5 ways to improve your account based marketing (ABM) efforts.

Account based marketing (ABM) has received a lot of attention in past couple of years, especially the practices to service these accounts have gained a considerable traction across the market. Numerous upcoming organizations and businesses have started exploring best practices for account based marketing. Majority of these organizations tend to focus on the enterprise accounts. The primary reason for this being the game changing potential of the revenue generated through these deals for the overall growth of your organization.   There are some obvious reasons for account based marketing apart from the potential revenue changing capacities. Let’s look at these advantages:

Enterprise accounts have a higher CLV:

Once you rope in an enterprise account, there is an ocean of opportunities in front of you to upsell and cross-sell to the other regions and departments of the company.

With right kind of services, they stay for longer period:

Once you offer these enterprise accounts with right kind of services, they tend to stick with you instead of switching to your competitors. Moreover, you have the additional advantage of already passing through their standardization and vetting process.

They like your attention:

Believe it or not, the company does value your efforts and services in comparison with your other regular client.   Considering these facts, we have put together 5 business critical points you need to follow to make your team hit the bull’s eye when it comes to account based marketing.

1. Have a data driven approach for high value accounts:

If you really want your account based marketing strategy to be a success, you need to have a strict data driven approach. Deeply assess the data you collect from your customers to identify the account you want to target. One of the best ways to identify the right account for ABM is pinpointing companies that are most likely to benefit from your solutions and services. Spend more time on those organizations, find out their key behavioural commonalities and demographics and compare it with your current top clients. It is important to consider that even though the initial business might not be huge, but it certainly has the potential to grow into a big opportunity over the period.

2. Bridge the gap between your marketing and sales team:

Once you have a list of potential companies for your ABM strategy, it is extremely crucial to get your marketing and sales team on the same page. It is just like a soccer game, your striker (sales team) won’t be able to score (close the deal) if he isn’t in-sync with your playmaker (marketing team).

3. Identify the critical decision-makers and target their pain-points:

It is crucial to identify the key decision makers and stakeholders of your target account. This is very important for a successful ABM strategy. This allows you to design a highly personalised experience covering all the motivations and pain-points for all the stakeholders. This is also a better approach than attempting campaigns and marketing content for an entire organization.

4. Clearly define goals and metrics of your campaign:

One of the prime reasons of growing popularity of ABM is that it gives you a clear goal for your marketing campaigns along with the a specific direction regarding which accounts to target. You can focus on goals such as quality account generation, revenue scaling, and scaling of account DMU contacts along with your primary KPIs such as clickthrough rates, page-views, among others. This clear definition of goals will allow your team to secure high quality account relationships and will push you one-step closer towards a successful account based marketing.

5. Make an irresistible offer:

It is the most critical part of the overall process. During the course of the talks, both the parties are very well aware of the take-away from the deal. It is not mandatory to give an offer of solid financial structure such as discounts or sign-up amount. Instead, you can make a service based offer. It is critical to show your commitment towards the potential client while keeping a level of transparency in terms deliverables and financial structure.

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Article credits:

http://blog.strategic-ic.co.uk/account-based-marketing-best-practice

https://reachforce.com/blog/7-enterprise-level-account-based-marketing-best-practices/

https://www.oracle.com/de/marketingcloud/resources/account-based-marketing.html

http://www.adageindia.in/marketing/btob/best-practices-how-to-succeed-with-account-based-marketing-in-b-to-b/articleshow/48989506.cms

https://support.datanyze.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005051803-Account-Based-Marketing-Best-Practices

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2016/11/07/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-account-based-marketing