Is Your Business Ready for Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

When you are in B2B marketing, there comes a point when the business, sales processes, and marketing mature to a point where driving in volumes of leads no longer move the needle enough to drive further product research & development, allow you to hire much needed staff, or pay back your investors at the rate you agreed to. When you reach this point, you start to realize that simply adding a single new user to your subscriber or customer base may not be enough, and you start to target the larger fish in the sea. While you may reach this point with the understanding that you need to implement an ABM strategy, this doesn’t mean you have the foundation, nor the processes to drive this strategy to success. I’ve pulled together a few of the most important items to check off your list to ensure that launching ABM for your organization is a success.

Define Your ICP / Persona and Build Target Account Lists

Setup target account lists

This may seem like Marketing 101, but if you don’t have a defined ICP or persona and are simply worried about filling your funnel with anyone and everyone who would be interested in your product, this will become your first downfall. To successfully make your Target Account Lists (TALs) your marketing team will need to help perform some research to identify your best fit persona(s). This research and the amount of target accounts required to start your ABM motions will depend on the size of your target audience and size of your sales org. As your key accounts are uncovered, you can estimate based on the size of the opportunities based on your organization’s pricing calculations. This will help you start to uncover the initial value of what ABM can bring to your business

A Reverse Funnel Approach to Sales

As you move to ABM marketing, you need to dedicate the appropriate resources to help drive conversions and retain them. This will mean allocating less resources to convert your current low-value inbound funnel with more resources dedicated to your targeted accounts. Understanding how much revenue they will bring in will help you scale the team and understand the resources you need to properly win the accounts, and once won, what type of customer success support it will take to retain them and not let these big fish go right back out to sea. Because of this, the reverse funnel ideology will come into play where you will want to dedicate the majority of your sales and marketing resources to this small percentage of your customers. The reason for this reverse funnel approach is that you will expect this small percentage of your customers to account for the majority of your overall revenue for the year.

Marketing Campaigns that Prioritize Influence

If you are not yet tracking campaign attribution in marketing, it is crucial to prioritize tracking influence before you move into account-based marketing. Account leads don’t qualify nearly as quickly because they are high value and likely involve large groups of potential buyers who will be your first to convert. The first step is to measure intent. Account buying intent will show you when there is enough combined interest at that account to warrant additional follow up. As intent is not clear cut, campaign influence becomes important. Influence highlights those activities that are involved leading up to a conversion or point in the lifecycle journey that helps to measure velocity. For example, while a local event or webinar may not produce a direct conversion, so long as those in pipeline are showing a continued interest by attending the event, whether live or on demand, then it is influencing the journey.