ABM is one of the most complex data driven marketing strategies to successfully implement for the modern marketer. It is a strategic demand generation tactic whose success is dependent on the excellence in operational execution and contextual marketing analytics.
To further complicate things for marketers and to make the most of this ABM hype, companies all over have come up with new approaches, platforms (which is the latest addition to this rhetoric), success tips etc. around implementing ABM. At marqeu, we have developed a framework focused on the basics for implementing ABM strategy and our customers have had huge success with it.
A successful ABM strategy needs creative enhancements to the day to day marketing operations and demand generation frameworks. ABM execution is similar to setting up a parallel demand generation engine with in the marketing organization. While the rhetoric is that marketing organizations need new tools and platforms for ABM, our experience and the success across all our ABM engagements with our customers show that most of the modern marketing organizations already have all the tools and technologies in place to execute a successful ABM strategy. Success of ABM is all about bringing together these diverse tactics and tools to operate in resonance and power the ABM demand generation engine – and that is just one of our key competencies.
Account Planning is the foundation of any ABM strategy. This is where a close sales and marketing alignment comes into play and we enable this alignment by leveraging our deep expertise in analytics to discover key account insights and help with ABM accounts selection. Our accounts discovery process involves analysis of recent wins, new pipeline (by geos, product lines, sales segments), analysis of deal cycles and buyers journey along with the white spacing of the company and industry Total Addressable Market (TAM).
The success of ABM is primarily dependent on account based personalized strategy and content plays the most important role in ABM orchestration. Content Strategy drives a personalized experience and high engagement with ABM campaigns provided the strategy is aligned with the persona (decision maker vs practitioner), industry, sales stages, historic engagement etc. Highly engaging and relevant content delivered through the right channel at the right time is a critical factor for ABM success.
Data and Insights are by far the most critical element of a successful ABM strategy as these database strategies and insights span across the planing, execution and optimization of any successful ABM strategy. Specifically the include:
- Predictive Analytics: there is a wealth of information available within the existing sales and marketing platforms that can be utilized to predict the next best action or engagement tactic based on the historic engagement and behavior. These insights power the content strategy for a personalized experience.
- Account and Lead Scoring: demographic and behavioral scoring should be augmented to take into account extra scoring points for ABM campaigns and ABM accounts.
- Data Enrichment: more insights about the accounts and personas power the content and engagement strategy as well. Data Enrichment also helps with providing sales, inside-sales and tele-marketing teams with the insights for impactful conversations.
- Contact Maps for Accounts: enable a well planed strategy for meaningful engagements with different personas and decision makers across each account and provide insights for data acquisition strategy and database augmentation.
- Data Validation: it is a known thing about data that it is always changing and we should make sure that we have the up to date information about our target accounts and the personas within those accounts. Success rate of any campaign (whether ABM or not) is dependent on the data quality and availability.
Automation of the key ABM activities ensures contextual and timely follow-up with the persona across the engaged accounts. It spans across multiple areas:
- Leads to Accounts Mapping: Even in the organizations using modern CRM and Marketing Automation platforms, there is still one big challenge – data resides in 2 different silos. Marketing owns leads and sales owns accounts and contacts. ABM is dependent on providing a unified view of each account across each platform and this is where leads to accounts mapping is vital. At marqeu, we have developed a proprietary leads to account matching algorithm that can be implemented with in the your CRM system without any additional platform cost.
- Lead Routing: dedicated routing rules should be implemented to make sure that account owners get notified instantly whenever someone from the ABM accounts raises hands and engages with the campaigns.
- Triggers and Notifications: for the account owners notify them about the engagement with the web content or with the dedicated ABM outbound campaigns.
Reporting and Analytics marketing analytics provide a 360 degree view of every single action across ABM accounts including the details about:
- Leads and Contacts engaged across the ABM accounts.
- New opportunities created or the existing ones accelerated through the funnel, expanded deal size.
- Engagement with outbound marketing campaigns and tactics including web engagement.
- Account coverage and penetration in terms of number or percentage of engaged contacts by persona.
- Performance of ABM dedicated marketing campaigns and ROI.
Let’s talk about your ABM strategy and discuss how we can help with its execution.