We’re all too familiar with the dilemma most marketers face: higher expectations and fewer resources.
This pressure can feel even bigger if you’re already with a leaner team.
There’s also a lot of rhetoric about marketing strategies and buzzwords that seem complex and difficult to implement and only make the water cloudy.
One of those buzzwords we want to demystify is ABM – and especially the myth that scaling takes up a large team and a lot of time. The truth is that a leaner team may be your secret weapon for successfully implementing ABM.
Here we will examine how your small team can take advantage of the ABM benefits that larger teams have been implementing for years.
ABM is a mindset, not an isolated tactic
Before we start looking at how small teams can turn these higher expectations and fewer resources into real results, it’s important to reduce ABM to what it really is.
While ABM is often a tactic like “email marketing” or “display advertising” or “social media marketing”, it is actually more of a mindset.
Account-based marketing is essentially just a smarter way to do B2B marketing. You want to reserve your budget for those potential customers who are most likely to convert, rather than allocating your budget to a large group of people who have less insight into their chances of becoming a customer.
The scaling of the method was far more cumbersome before data and AI caught up to allow smaller teams to view results faster and on a leaner budget.
If you could, why not reserve your budget for those who are most likely to convert into pipeline or revenue? ABM helps you with this. That is why it is particularly powerful for teams without Overflowing budgets – with ABM you can start with ready-to-buy, high-matching accounts and customize the way you deal with them until you have a quick funnel from first to last touch.
Kickstart from ABM for small teams
Now that you’re in the mindset, let’s get started. The easiest way to approach ABM is to think in three easy steps. Now let’s take a closer look.
1. Identify your best accounts and related purchasing committees using fit, intent and engagement signals.
Build your ICP
We understand, one of the things that kept smaller teams from ABM in the past was the ability to analyze data and understand their really ideal customer profile (ICP). With more traditional approaches to inbound or demand generation, this was usually left with one person.
Instead of just relying on the buyer, this is a business-oriented measure of who is most likely to become a customer. This includes firmographic or technographic information such as company size, sales, industry, location, tech stack and many other attributes.
Instead of using your best guess, you should rely on your CRM data or website traffic to analyze the characteristics of your best customers in the past. This is where ABM Tech comes in to help you quickly distill information instead of relying on manual spreadsheets.
Develop your target account list
Once you have this concept for your best fit, you can start creating your Target Account List (TAL), which is full of companies that closely match your developed ICP. Again, you want to use existing databases with thousands of companies ready to fill your list.
If you want to focus your marketing budget even more on the laser, you can split your new TAL into layers depending on how valuable they can be to your business. There is a chance that some accounts will fit best while others will not. AI can help you avoid headaches with predictive models that compare your list with your best customers. From there, you can work with a list of accounts with the highest to lowest adjustment to decide where you want to spend the most time and money.
Beyond Fit
While it is important to ensure that you start building a TAL based on the correct ICP, other levels of buyer willingness should also be used to ensure that you approach your strategy with the most information available.
Account engagement is a first-party measurement that connects accounts to a company through activities such as email clicks, digital impressions, website visits, webinar registrations, attending physical events, reading blog posts, and online product demos. Not all activities are the same (a product demo is probably a stronger signal than a blog visit). However, summarizing the activities of everyone who interacts with a company at the account level is critical so that marketing and sales teams can respond quickly as engagement grows. In this digital, always active world, speed matters.
What should I do:
- First, list your potential customers who show clear signs of commitment to highly interesting sites such as prices, product reviews, case studies, etc.
- Next, look in your CRM for sales phases that can be revised, e.g. B. closed opportunities, past demo requests, no-shows etc.
- Finally, add colleagues from people who have shown a high level of commitment in the past (nothing more than deleting names to increase the opening rate of emails)!
Account intent is a measure of which companies are concerned with your solution area but are not (yet) concerned with your company. Intent is measured by third parties (such as Bombora) who identify buyers who consume business content that is relevant to a solution area or topic. These are the accounts that are traditionally invisible to marketers.
What should I do:
- Work with your team to compile and compile a short list of topics your prospects are looking for that suit you.
- From there, work with intent signals that indicate increasing topics for certain accounts, such as: B. how often they search for topics related to your service.
- If you have partnerships with review sites, you can also access their database of companies looking for your category or visiting your profile.
2. Define your marketing mix and invest in the channels that are most likely to reach your audience and engage with the right news.
When you ask marketers what it means to be “account-based,” some jump to personal events, direct mail, special sports events, or high-quality prospects – you name it. These are also usually more difficult to scale than a more agile team with a tighter budget. However, recent events (farewell conferences, lunch and learning, happy hour) have more than ever prompted marketers to reconsider how they see an account-based marketing mix and what impact it can have.
The resounding answer? Go digital. Even before the world changed ranger showed that 65% of B2B buyers prefer to do their purchase research online rather than working with a seller (and we know you have staffed your stands).
Now you have the opportunity to use this data to rethink your marketing mix and lean where it makes sense. We know so much: People are spending more and more time online. In our own internal data, we saw that prices are falling (50%), inventories are increasing (13%) and the most important measures of return on advertising (ROAS) are going in the right direction.
Start with the air cover
The best way to build momentum and alignment with your sales team (also known as building a pipeline) is to start an air raid game. That’s how it’s done:
In the real world: When running our own ABM program (in 2017), we found that accounts that had a marketing touch during sales were twice as likely to book a meeting.
3. Move the key metrics to see the impact and slowly switch from lead-based to account-based metrics with multi-touch mapping.
First, look at the campaign metrics to make minor changes or optimizations. This looks like CTR, CPM, CPA, CTOR etc. You can start prioritizing spending on certain higher value accounts and drill down to account level engagement.
Here are some other key metrics to look out for to determine the impact on demand:
Targeted accounts – As a basis, you should always know how many accounts are on your list. By keeping this number in the foreground and in the middle, marketers can understand other metrics.
TAL responses generated – The number of target contacts who replied to the offers, measured by filling out a form, by page view or by email response.
TAL meetings booked – The number of meetings booked with your salespeople that had a 3x3x3 game response prior to the opportunity creation as a previous event.
Generate LT TAL opportunitiesd – The number of new net opportunities created with a 3x3x3 response as an event before the opportunity creation.
LT TAL pipeline value $ – The dollar value of the newly defined net opportunities as defined above.
Spend – Amount spent on all selected campaigns.
Value over volume
What you want to investigate is a potential shift in demand volume that is moving more towards demand value. This is a very typical shift when you turn to an audience with a higher fit / commitment / intention.
However, with this higher value versus the high volume, you see a faster funnel conversion from meeting to sales because you are more selective with your audience. You can also measure this.