5-Minute Read
Building relationships and increasing sales through account-level personalization is not only a best-practice your prospects expect it. But while the transition to account based marketing (ABM) may seem daunting: “how can my B2B marketing team personalize every piece of collateral without maxing out our capacity?”, or “how can I ensure brand governance?” – there are technologies available specifically to help with these (and other) concerns. Not only will they allow for a smooth transition, they will also allow you to scale your ABM strategy and streamline your tasks, saving you time and money.
Scaling Up Your Marketing Efforts Can Be Intimidating
Consider this scenario:
You’re using personalizing presentations and content for your target accounts, perhaps the top 1% of prospects. And it’s working really well! Prospects are more likely to close since you’ve made them feel like your product or service is exactly what they are interested in or you provided them with a tailor-made vision of what they didn’t even know they needed. You have customized presentations with their business in mind and your pitch has resonated. It is great news! But it is time to do more customization based on funnel stage and prospect needs.
Behind the scenes, you’re working endlessly to create all of that personalized collateral and you can’t keep up. There is no easy way to delegate since you know exactly what you need and you are the only one who seems to care about brand governance. You are spending so much time on focusing on key accounts but that effort only affects a tiny percentage of prospects and soon you may have difficulties balancing essential tasks because of the time that level of personalization absorbs.
The idea of scaling ABM to the rest of your accounts seems overwhelming. There aren’t enough hours in the day, people on your B2B marketing team, or money in your budget to continue to target account focused marketing this way. In order to effectively scale, the systems and processes must be more seamless.
How to Get Started with Account Based Marketing
ABM isn’t a simple campaign or tactic. It’s a business strategy for both sales and marketing. It’s best to scale up deliberately to ensure adoption and success:
- Sales & Marketing Alignment. Ensure Marketing is leading your ABM strategy, but that you are working closely with the sales leaders. We have found that sales leaders who are advocates for marketing efforts from the beginning are more involved and see more success. Be sure to showcase how ABM will benefit their team until sales benefit blog can be drafted]. Show internal advocates from other departments within your organization such as sales why they should care and encourage your ABM strategy. When executed correctly, your entire team will benefit: Sales, Marketing, and more…
- Start with a key account. Focus all your resources on 1-5 key prospects. Take your top prospect and personalize your materials. Only show information that is relevant and helpful to them. Showcase your company and services/products to feel like the perfect solution to you prospect’s pain-points, needs, and industry. Show them how you will solve their everyday business problems and the rest will fall into place.
- Metrics and insights. Your materials won’t be perfect right from the start. Anticipate data-driven adjustments. Until you can align with a Programmatic ABM Automation tool, use whichever reporting is available to you to gain insights on the successes from your all customized elements throughout the sales process. Here are some recommendations of what to monitor:
- Percentage of emails opened and clicked – to prove engagement increase
- Track links – to monitor what content and messaging is resonating
- Number of webpages viewed – to see how deep they’re exploring and what they are looking at
- Plan to expand. Discover and record which elements of your presentations and materials might change drastically and which elements could be leveraged with an ABM Tool, such as creating preselect options for your presentations. It may be helpful to start researching which tools you may want to consider.
- Consolidate budgets. Now that Sales and Marketing are collaborating, the potential for combined budgets could open doors for ABM Automation tools that can help with rolling out ABM to more key accounts and, ideally, all prospects in the future.
- Scale up. After your success with your key account, Here is the order we recommend rolling out and ramping up ABM.
- Expanded testing: Make a small list of a few specific businesses to target with ABM.
- Standardization: Focus on the end of the buyer journey. Those in the decision phase who are deciding if they should move forward with your product or service. Additional qualifications would include being labeled an SQL in your CRM. At this point, Automated ABM tools such as the DIGIDECK are recommended to save on your teams capacity.
- Full roll out: Segment a broader cross section of prospects, such as industry type, that have similarities in common who are MQLs considering your product or service.
Next Steps to Make Scaling Your Marketing Efforts a Reality
Before diving into what feels like the deep end, it’s important to determine what exactly you need to make ABM a reality for every prospect.
- What are your sales and marketing priorities?
- What does your sales team need to be successful?
