Nearly 70% of companies engaged in account based marketing programs are using email as a key channel and close to 60% label it as an important channel to their ABM effort. So what kind of emails are account-based marketers sending? We’ve gathered the most effective account based marketing email examples and will unpack the strategy behind each
ABM Email Example: Gifting
One ABM email strategy that’s taking off is the use of gifting to catch your target’s attention. Take this example from Marketo.
It serves a dual function between a gift or a donation to a cause that the recipient cares about. Does gifting work? According to Sendoso’s 2020 State of Sending Report nearly ⅓ of senders reported an increase in close rates from sending and almost 75% of senders saw an increase in opportunity creation. Among the top items being sent: Coffee, Experiences, and eGift Cards.
Account Stage: In this example, it’s clearly designed to get attention and engage a new account. However, gifting could be used across the lifecycle. It could be a great way to onboard and welcome a new client for example.
ABM Email Example: Personalized Video
Another account based marketing email example I’ve been seeing a lot of is the 1:1 personalized video, like this one from Lately.
There are a couple of things working really well here. First of all, the copy. It’s not boring. You can definitely feel the sender’s energy. We can debate about the use of all the “o’s” in so and all the exclamation points – but I remember this email. Most of the emails I get – I don’t recall. Second, a video created for me. If you aren’t currently using video for sales and marketing, get on it. Emails with the word “video” in the subject are 8X more likely to be opened.
Account Stage: This example is also attempting to garner first engagement with a new account – however, use of 1:1 video can be used across multiple lifecycle stages. There are plenty of opportunities to incorporate video into sales from prospecting to renewal.
ABM Email Example: Lunch
This email is in the same vein as gifting but deserves a separate call out. Team lunches have a unique opportunity to drive comradery, so getting a team lunch “on the house” to watch a webinar or hear a sales pitch, there’s definitely something to that. Here’s an example of how this played out in an ABM email from Sharpspring.
Account Stage: Another example of initial account engagement, but this tactic could also be very beneficial for onboarding and renewals, particularly when in-person meetings are harder to arrange.
ABM Email Example: News Alert
An ABM email that comes over from traditional prospecting tactics that I love is news alerts. Setting up alerts with Google to monitor the happenings at your target accounts can give you an opportunity to personalize your ABM email. For example, the following email I received after Lake One was named to the Twin Cities Business list of top LGBT owned businesses.
Account Stage: Another example of initial account engagement, but this tactic could also be great for re-engaging an opportunity that has stalled.
Key Takeaways on Account Based Marketing Emails
What all of the emails have in common is a hyper focus on personalization. I’m not talking just “Hello first name”. Each email reaches beyond personalization tokens and tries to find a way to connect with recipients in a way that’s more powerful than just using a name or company data point in the copy. From videos to gifts, account based marketing emails strive to drive high value into the inbox and as a result into the overall ABM program.
I’ll continue to update this post with additional emails I come across. If you have a sample you think should be included reach out to us on social media.
New to ABM and not sure if it’s a fit for you? Find out with our ABM Assessment.
Video is growing in popularity across all areas of the online experience. It’s everywhere. And that includes the selling process. Here’s how and why you should be including sales videos into your existing selling process.
What are Sales Videos
As we refer to them, sales videos are 1:1 videos intended to aid in the sales process. These videos are sent from a salesperson to their prospect or new client to create a connection, simplify complex information, and build rapport.
Sales videos are different from promotional videos or commercials in that they are not a high production venture. They are simple, personalized, and created for a specific prospect to watch. Typically, they address the lead by name and acknowledge their company and invite them to take the next step in the sales process. That might include replying to the email, booking a meeting, or even signing a contract.
Why Video Increases Sales
Given that you don’t have unlimited amounts of time, is it worth the effort to create sales videos? Well, our friends at HubSpot say that “Reps that use video in prospecting, relationship-building, and sales emails see 5x higher open rates and 8x higher open-to-reply rates.” Furthermore, video was named the type of content with the best ROI by 51% of marketing professionals worldwide. Why it works is a little less concrete.
