Account-based marketing: Persuade all stakeholders in the B2B sales process.

*Account-based marketing*: Overtuig alle betrokkenen in het B2B salesproces*.*

Always wanted to create a focused B2B strategy, but don't feel that the 'standard' formats work for you? With account-based marketing, you create a growth strategy where you focus on accounts that are valuable to your organisation and the issues of each stakeholder in the B2B sales process. So you no longer waste time on leads that are ultimately not a fit for your business and you can better respond to where the valuable accounts are looking for. So ideal for B2B. Let's get started!

In this blog, you will discover:

  • What account-based marketing actually is
  • The strong duo: inbound and account-based marketing
  • The benefits of account-based marketing
  • And how to get started creating your ABM strategy

 

What is account-based marketing?

In short, account-based marketing is a focused B2B strategy, where marketing and sales work together to bring in predefined, valuable accounts. Within ABM, you focus on the different issues each unique person involved in the B2B sales process has, rather than targeting a broad audience or segment of it.

You can actually think of ABM as professional fishing. Where beginners spend a day fishing, bringing in random fish, account-based marketing is the expert who figures out in advance what fish he is going to catch that day and where to find them. So instead of catching first and then choosing, you choose what you catch. And so it is with ABM: you decide in advance which accounts you want to bring in, and based on this, you start looking at how best to go about it.

Account-based marketing is ideal for B2B precisely because it focuses on bringing in accounts rather than leads, and thereby takes into account the various stakeholders that influence the sales process. Start using account-based marketing if you recognise yourself in the following points:

  • The product or service you are selling has a higher investment amount
  • You have a selection of prospects/customers
  • You are selling to an account with multiple people involved in the sales process

 

Inbound & ABM

Does this mean you should completely abandon your inbound strategy? Certainly not! ABM and inbound marketing are a match made in heaven. Inbound has taught you how to create relevant content that matches each step within the experience journey, instead of disrupting it like you would with outbound marketing. So you offer content that your target audience is actually looking for. Inbound thus lays the foundation for your account-based marketing strategy.

This is why you should use inbound and ABM together:

  • Where inbound helps you attract your valuable accounts, ABM takes you a step further by providing a unique customer experience for each stakeholder within an account.
  • If you use both strategies you capture and nurture more leads, than if you use only one of these strategies.
  • In addition, you catch opportunities you might have otherwise missed.
  • You can put your hyper-personalised content that you share with a valuable account also on your website and vice versa. This way, you serve both your high-value accounts and interested website visitors.

Below we take you through the benefits of account-based marketing.

 

Advantages of account-based marketing

There are several advantages to applying account-based marketing:

 

Marketing-sales alignment

A collaboration between marketing and sales benefits the entire company. With ABM, you can bring your teams together better than ever, so that they focus on the same goal, communicate in the same ways and everyone knows what role each stakeholder has.

With ABM, you can bring your teams together better than ever before, so that they focus on the same goal, communicate in the same ways and everyone knows what role each stakeholder has.

You achieve this by looking together at who your target accounts are. Just as with inbound you focus on creating a persona, with ABM you focus on creating an ideal customer profile. In other words, the profile of the accounts you want to bring in.

You can create the ideal customer profile by looking at the following points:

  • What high-value accounts are your inbound channels already attracting?
  • What open deals do you want to move faster? In other words, which sales cycles do you want to shorten?
  • What are the 10 biggest deals you have closed recently? Can you add more value to these?
  • What characteristics do your most successful customers have in common? Can you find more companies with the same traits?

Based on this data, you can then see which of your current customers and prospects are and are not target accounts. And thus shift your focus from all accounts, to only those that are valuable to you.

 

Personalisation for every stakeholder

Because you focus on specific accounts rather than leads with ABM, it is essential to know who is involved in the sales process within that account. These stakeholders all have different roles that help or hinder you in selling your product or service. Identifying these different roles is crucial if you want to get started with personalisation. After all, you can only start personalising if you know who you are communicating with.

To identify and clearly display these stakeholders, we can bring in Philip Kotler's Decision Making Unit. This model provides a clear overview of all the individuals and groups that have a seeking, influencing or deciding role in the decision-making process for buying new products and services.

This model provides a clear overview of all the individuals and groups that have a seeking, influencing or deciding role in the decision-making process for buying new products and services.

The roles you consider within the DMU model are the following:

  • End users: The users of the product or service. They are mainly focused on the specifications and ease-of-use.
  • Influencers: Every influencer has its own prerequisites that the product or service must meet. Influencers can be found in all layers of an organisation.
  • Buyers: The buyer is ultimately the one who places the order and negotiates the terms and conditions. Buyers are one of the two most important roles.
  • Initiators: The initiator is the person who started the sales process and is looking for a solution to the problem. The initiator is the most important person within the DMU.
  • Deciders: The decision-maker is the one who ties the knot and thus also occupies an important role.
  • Gatekeepers: The coordinators are the ones who decide which information goes to which person within the organisation. They can thus greatly influence the decision-making process.

