Looking to increase your ROI and overall performance? Here’s how.
A guide to implementing account-based marketing & sales.
Account-based marketing and sales (ABM&S) is a popular strategy that targets specific companies with personalised campaigns, rather than targeting large groups as a whole.
There’s no denying ABM&S is one of the most powerful tools needed to take your business to the next level, but exactly which solution suits your specific goals is dependent on a number of factors and is vital to your ongoing success.
Each component of ABM&S acts towards addressing different buyer segments through both inbound and outbound tactics. These consist of AI-assisted account selection, account-based channel execution and multi-touch revenue attribution.
Choosing the right ABM&S solution enables you to create a long-lasting positive impression on buyers in target accounts.
So, where do you begin?
While you want to achieve ambitious goals, you don’t want to take on more than is possible. Assessing the above factors will guide you into the best ABM&S strategy for your unique offering. Consider the below key elements:
- The size of your offering
- The complexity of your product
- The size of your targeted organisations
- The number of stakeholders in the targeted organisations
- The strategic importance of clients
- The perception of your company to others
- The competitive environment
- The internal setup of your organisation
Kickstarting a new sales and marketing strategy can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Utilising the T.E.A.M. Framework of Target, Engage, Activate and Measure is a simple way for teams to begin to plan, operate, and evaluate their desirable campaigns.
Moreover, it opens the door to shared goals and fluid communication – ensuring all departments are working towards joint success.
Start by following these steps.
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Define your strategic accounts
Begin identifying your target accounts by determining the common makeup of organisations that bring in the largest MRR (monthly recurring revenue) at your company.
Define the industry, company size, location, annual revenue, upsell opportunity, and profit margin for those yielding your business the highest long-term profits.
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Put your investigation goggles on
Understanding the makeup of your target organisations is vital to discovering how best to approach them. Work directly with strategic thinkers within your sales department to brainstorm which accounts match your desired criteria, and who the key stakeholders are.
Utilise social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook to gather more intel or pick the brains of people within your company that have had prior contact with your targets.
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Create personalised content & messaging
Understanding stakeholders’ specific pain points is vital to cutting through the noise, and your messaging and imagery should appeal to how you can solve them.
The core of ABM&S is that it’s completely personalised, so your content needs to be curated to the needs of each account. Work together with your design and sales team to ensure you’re communicating the right message to the right people.
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Decide on the best channels for your campaigns
Understanding where stakeholders spend their time online, and what their activity is like while on social platforms, is vital to ensuring your content is making its mark.
Reach the key players where they are by making use of powerful networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn that offer unique data, insights and the opportunity to promote your content directly to your target accounts.
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Execute your account-based campaigns
Because the goal is to be as personalised as possible, your content needs to be as streamlined as possible. It’s important not to overwhelm future prospects with repeat messages across multiple channels. You want to be seen and heard, but not bothersome.
The more stakeholders you reach, the better – as long as there’s a balance between catching your prospect’s attention and keeping content targeted.
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Measure & share your results
You can’t know what’s working and what’s not, without assessing your efforts after the fact. The best time to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign is after a run time of 30 to 60 days.
It’s important to gain insights after the fact to accurately understand where you succeeded, and how you can improve. Base your evaluation on following criteria:
- Did the content prove to be engaging? If so, how?
- Are you seeing more engagement from targeted accounts?
- Are you expanding on the number of known stakeholders within these organisations?
- Did any targeted leads prove to be a success?
- Did you generate any revenue from these campaigns?
- What could be improved on going forward?
It’s important not to be discouraged if the initial campaign results are not as you hoped. Online marketing is a powerful method of measuring your efforts and will help you to see exactly how things can be altered for future success.
What can you expect next?
Every business has the primary goal of increasing sales and securing target accounts. How to go about this, however, is up to you. ABM&S has been tried and tested for customer-centric companies and has been proven to be a highly successful strategy to achieve increased ROI and overall performance.
So, organisations seeking maximum campaign impact, accelerated sales, and a direct channel of communication to key target accounts, should adopt ABM&S for improved (and highly impressive) results.
With these newly gained insights into the world of account-based marketing, your organisation will be able to create meaningful connections with those that matter. Rather than spending a ton of time creating content for everyone and anyone, your message will reach your targets and create a lasting impact.
Are you ready to take a giant leap forward with your marketing?
If you’re ready to build your dream marketing team, and take a giant leap forward in the way you market and scale your business, then please get in touch for an informal chat on how we can help you achieve your aspirations for your business.