So much gets lost in text. From tone to body language to the nuances and emphasis of specific words, the written word is left to interpretation more than video or face-to-face communication. With video, you’re able to communicate your exact point in the precise manner you intend. This can lead to less back and forth, better understanding, and a higher level of confidence- all of which can translate into sales.
The confidence built by effective communication turns into trust. I am 100% guilty of deleting sales emails that come into my inbox by purely assuming the person on the other end is a bot or scammer. I don’t give them much credence or credibility because I don’t have any real reason to believe that there is a live person on the other end. Video changes that. Seeing a face, even just as a thumbnail, automatically adds authenticity. Just like that, you go from spammer to a real person.
Even when you have an established relationship, video builds trust. Hearing a voice, seeing a face, the automatic response to smile when you see a smile… all those things help build business relationships.
Setting Yourself Apart from the Competition
Video is something that everybody talks about, but few actually use it when it comes to the sales process. It’s inherently attention-grabbing. If you start now, there’s a good chance you’ll be ahead of your competition, especially if you’re in an industry that’s focused on more traditional marketing.
Ways to Use Sales Videos
Sales videos can be incorporated into your existing sales processes. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel by any means. Creating quick videos might save you time by turning what could be writing a lengthy email into recording and sending a 2-minute video.
Thank you’s and recap emails after a meeting: Summarize a meeting and state the high-level to-dos and genuine gratitude for their time.
Meeting reminders: Self-explanatory but a natural way to deliver face time and build a connection.
Explaining complex information: Sometimes it’s hard to communicate complex ideas into an email. Video allows you to communicate more effectively in a manner that’s easier to digest.
Product demonstrations: Don’t launch into a demo if you haven’t made acquaintance yet, but when the time is appropriate, video can be highly effective in this area.
Don’t over complicate things here. Anybody with a smartphone or a computer with a camera can create a sales video. The specific tools listed in the section below can help you physically create a video, but here are some tips to keep in mind regardless of your platform:
Make eye contact like you’re speaking with the person on the receiving end.
Introduce yourself and your company. Even if you’ve had a conversation or two before, a friendly quick intro like, “Hey, it’s Danielle from Lake One!” can you help become memorable.
Keep it brief, under 2 minutes. Some topics warrant long videos, but generally, the shorter, the better as long as you’re still able to communicate effectively.
Consider your environment and clothing. Be professional. It’s a no brainer, but perhaps recording a video for the CEO of ABC Co. while wearing your favorite tattered college t-shirt may not be the best choice.
Be authentic. Turning robot just because you’re recording is as bad as turning into the cheesy local car dealership owner, recording commercials in a gorilla suit. Authenticity in video will get you everywhere.
Where to Host Sales Videos
There are a number of places to host your sales videos. No matter where you decide to do it, make sure it’s a secure location. You want to be able to protect your videos and limit who has access.
Ultimately, you could just host your videos on Google Drive or a secure YouTube channel. However, if you’re going to put the effort into creating your videos, a video hosting platform service is worth your effort. You want to find one that specializes in 1:1 video and be cognizant of the features that help you be successful in that area. There are many video hosting platforms out there, but a design for 1:1 sales videos is notably unique.
Vidyard
Vidyard has everything you need to create quality, personalized sales videos. Their features are what makes them Lake One’s video platform of choice. The feature that had us most star-struck is the analytics. We can see if our video was watched, who watched it, what percentage of the video they completed and more. This data is extremely valuable information for your prospecting and selling.
Vidyard also lets you add CTAs to the end of each video, which is perfect when you’re asking somebody to take the next step. Password protection and the ability to create customized thumbnails on each video are huge pluses as well. Oh, and creating videos is incredibly simple. They offer a Chrome extension so you can literally produce a quick video with the click of a single button. Hosting space with Vidyard is unlimited, too, so you can create and share as many videos as your heart desires.
If you’re in any type of sales or marketing role, chances are you’ve heard of account based marketing or ABM for short. It’s almost impossible not to have. It seems to be everywhere! You may even be using an ABM strategy currently, which means you likely already know the what and why behind ABM. So instead of going through why it’s so great (you likely already know), I’m going to talk about the tools that can help you execute an even more effective ABM strategy.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Quick recap. ABM (account based marketing) is a focused growth strategy. Sales and marketing work together to create a personalized buying experience for a set of high-value accounts that the two teams have both agreed on.
