In today’s time, getting buy-in from the top management of the company is a tough nut to crack for many product & service offering companies. Selling a product is not a cakewalk. It requires a lot of time, expensive resources and a quality database. Even after having all of this, achieving the desired return on investment ROI and revenue generation is not certain. What do you think, what must be lacking? Is it the faulty marketing techniques, incorrect targeting, inefficient team or you are running behind the wrong leads? The reason can be anything; however, being a marketer first and foremost thing that you should do is ‘FOCUS’.
You must have read this quote ‘When you focus on what is important, you work better’. Bang on, you cannot try to appeal to every customer and even if you try you will end up appealing no one. Therefore, first define the prospects, which will successfully travel through your sales funnel and generate impressive revenue.
ACCOUNT BASED MARKETING (ABM) – A Flipped Sales Funnel
ABM a flipped version of traditional marketing is a secret sauce of your sales success. It is one of a kind of marketing strategy that integrates targeted, insight-led marketing with sales to increase awareness, strengthen customer relationships and steer revenue growth from specific accounts.
With ABM, instead of appealing to everyone, you treat every customer as an individual market and craft personalized campaigns for every targeted customer as per their buyer persona. It is just like cooking a separate meal for every guest and making everyone satisfied that the guests will wait for the next food invite.
Does ABM Really Help to Increase the Sales Revenue?
- More than 80% of marketers say that ABM outperforms other marketing initiatives. – ITSMA
- 86% of marketing and sales professionals from B2B companies have begun using account-based marketing. – LeanData
- 92% of companies recognize the value in ABM, going as far as calling it B2B marketing must-have. – Demandbase
- 87% of B2B marketers agreeing that ABM delivers higher ROI. – ITSMA
The above stats showcase the real-time importance of ABM in today’s b2b marketing arena. Now, let’s take a closer look at the ABM program and explore its mechanism to win the high-value accounts.
Right Customer, Right Time, Right Channel
Connecting to the right customer, at the right time and through the right channel is the ideal roadmap you must follow to attain the worthy accounts. Let’s take a walk through this road:
- Identify the crucial accounts
Make the maximum usage of business intelligence and firmographic data to filter out the key accounts. Apart from purchase potential, take into account other strategic factors also such as the possibility of repeat purchase and influence in the market.
- Personalized content as per the buyer persona
Personalized content/messaging is the differentiating factor of ABM. Think about the challenges and pain points of flagship accounts and try to address them through engaging content.
- Hit the right channels
Connecting with the audience through the right channels is as important as crafting the right message. To reach out to the audience through all the channels they leverage, such as mobile, web, email, social platforms, etc., you first need to consider their industries or roles and accordingly spread out your content on those channels.
- Keep an eye on the campaigns
Coordinating multiple campaigns across the channels and at the same time aligning the marketing and sales team efforts to gain maximum output is quite a hard task to perform. By executing advanced tools, you can manage the ABM campaigns much efficiently like giving a prompt reply, checking the schedule, automating the other factors of the campaigns, etc.
- Measure, Improve and Optimize
Make sure you regularly test the ABM campaigns, improve the effectiveness and earn good results over the course of time. Measuring the results is important as they define what works and what doesn’t work for you.
ABM is a combination of focused targeting and nurturing. It requires a good amount of time and patience, but the end result is worth waiting for. What we discussed above is just a tip of the iceberg, a lot of planning, strategizing goes into this process, which we will discuss in the upcoming blogs.
