ABM, Boosting Marketing and Sales Management

In this blog, we will talk about one of the strategies that has been around for a long time, but which has recently been given greater importance, ABM or Account-Based Marketing, a methodology that works very well for companies with B2B business.

What is ABM?

It is a strategic approach to business marketing in which a company focuses its marketing efforts on identifying specific opportunities and on the individuals within a company who are involved in the decision-making processes.

Here, instead of throwing marketing, advertising, and sales at a broad network of the audience, an Account-Based Marketing strategy focuses on a small group of prospects, and marketing efforts and assets are tailored to the individual's need, to attract and guide them to generate a purchase.

• Capture large qualified accounts
• Position yourself as a benchmark or expert in your industry.

For example, if your company specializes in the manufacture of medical supplies, you will probably be interested in having large, well-known hospitals in your region as clients. If you decide to expand your sales internationally, you should already have your sights set on whom you want as a customer in that country, and there will also be another, perhaps smaller, group that could apply as your customer, and the visibility of the large accounts will certainly help you attract that second segment.

From that moment of identifying key accounts, all Marketing and Sales efforts should be directed to create an expert positioning with valuable content and different techniques and tools to reach those customers, and ABM is the best alternative.

Keys or steps to adopt ABM strategy

• Establish a team of Marketing and Salespeople: It is a team that must be fully aligned with the company's objective and the tasks to be performed. In the initial stage, the team can be composed of a Marketing person and a sales representative.
• Identify target accounts: For this purpose, the Ideal Customer profile must be taken into account. It is a matter of identifying, in order of priority, which accounts are most suitable for the product/service and provide the greatest profitability.
• Identify the people involved in the purchase or contracting process. In each of the important accounts, there are people with different roles and personalities, each of these roles can be identified as:

1. Decision maker
2. Influencer
3. Legal & Compliance
4. End-user.

The JTBD (Job to be Done) approach is interesting for this management. Each of these people has a different job to do and the role of the sales rep is to think about how he can help them to do it better, to analyze what kind of content is interesting to them to capture their attention, with personalized measures such as an evaluation about your company, a personalized web page, personalized content, among others.

• Start attracting contacts from target accounts: Attend conferences, find and contact people from each target account on social media, with the help of industry influencers, or sponsored ads.
• Measure the performance of the large account attraction plan: At each stage of the process, both in the initial engagement and in the conversion and closing process: Some of the most important metrics to take into account are:

1. The number of new target accounts.
2. Pageviews by users of your target accounts.
3. Conversion rates.
4. The number of new Deals.
5. Type of contacts (according to their roles).
6. Timing of opportunities in the different stages of the sales pipeline.
7. Customer closing ratio.
8. Cost of customer acquisition.

• Maintaining and building the loyalty of each important account is part of the Core Business: It is essential to maintain quality controls and follow-up meetings and to prepare the renewal of contracts as if it were a new sale, always showing interest in the account and showing how important the customer is for the company.

• Focus on accounts, not individual leads.
• Align your Sales and Marketing to focus on revenue rather than lead generation.
• Design your team's workflow around accounts.
• Research what is most important to your customer.
• Use a CRM to track the data you need.
• Look at ABM platforms (tools) that can give a boost to your efforts.
• Maintain constant communication between teams to ensure tasks are being executed effectively.

Managing contacts in the CRM can help you create custom properties, account labels, and roles for each of them to target efforts to the appropriate buyer persona.

• Create ideal customer profiles and automation workflows to automatically identify ideal customers and appropriate target accounts.
• Design a Lead Scoring matrix to score companies based on various factors, such as their turnover, number of employees, interaction with the company, or any other criteria of interest to the business.
• You can view all contacts made by anyone on the team, both marketing and sales.
• All marketing emails are sent and how each prospect interacts.
• Monitor the activity of all target account contacts with the website and other digital platforms.
• Create a customized pipeline for each account if needed.
• Create intelligent and personalized content on the website or landing pages for both a customer segment and a particular customer.
• Use sales templates to optimize the conversion process and organize digital assets.

• Create reminders of dates and jobs that can't be forgotten, automating prospecting, sales follow-up, and account renewal tasks.

Platforms like HubSpot, have these tools to help you implement different marketing strategies, with different types of licenses, depending on the need you have. Remember that it is important to have the right platforms to execute the strategies that are being proposed to achieve the objectives of the organization.