Once those accounts are agreed upon, there’s an ABM framework that should be followed to successfully execute the focused growth strategy. Within that strategy, there are tools that you can and should use to help ensure your efforts are as successful as possible. Many of these tools integrate within your CRM, like HubSpot for example, and make using them for ABM pretty painless. Here are five account based marketing tools worth taking a look at:
Here at Lake One, we love using Vidyard as a video platform. Vidyard not only can be used to further ABM efforts, but it integrates directly with HubSpot. It allows you to easily create, track and include personalized videos into your landing pages or emails. In addition, you can see user engagement and use it for segmenting, scoring, and nurturing leads. We also like it because it allows you to easily:
Create video playlists
Embed your videos just about anywhere
Create in-video CTAs with links to your website and specific pages
Provide customer testimonials, product demos marketing videos, and more.
Generate video transcriptions for SEO and improved accessibility, automatically!
With the growing importance of incorporating video into your sales and marketing strategies, it’s no wonder this type of tool aids in a successful ABM strategy.
LinkedIn is a social networking platform dedicated to business professionals and used only for business purposes. It’s a great account based marketing tool to have at your disposal. There are several ways to use LinkedIn to help with ABM:
Build a LinkedIn ABM account list
Since ABM protocol says to find a specific person/account at a company, versus just a company at large, you’re able to search people using LinkedIn’s advanced search features to find the types of accounts suited to your business and build a targeted account list.
Create LinkedIn sponsored content
Sponsored content is LinkedIn’s version of “ads”, only it’s content that’s being displayed. These “ads” will only show up in the newsfeed of your targeted accounts. So you’re getting the right type of content in front of the right sets of eyeballs.
Take advantage of LinkedIn InMail
With the LinkedIn Premium subscription you’re able to direct message people you aren’t yet connected to. This allows you to reach out to those targeted accounts you’ve identified directly before you’re connected.
Pro Tip: Ensure your message is personalized and not spammy. The goal is to get people to actually open the message and read it. The subject line should be to the point and attention-grabbing.
Utilize LinkedInSales Navigator to manage your ABM
Sales Navigator allows you to take all of your LinkedIn account based marketing efforts to the next level. This account based marketing tool allows you to do an even more advanced search, receive account recommendations and score them, and you can set up alerts on those accounts, create notes, and see which of them views your profile.
One of the reasons we love LinkedIn for ABM is because users self identify on the platform. They readily provide their job titles, company they work for, and what their job entails. Not to mention, companies themselves are offering up loads of information, like their size, industry, service offerings, and location. Thanks to this, it’s a lot easier to identify specific people for your ABM efforts.
Another account based marketing tool that integrates well with HubSpot is Uberflip. Uberflip is a content experience platform (CEP) that allows you to reorganize existing content based on different audience profiles so that they can experience your website in ways that are most relevant to them.
As a result, you’re able to attract audiences to stay on your site longer and help you increase your revenue. This can be applied in different use cases, such as sales enablement and demand generation, but most importantly for this discussion, it can be applied to ABM. According to Uberflip, you’ll be able to accelerate the pipeline with binge-worthy experiences. What does that mean exactly? You can decrease the sales cycle by guiding your buyer down a path-to-purchase that encourage self- nurturing
When targeting specific companies or people at those companies, it’s important to know who plays what role. Who are the decision-makers? Who works for who? It can be tough to keep all of that straight. With these Org Charts for HubSpot you can easily build and store customer organization charts one each of your accounts. Not only that, but you can also do:
Relationship mapping: avisual display that shows the relationship between contacts
Customized sales personas: help your team to visualize key stakeholders
Placeholder contacts: you can identify key contacts, avoid sales blockers, and close deals faster
Account mapping: visualize and manage relationships between parent and child companies
Despite the digital age that we live in, direct mail is still alive and well. Postalytics takes the more traditional route of direct mail and marries it with the modernness of automation. What’s the result? A match made in heaven.
