There are many arguments on blogs, podcasts, and talks declaring “Account Based Marketing isn’t new.” Sure, there are elements of ABM that smart B2B practitioners have been doing for years, such as focusing on accounts rather than leads and sending personalized communication to decision makers. However, there are many aspects that have been recently established to supplement selling efforts or overhauled and modernized. But rather than continuing to debate whether it’s new or not, our time is much better spent on moving the industry and idea forward.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s value in understanding the what and why of ABM, but the more interesting thing to address is how. How do you actually execute an effective ABM program?
Here are 5 tactics you can use right now to close larger deals with Account Based Marketing and Sales Development.
1) Use Intent Data to Read Your Prospects Minds
Intent data can uncover signs that a target account is in the market right now for solutions like yours.
“It is a crucial part of effective ABM, because it is not enough to reach any person at a company, intent defines those who are influencers and decision makers. In fact intent is a more accurate indicator of influence than job titles or departments.”
-Tom Koletas, Madison Logic
This can include any behavioral data that indicates the right activity, including:
- Topics people at this company are researching on 3rd party sites
- Participation in forums
- Content interaction and downloads
- Ad clicks
This data is sourced from forums, job boards, and similar sources. In addition, intent vendors such as Bombora, MRP, and The Big Willow can deliver a layer of insight to maximize your findings, depending on your specific solution and targeting criteria. Intent data is increasingly important because most enterprise IT vendors are selling to the same 5,00-10,000 companies. If you can get to them when they’re actively thinking of this kind of solutions, you have a major advantage.
2) Leverage Predictive Scoring to Look into the Future
Just as Netflix predicts which movies you’ll like based on the ones you’ve already watched, Predictive Scoring forecasts the companies most likely to close by analyzing historical data from customers who have already closed or become opportunities.
Models will often include all the firmographic (company information), technographic (what technologies are used at that company), intent (meaningful behavioral data from that account) and engagement data (how engaged your company is with that account) that you might use in a manual scoring model. The difference is that predictive models allow you to analyze vastly more dimensions and data points. Predictive Scoring looks at leading indicators at a level and volume that far exceeds our human ability.
“Yes, you need to look for intent signals. But I’d hate to try to build a predictive model on it exclusively – there’s just not enough of it in the market compared to companies that fit and companies you’re already engaging with.”
– J.J. Kardwell, EverString
Though not an exhaustive list, consider partnering with organizations that provide predictive analytics solutions, including:
3) Take Advantage of Social Intelligence to Listen to Your Customers
According to the ITSMA, “75% of executives will read unsolicited marketing materials that contain ideas that might be relevant to their business.” So, how do you know what executives at target accounts care about? Listen! Leverage services like Google Alerts, or even better Mention.com (much more powerful, and worth the price). This way, you can keep pulse of what’s going on in your target accounts and their industries. The power of Mention.com is that you can also monitor their social activity, which will help you uncover what they care about.
Social intelligence tends to be an extremely powerful form of intelligence. The information someone shares on social media is something they care about and can make for easy connections. It’s time to channel your inner Sherlock Holmes and dig up some valuable information on your prospects beyond just LinkedIn and Twitter.
4) Get Other Members of Your Team Involved to Sell to An Account
In her book Whale Hunting with Global Accounts, Barbara Weaver Smith explains that today’s buyer wants to meet not just you, the sales rep, but also the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and everyone else on your team. This begs the question if people want to buy from the whole team, why do we only expose them to certain members during certain times?
You must get your entire team involved!
We’ve written about this before, but I want to show you what this actually looks like with an example from our Playbook. Here’s one of our prospecting/door opener Plays that’s manually launched when you want to leverage a mutual connection. The players involved on our team are an SDR and our CEO. The players on the buying team are the CMO and the Head of Sales.
That’s a high-level view, but to give you a better idea of the role of our CEO in this Play, here’s the email template for step 3.
When this email is sent, this is what the receiver sees.
That may seem like a lot of work for your CEO when you look at applying this to many accounts. However, you can have your ADR do the research and fill in the snippets so all your CEO has to do is approve and hit send. Then, since the ADR is CC’d on the email, he or she can hit reply and get a conversation started. The best part is the ADR doesn’t have to manually reply. If you’re using the right software, this can be semi-automated, or fully automated!
5) Create a Waterfall of Content for Your Top Accounts
When your sales and marketing teams are on the same page, it will make life easier for everyone.
One way to make this happen is to go to your sales team and tell them you want to help create some collateral specifically for their target accounts. They’re never going to turn that offer down. Find two or three of the most common questions they get when talking to prospects, then turn it into an educational piece of content. Aim for mid-funnel and purely educational content that brings value to prospects even if they don’t buy. Of course, if you do it right, you’ll position it so that the answer to the problem is your product, but let the prospects draw that conclusion on their own.
Work with your sales team to come up with enough content to write an ebook. Then use your content marketing skills to find some additional research, add some graphs or charts, and package it up nicely for reps to deliver to prospects.
Now that you have this one main piece of content, brainstorm with your sales team on how you can break it up and create a waterfall of smaller pieces of content for them to utilize throughout the sales process with other accounts. Repurpose this content in many different mediums to get the most out of it. You could write a series of blog posts, create infographics, design worksheets, print physical versions, shoot videos, host webinars, get press, share social posts, etc.
Do this a few times, and you’ll have your sales team coming to you with new ideas. I love nothing more than when my sales reps go to the marketing team and say, “I have an idea for some content I want to work with you on.” Those are usually some of our best ideas.
Blurring the Lines
In the traditional demand gen model where sales and marketing are completely separate, one team would own half of what I’ve just written about, while another team owned the other, and never the twain shall meet. However, when you’re taking an account-based approach to revenue, it’s not just recommended that sales and marketing work together, it’s demanded.
Which brings me to my final words of wisdom before parting: Stop calling it Account Based Marketing. When we use these labels, it only perpetuates the misconception that only one department is responsible for thinking and acting at the account level. For complex B2B sales, nothing could be further from the truth.
That’s why it’s leaders in the space, like Jon Miller, David Brock and Craig Rosenberg (to name a few) call it Account Based Everything.