Communicating with an organisation working in the B2B manufacturing industry, for example, the DMU model will look something like this:

 

DMU model B2B Manufacturing Industry

 

By giving all contacts within an account one or more specific buying roles, you can personalise your content specifically to what that buying role is looking for. This way, you shape your organisation exactly in such a way that it is relevant and every stakeholder sees you as the best option to solve their problem.

This way, you shape your organisation exactly in such a way that it is relevant and every stakeholder sees you as the best option to solve their problem.

 

Starting working on personalising your B2B platform? Read all about it here

 

Measurable return on investment

Because your target audience is even more specific, and you create a unique experience for each account, you can much better measure the return on investment of each account and activity. Not only is your return on investment more measurable, but this also allows you to discover whether an account is actually a 'match' with your ideal customer profile, which activities worked and which didn't, and you can continue to use these tactics to maintain the long-term relationship.

 

Close deals faster and retain customers longer

With ABM, instead of focusing on bringing in as many leads as possible and trying to convert them all into customers, you choose in advance which accounts you want to bring in. This quality over quantity approach means you waste less time on leads that end up not being a good fit for your organisation after all, and more time on the accounts that are a fit. As a result, you know better what each account is looking for, and how to respond to each stakeholder's issues. With this personalised ABM strategy, you will close deals faster and give your leads and customers the attention they deserve.

By providing your customers with unique and personalised customer experiences, you will ensure that you can convert them into loyal customers. And those loyal customers are the best marketers you could wish for! Through word-of-mouth advertising, these fans in turn ensure that you bring in new customers. And this is how you ensure that the flywheel keeps spinning and your organisation continues to grow.

 

Getting started with ABM

Naturally, after all that theory, you'll want to get to work creating your own ABM strategy, and we've listed a few key points to do so. That way, you can make sure your ABM strategy is a success!

 

1. Marketing & sales alignment

Make sure your marketing and sales are perfectly aligned. Not only should they create the ideal customer profile together, but they should also point their noses in the same direction. Make sure goals, budget, propositions and communication tools are jointly determined and known to everyone in the team. Have marketing and sales meet regularly, so everyone knows where you stand within the ABM strategy, where the process is stagnating and which activities are working.

 

2. Create a dedicated ABM team

To perfectly align your marketing and sales, setting up a dedicated ABM team is super helpful. Within this team, a few marketers and sales people work together and focus purely on setting up, maintaining and optimising your ABM strategy. They keep a close eye on the targets and ensure that the target accounts get a unique customer experience.

In addition to your marketing and sales people, you can of course add other key team members. For example, consider someone from the service department. This person will maintain contact with your customers and ensure that questions are answered quickly and problems are solved quickly.

This person will be in charge of keeping in touch with your customers.

 

3. Identify and choose target accounts

Once you know who is committed to making your ABM strategy a success, it's time for the next step: identifying your target accounts. We previously explained how to identify them, then it's time to find them. Here are some tips on how to choose the organisations that match your ideal customer profile from the huge number of organisations:
Create a workflow in your CRM that automatically awards companies to target accounts based on, for example, company size, industry, location or expected annual sales.

Create a workflow in your CRM that automatically awards companies to target accounts based on, for example, company size, industry, location or expected annual sales.

Find out which organisations you are currently already attracting and engaging with your inbound content but don't have a deal yet.
Use LinkedIn's job alerts so you are regularly notified of companies seeking your expertise. For example, if you are an HR software organisation, companies looking for an HR manager are of interest to you. Or do you work at HubSpot, for example? Then companies looking for marketing staff or sales people might be of interest to you.
Set up search alerts on LinkedIn. This works the same as the tool above, but instead you search for people with a particular function in a specific company, industry or country so that you immediately know who to approach and in what way.
Look at your competition and their customers. They are looking for the same thing you have to offer them, you just need to convince them of the strength of your organisation. Let that happen to be what ABM helps you with ;-)

 

4. Determine how to attract target accounts

Your dedicated ABM team or your marketing and sales should jointly agree on which channels and way of communication you are going to use to attract new target accounts. To determine that, you need to know who you need to interact with within each account, what questions and problems they have and how you can help them with them.

If you have established that, you need to know who you need to interact with within each account, what questions and problems they have and how you can help them with that.

Once you have established that, you can apply familiar (or new) tactics to bring in new target accounts, such as: Ads in Google or LinkedIn based on specific audiences, creating blogs, e-books, videos or podcasts that address the issues of a specific stakeholder, creating personalised landing pages for specific stakeholders or sending relevant content to interesting contacts via email or LinkedIn.

 

5. Convince stakeholders

After introducing potential buyers to your business, you want to take them a step further and eventually convert them into customers. You do this by offering each stakeholder personalised content that addresses their unique issues and how your product or service can help them do so. Convince them that you are the right choice for them by using knowledge articles to demonstrate your knowledge or case studies to showcase the experiences of existing customers. Make sure you are consistent in your communication, and make every stakeholder feel that they are your number one priority.

And once you have convinced every stakeholder of the strength of your organisation, and converted them into customers, it is of course important to keep track of which tactics were successful and which were not. So monitor, for example, which deals were created, how many deals were closed, how much time it took to close a deal, how much engagement there was and what the final net sales were. Only if you actually measure the results can you make your ABM strategy a true success.