Marketers are using Postalytics automated direct mail to help grow their pipelines and increase engagement throughout the inbound marketing journey. It allows you to:
Quickly design and send your personalized letters and cards
Access affordable and high-quality print and mailing services
Track, trace and measure impact of your campaign real-time
Target new leads and drive great responses from customers
Cut direct mail production from weeks to minutes
Tracks every piece of mail through delivery and response
Integrates with HubSpot workflows, lists and contacts
As account based marketing continues to grow in both popularity and performance, it’s important that you’re using the proper tools to help aid in your efforts. You might have a good ABM strategy in place, but with the help of these account based marketing tools, you can take your efforts from good to great. Keep in mind, not every tool will be the best fit for your ABM toolbox, but you won’t know unless you try.
New to account based marketing and wondering how to get started? Or maybe you just need help incorporating these tools into your strategy. Let’s talk. Our ABM strategists know a thing or two about both.
Maybe it goes without saying, but we think that Account Based Marketing is here to stay as an effective strategy to drive more leads for your business.
HubSpot’s Account Based Marketing tools are some of our favorites from the big-time marketing software platform. HubSpot has stepped up to the plate and knocked their added features out of the park.
This post will talk about the differences between ABM and inbound and the basics you need to get your HubSpot Account Based Marketing strategy up and running.
Inbound vs ABM: What’s the difference?
You likely know HubSpot supports the inbound methodology so you may be wondering, how does ABM fit into the picture?
Both strategies are still hyper-focused on leads and using valuable content to convert them. The best way to actualize the difference between the two strategies is by thinking of it as the difference between fishing with a net vs fishing with a spear.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound focuses on attracting a wide range of potential customers through relevant high-quality content offers and follows HubSpot’s inbound methodology of attract, convert, close and delight. So just like fishing with a net, your catch can vary by industry, role, and business need.
Pro Tip: Do your keyword research! Making sure your content efforts are highly targeted and keyword focused helps ensure you are attract the right audience.
Account Based Marketing
Account Based Marketing is the process of Sales and Marketing working together to close deals at a specific set of Target Accounts. Unlike conventional, volume-based marketing approaches, ABM is more about attracting and engaging the right contacts from each of the Target Accounts that Sales and Marketing selected together.
So just like fishing with a spear, you’re making moves towards specific targets and using highly targeted valuable content to convert them.
Inbound & ABM Working Together
Inbound and account based marketing don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Companies may find that one works better than the other, but both can be a part of a holistic marketing strategy and leverage HubSpot.
Here are two more added benefits of using ABM and inbound together to win more deals.
Attract More Prospects – You attract a broader group of prospects than you would using just one method and catch opportunities that one strategy may have missed.
More Content Bang for Your Buck – You can create content that works for both ABM and inbound. Examples: Case studies, white papers, brand videos, etc.
Setting Your ABM Strategy in HubSpot
Setting your ABM strategy in HubSpot starts with defining and configuring the ABM default properties and using workflows to help set tiers and notify sales on the fly. The bonus? ABM is tied into the HubSpot CRM so all account activity can still be found on contact records.
But First, Ideal Customer Profiles
Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) are a critical part of ABM strategy and we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention them. Just like any element of your sales and marketing strategy, setting your ICPs is a team effort and should be agreed upon by key stakeholders.
An ICP is much like a buyer persona in that it’s a fictitious company that embodies all of the qualities that would make them the best fit for the solutions that your company provides.
Pro Tip: Think about these thought starters when trying to determine your ICP: Budget, Revenue, Company Size, Geo, or Industry. Also, if you can capture elements of your ICP via a form? Bonus.
HubSpot’s Account Based Marketing Properties
HubSpot has created three key properties to support ABM. Data from the following properties will be used in your ABM dashboards, reports, lists, target accounts home, and account overview.
Buying Role
Buying role is a new contact property that identifies the role that a contact plays during the sales process. In HubSpot, contacts can have more than one role and can share the same role with another contact.
Target Account
Target Account is a company property that identifies a company that you are marketing and selling to as part of your ABM strategy. It’s a single checkbox that makes your life a whole lot easier when it comes to reporting, your target accounts home view, and more.
Ideal Customer Profile Tiers
Ideal Customer Profile Tier is a company property that categorizes how closely a company matches your ideal customer profile in three tiers. Companies that are Tier 1 should be a great fit for your products/services and Tier 2, slightly less so, and Tier 3 might be acceptable, but considered low priority.
