We all know the importance of account-based marketing (ABM) for a business. It’s all about creating ideal customer profiles, studying target accounts, and connecting sales and marketing around common goals and processes. Account-based marketing must be utilised to its full potential.
Now, in this RisePath blog, we look at some of the most important best practices for leveraging a unified CRM to drive your ABM initiatives.
With a single CRM, there are eight recommended practices for driving ABM success.
Use the strategies listed below to get the most out of your ABM efforts.
1. Obtain agreement from internal stakeholders.
Your account-based marketing approach will only thrive if your sales and marketing leaders are on board. They divide up the budgets for their various teams. Your work will be significantly less likely to succeed if they aren’t totally committed to or convinced of the value of operating an ABM programme.
Every phase of the procedure requires the participation of both teams and their leaders. You don’t want to spend a month planning your strategy and approach just to find out later that you don’t have the budget or time to put it into action.
2. Assemble an ABM team
Who will be the driving force behind your ABM efforts? You don’t want to use your account-based marketing strategy for all upsell prospects and customers. You must choose the correct people to participate in the programme and target a certain group of people.
Starting with a pilot programme to test the waters is a terrific approach to get things started (more on that below). Choose the people you believe are the best fit for the job. One marketer and at least one salesperson should be on the initial team.
Due to the substantial research and outreach required, that sales rep should only have a few accounts. In the beginning, we recommend capping the number of accounts each rep owns/manages at eight or fewer. If you overwork a salesman, they won’t be able to commit the time and effort required to make your ABM programme successful.
PRO TIP: Don’t forget to include members of other teams who will be involved in your programme, such as customer success.
3. Align sales and marketing efforts
Alignment between sales and marketing entails more than just the two teams getting along. It necessitates them to align their mental processes around a variety of variables and objectives. Gaining consensus on how accounts are discovered and targeted, how ABM plans are established, and the roles each team will play during the process are among them. Free marketing automation tools can help with this.
4. Identifying and selecting accounts
You’ll start using your unified CRM to help you manage your programme at this stage. All of the information in free marketing automation tools and free sales automation softwares will make it simple to discover the accounts with the most income potential.
It’s critical that data is submitted to your CRM in accordance with your procedures. That information will help you understand the issues, goals, and wants of each targeted account, allowing you to tailor your outreach and create material that reflects those factors.
Furthermore, CRM data will reveal which interaction channels a target account’s contacts prefer. You’ll also learn about the types of material they prefer and the outcomes of previous sales discussions. This understanding will assist you in the planning step.
PRO TIP: As you move forward, consider setting up an account-based scoring model in your unified CRM. Individual contacts should be given points if they do things that show they suit your ideal customer profile. Add up those points to get an overall account score that can be used to find new candidates for future ABM operations.
5. Account planning: laying the groundwork for your ABM strategy
You should document the forms of outreach that will best engage your target account at this point. You’ll also determine the cadence of campaigns and prospect management techniques.
Additional ABM account planning strategies include:
- To stimulate content production and one-on-one outreach, create account-specific messaging.
- Creating tailored material that addresses the issues that each account faces
- Identifying the measurements you’ll use to gauge success
- Identifying the channels through which your material should be distributed and at what point in the buyer’s journey it should be supplied
PRO TIP: From the start, sales and marketing should collaborate on all of the above. From start to finish, both teams must be on the same page regarding every aspect of the process.
6. Use your unified CRM to create automated workflows.
You use your CRM data to determine which accounts should be targeted. Then, during an ABM campaign, you leverage your unified solution’s marketing automation features to establish rigorously specified workflows that drive your outreach and internal procedures.
You could, for example, create an automatic, triggered email that is sent when a contact at your target account does a specific activity. You’ll be able to send customised material to the right prospect-account stakeholders at the right moment this way. This advances the account along the sales cycle.
7. Begin with a test campaign.
If you’re just getting started, try a pilot campaign with one or two accounts and your established ABM methodology. Your ABM programme can easily deviate from the path, and if it does, you’ll want to minimise the consequences of any mistakes made along the route.
A pilot programme will serve as a learning opportunity, allowing you to see where you need to improve, what succeeded, and ultimately how to strengthen your ABM strategy.
8. Analyse ABM outcomes and improve your methodology
Measuring the performance and results of your pilot programme will be simple because you’ll have already set the parameters you want to track. Not least because, from the start, your unified CRM will be tracking and gathering data for analysis.
Your unified free marketing automation tools and free sales software’s reports and analysis will point out areas for improvement, allowing you to fine-tune your strategy.
Ease your way towards account-based marketing by refining your strategy and methods over time. Your methodology should be rock solid by the time you’re ready to kick your programme into fifth gear.
Are you ready to begin?
You’ll be far more likely to operate a successful ABM programme and achieve results in less time if you follow the best practices outlined above. If you try to wing it, you’ll end up making a slew of errors due to trial and error. You’ll have a path to follow as you prepare for, construct, and launch your account-based marketing using a set methodology.
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