within each organization as their client or customer base grows. To increase the odds of converting current customers to create repeat business or make upsells, marketers in the B2B world need to approach ABM outreach and communications in the right way and stay up on the latest trends.
Learn more below, where members of Forbes Agency Council each share their top tip for companies seeking to grow their revenues through ABM.
1. Align Sales And Marketing Teams Around Revenue Data
To maximize ABM, today’s sales and marketing teams must work together. When they are aligned, interactions with target accounts are consistent, team members from either group can pick up where others left off, lead quality increases and conversions go up. If your sales and marketing teams aren’t collaborating, Gartner analyst Jeffrey L. Cohen points to aligning on revenue data as a good way to begin. – Peter Cannone, Demand Science
2. Speak To The Right Person With The Right Message
In account-based marketing, you’ve got to make sure you are speaking to the right person with the right message. Otherwise, they won’t have any reason to care about it. You can create relevant and valuable content and then target specific companies with LinkedIn ads or Facebook ads or promote it via email. If this is something that solves their problem, they will be happy to engage with it. – Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS
3. Harvest The Data You Need To Automate Communications
To effectively utilize ABM, it’s essential for your sales or account staff to harvest the data that you need to appropriately communicate with your clients. Once you have determined the critical data points, implement a system to create sales and marketing automation channels to send out the communications. Remember to always provide value and not just offers. – Jason Wilson, Strategy, LLC
4. Use Multiple Data Providers To Drive Incremental Reach
Utilize multiple data providers to maximize reach with the targeted accounts. The biggest hurdle with ABM is low match rates, which can significantly impact your ability to scale media campaigns. The best practice is to do your research and include multiple data providers to drive incremental reach for the campaign. – Donna Robinson, Collective Measures
5. Set Succinct Targets And Measure Key Metrics At Each Stage Of The Funnel
To succeed with ABM, it is important to set succinct targets and measure key metrics at each stage of the marketing funnel. Light the way from target account reach to sales velocity, target pipeline size and eventually referral scores. It is this map of data that will highlight the weaknesses and opportunities in your ABM activity that can be addressed to deliver high growth. – Chris Martin, FlexMR
6. Align Your Campaign With Your Target’s Personal Preferences
When targeting a specific brand or executive at a company, get to know their personal preferences and align the campaign with them. Make sure the campaign is seen on their preferred type of site or incorporate their preference into the actual advertisement to have the highest chance of success and conversion. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC
7. Be Authentic And Unafraid To Reformulate Your Strategy As Needed
Be authentic. Make sure that you are hitting your target audience at the right time with the right messaging strategy, and don’t be afraid to throw it all out the window on a moment’s notice. With the times changing at a rapid pace, you need to be measuring the results of your strategy in real time and have the bandwidth to edit and reformulate it as needed. – Christopher Tompkins, The Go! Agency