Pro Tip: Ideal Customer Profile Tiers are meant to help you categorize and set priorities. However, if you are working with just a handful of select target accounts set the tier to 1 and table the rest until you need them.
Leveraging HubSpot Workflows for ABM
Whether you use HubSpot’s workflow templates or start from scratch, you have the ability to customize and really create automations that work for you and your sales cycle. Here are a few of our favorites for ABM.
Ideal Company Profile Tier Setting: HubSpot actually has a template for this, but you can use workflows to automatically set tiers based on your criteria. It saves a step and makes the tiering less manual.
Lead Nurturing: ABM is still a strategy that’s focused on high valued content and the content will fall into various stages of the buyer’s journey. So once a lead converts, use marketing automation to nurture your leads until they are ready to engage with sales.
Account & Sales Notifications: Use marketing automation to notify your sales team based on ABM activity like buying role conversions or highly engaged target account activity. Much like a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), you are thinking about what constitutes a sales-ready lead or target account, and then engaging sales when the timing is right.
HubSpot Account Based Marketing Integrations
HubSpot allows for the integration of several tools to help fuel your ABM strategy. These tools essentially comprise your marketing tech stack. Here are a few that are at the top of our list.
Slack
We are big fans of slack. The Slack and HubSpot integration has certain features that can help your ABM strategy, including:
Creating deal or company-based Slack channels through a HubSpot workflow
Entering a /hs-report-company Slack command to receive metrics on a target account
Sharing notes in HubSpot to Slack immediately when on a call or during a meeting
Creating ad campaigns can be a major component of ABM and your LinkedIn marketing strategy. If you’veconnected your LinkedIn Ads account to HubSpot, you can create a company list audience to automatically sync companies from your target accounts or a specific company profile tier to the matched audience in LinkedIn. Cha-ching.
According to Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing Survey, 80% of video marketers say video has directly helped increase sales. Sign. Us. Up. Oh wait, we already did. See below. 🤓
One of our favorite platforms for video that integrates directly with HubSpot and can be used to further your ABM efforts, is Vidyard. You can easily create, track, and insert personalized videos into your emails and HubSpot landing pages. Here are a few key uses:
Easily embed your videos anywhere
Create in-video CTAs with links to your website pages, like a blog post, meetings page, or pricing page.
Create video playlists to combine multiple videos into a single player
Automatically generate video transcriptions for improved accessibility and SEO.
Provide product demos, customer testimonials, marketing videos, and more.
Learn more about HubSpot’s Vidyard integration and partnership here.
HubSpot Account Based Marketing Reporting & Dashboards
Reporting is critical and much like HubSpot’s inbound reporting, you can expect dashboards and reporting templates to be available with a click to support your ABM efforts. Simply starting with HubSpot’s Account Based Marketing dashboard template, you get 9 out of the box reports that focus on answering questions about your ongoing ABM campaigns and provide a better understanding of its success (or lack thereof). Reports included in this dashboard are:
Ideal customers
Contacts created at target accounts monthly
Target accounts by page views
Buying role by target account
Contact source report by target account
Contact lifecycle stage by target account
Deal stage by target accounts
Target accounts by active deal amount
HubSpot Reporting Examples
How Much Does HubSpot’s Account Based Marketing Software Cost?
If all of this sounds great, you’re likely asking how much does it cost? HubSpot’s new tools for account based marketing are now available in Marketing Hub Professional and Sales Hub Professional products. With the majority of new ABM tools shared between Marketing Hub and Sales Hub, you may want to consider access for both.
Here’s the breakdown from the Hubs.
Is ABM Right for Your Company?
Still trying to decide if ABM is right for you? This quick online quiz will help you determine if your organization is a good fit for account based marketing.
LinkedIn is one of the popular social networks right now. With over 610 million users, it’s the epicenter of business networking and the perfect place for thought leadership. It’s also a fantastic place to launch your ABM. Here’s what you need to know to launch a LinkedIn account based marketing strategy.
Why Use LinkedIn for Account Based Marketing
Unique amongst all other social networks, LinkedIn is purely business-related. It’s mostly free of politics, memes, and the unsolicited parenting ‘advice’ that comes with other social platforms. People using LinkedIn are on it to network, promote themselves, and grow their businesses. They are inherently primed to have conversations about their companies.
That notion, along with LinkedIn’s native tools, makes it one of the best places to launch an AMB strategy. We’ll get into the specific tools shortly, but regardless of which tool you end up using, LinkedIn targeting is simply unmatched. Why? Users self identify on LinkedIn. They give you their job title, company, and job description alongside stats on the companies themselves, like size, location, and core business description. This makes it incredibly easy to find specific people for the purposes of account based marketing.
How to Use LinkedIn for ABM
Building an account list
As mentioned above, LinkedIn makes it easy to identify potential good business fits based on their shared information. Unlike running an ad that might target types and categories, ABM protocol is to actually find the specific people/accounts to target. You’ll actually be on LinkedIn searching for Jane Smith, CTO of Acme Co., and not just Acme Co. look alike audiences. You’ll use LinkedIn’s advanced search feature to find the types of accounts most suited for your business.
InMail
LinkedIn Inmail is for all intents and purposes paid direct messaging. If you’re a Basic LinkedIn user, you can only direct message your connections. InMail, which is only accessed through a LinkedIn Premium subscription, is how to go around that. Start by drafting a templated message that you can use as the base message to all of your identified accounts. Then personalize that template. Do you have somebody or something in common? Perhaps a mutual connection or ties to a former company? Include that personalization on your Inmail. Make sure your subject line is clear, attention-grabbing, and concise.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is just a fancy way to say “Ads” in LinkedIn terms. The only difference is that you’ll be promoting content as the term suggests. The ads will display in the newsfeed of your targeted accounts. Make sure the content you’re promoting is highly aligned with your persona. If it misses the mark, it won’t be effective or produce the ROI you’re seeking. We also recommend promoting content that aims to inform your audience- something at the awareness or consideration stage of the buying funnel. They most likely won’t be ready to buy or complete a form to speak with somebody, especially if your ad is the first they’ve ever heard of you. Start with something noncommittal.
Hand-in-hand with sponsored content is lead generation. Offering a piece of content for your accounts to convert on looks like gated content: access to your valuable content in exchange for their contact info. Once you have that contact info, you can nurture those leads. Luckily, LinkedIn integrates with HubSpot’s CRM. Any contacts generated through sponsored content will automatically be imported as contacts into HubSpot. Read more about that here. This cuts out manual work and allows you to easily enroll leads in workflows or sales sequences.
Sales Navigator is a native tool within LinkedIn. It allows you to take all of the above LinkedIn account based marketing strategies to the next level. Your advanced search is more advanced with Navigator. Accounts will be recommended and scored. Best yet, you can set up to receive alerts about updates on your leads, create notes and tags, and see who viewed your profile. It also integrates with your CRM as well.
LinkedIn & Marketing Automation Platforms for ABM
To say the integration with a CRM/CMS that does marketing automation makes life easy is a huge understatement. Marketing automation allows you to automatically nurture and follow-up with the leads you generate on LinkedIn. This might look like the automatic send of a follow-up email 3-day post initial outreach. It could also be sending automated notifications to your sales reps to take the next step in their selling process or it could be the trigger to enroll a contact in a workflow based on their response (or lack thereof).
How to Measure Results
You should be able to measure most of your LinkedIn account based marketing efforts within LinkedIn. What are your InMail open rates? What’s your response rate? A typical cold sales email has about a 16% open rate. Personalized InMail can increase that by as much at 13% bringing your targeted open rate to about 29%.
You can also track the conversion rates from your lead generation and Sponsored Content efforts. A standard ad click rate is 0.06% for LinkedIn. From there, you can expect to see a landing page conversion rate of 4%, according to Unbounce. However, we would expect the rates from an account based marketing campaign to be higher than standard. Your targeting is much more selective and if you’ve done your research thoroughly, they should be much more ready to engage with your company.
Another area to measure for success is your deal close rates. How do your close rates compare to your benchmarks or goals? Are you moving more people further along in your pipeline? Having more sales calls? These are all things you should already be tracking. Compare those against your AMB efforts to determine success.
Conclusion
A LinkedIn account based marketing strategy can be executed through the many native tools LinkedIn offers. It’s a great place to start your ABM efforts because LinkedIn users are already primed for discussing and growing their companies. ABM on LinkedIn begins with the ability to search for and find specific, highly relevant accounts. Using Sales Navigator can take the already advanced search functions to the next level, allow you to make notes, and find you more prospects. Utilize the integrations these tools offer and connect your CRM. That way you can build automation and lead nurturing into your ABM strategy in order to close more sales.
Account based marketing is taking B2B by storm. The latest trend in the world of sales and marketing, ABM is a highly effective way to engage with potential leads. Our clients are doing it, and the ones who aren’t yet are interested. Here’s an in-depth walkthrough of the account based marketing framework for beginners.
What is account based marketing
First thing’s first, let’s define account based marketing. According to HubSpot, “Account-based Marketing (ABM) is a focused growth strategy in which Marketing and Sales collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts.”
Now, let’s break that down piece by piece to define what that actually means.
A focused growth strategy
There are many ways and tactics to implement account-based marketing; however, it’s important to note that the framework of account based marketing is strategy, first and foremost. Marketo states that it’s a “customer experience-centric approach” in order to “generate more revenue faster and easier.”
Think ABM is right for you? Take the assessment. Click here.
At its core, ABM is about understanding that not every company is a fit for your product/service. While a buyer’s persona is a fictional representation of your ideal buyer, ABM takes the next step to actually find, target, and talk to those ideal accounts. ABM is the strategy behind that process and implementation.
Marketing and Sales collaboration
This part is critical. Account based marketing is really the pinnacle of sales and marketing alignment. The ideal process of AMB is: identify accounts, communicate with accounts directly, nurture and close deals on those accounts. Sales, Marketing, Sales. All in close collaboration.
Therefore, once you have your ideal types of accounts in mind, the next step in ABM is for your sales team to identify specific ones. Sales should create a prospect list of specific companies or people your company should be speaking with. (This is the account part of account based marketing.) Once this list is created, it should be handed off to Marketing.
Marketing will then implement your targeting strategy. There’s more on specific tactics below, but Marketing’s role may include things like LinkedIn advertising or connecting and engaging on social media. Marketing is the one responsible for carrying the strategy forward, making the connections, and starting the conversations.
When the conversations are activated and a prospect becomes an active lead, it’s handed back to Sales to nurture and close.
Without alignment between Sales and Marketing, the entire account based marketing process would fall on its face. Marketing needs to know who specifically to talk to- is targeting anybody under the executive level a waste of time? Were conversations with X company already conducted and lost?
And Sales needs Marketing to implement the tactics. A break down on the latter half of this may mean Marketing is hooking leads that Sales isn’t receiving or following up on.
Another important arm to the account based marketing framework is the element of personalization. Because the accounts chosen in ABM are already so highly targetted, messaging needs to be targeted, too.
However you connect with your prospects, it needs to authentic, helpful, and personalized. That means do your research beforehand. Leave anything generic at the door. Also, take timeliness and relevance into high consideration. Personalization might look like custom landing pages, custom calendar links to schedule a consult directly or references specific to the account you’re connecting with.
Mutually-identified high-value accounts
As granular and targeted as inbound marketing can be, ABM is next-level targeting. As such, it’s more time-intensive. What that translates into is being selective about accounts that are not only the best fit but also stand to be the most lucrative.
A study done by SiriusDecisions found that, “91% of companies using ABM were able to increase their average deal size, with 25% of respondents stating the increase being over 50% or larger.”
The specific nature of ABM allows teams to key in on those high-value accounts and put more effort into nurturing them. The alignment between teams empowers Marketing to develop the specific collateral and assets to enable Sales in their nurturing. Under the ABM model, it’s easier to make a case for investing the time and resources into this process when accounts and the rewards are high-value.
Thinking about implementing AMB? Take the assessment to see if it’s right for your organization.
Account Based Marketing Examples
Now that we’ve defined the framework of account based marketing, here are some ways to put it into action. Using these tactics are just a few of the many ways to implement ABM.
