Tools To Grow Your Business Archives • Lake One ®

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:

Account Based Marketing Tools

Vidyard

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 LinkedIn Sales 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.

Uberflip

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

OrgchartHub

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: a visual 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

Postalytics

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.

The B2B buying environment is complex and often multifaceted. With heavy workloads and high goals, one thing remains consistent across the board: strong business relationships help close deals and drive company growth. But how do you keep track of contact history and provide visibility company-wide all while keeping your sales and marketing teams aligned? Queue Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and B2B CRM strategy.

CRM software revenues are now the largest of all software markets with revenues expected to reach over $80 billion by 2025.

B2B CRM Software Revenue Chart — Image Source: SuperOffice

What is a B2B CRM

According to Salesforce, a B2B CRM stands for Business to Business Customer Relationship Management and refers to systems, technologies, strategies, and processes that help B2B companies manage their relationships with existing and potential customers. It helps companies better understand contacts, their needs, and where they are in the buyer’s journey as it relates to your business.

Why Invest in a B2B CRM

B2B CRMs should really be thought of as a strategic way of understanding, managing, and delivering on business customers’ needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey. They really are what you make of it, but here are three main reasons why you should take the plunge and invest in a CRM and drive alignment for your internal teams.

Better Visibility

B2B CRMs provide visibility system-wide and are single-handedly the best solution for keeping a real-time pulse on your contact database and sales cycle ecosystem. Even smarketing meetings (sales and marketing alignment team meetings) can’t provide you with the same kind of real-time feedback across teams.

Have a question on a contact? Or are you wondering overall how leads that come from paid media are performing? Your answers lie in the CRM.

Working Smarter

We’re big fans of working smarter and not getting bogged down with busy work or meetings for meetings sake. You might be thinking that CRMs create more work because of all the necessary input which is only partially true. It does take time to adjust your daily processes to a CRM, but once you do, your teams will likely find that they are more efficient with contact follow up and reporting, and actually are able to spend more time selling and focusing on target accounts. And as an added bonus, marketing has better insight into marketing qualified lead performance as well, resulting in the ability to hone in lead quality vs quantity.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Whether you’re looking for a bird’s eye view or you like getting down and dirty with the details, CRMs undoubtedly provide insight into the data. You can view account activity, pipeline, close rates, and more. You’ll also be able to turn your hunches into a data-driven decision. For example, let’s say you think that the majority of your prospects in a certain industry sign when you can get them to a demo. A CRM would allow you to confirm that in the data and then you could spend your time focusing on how to get more prospects in the said industry to demo faster.

Getting Started with Your B2B CRM Strategy

B2B CRMs should really be thought of as a strategic way of understanding, managing, and delivering on business customers’ needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey. The CRM technology itself is what enables the strategy and makes it possible.

So where to start? Here are our 6 proven B2B CRM strategies that fuel sales and marketing alignment and business growth.

Get Teams Speaking the Same Language

CRMs are great, but they’re only as good as in the information you put it in and it’s really difficult to increase usage if everyone has different definitions of some of the basics. Everybody needs to be speaking the same language and have a common understanding of what is critical for your CRM. And trust us, it’s better to iron out the basics sooner in the process rather than later.

Lifecycle Stages & Lead Statuses

Lifecycle stages and lead statuses may differ slightly in naming depending on your platform, but the purpose behind them likely doesn’t. Lifecycle stages signify what stage your contact is in the buyer’s journey and lead status provides an extra layer of detail as to where they are at exactly. Here are the most common definitions we use across our partnerships.

Lifecycle Stages

Subscriber: Contacts who know of your business and have opted in to hear more from your team. This is likely visitors that have signed up for your blog or newsletter.
Lead: Contacts who have shown sales-readiness beyond being a subscriber. An example of a lead is a contact who signs up for a content offer from your business.
Marketing Qualified Lead: Contacts who have engaged with the team’s marketing efforts, but are still not ready to receive a sales call. An example of an MQL is a contact who responds to a specific form in a marketing campaign.
Sales Qualified Lead: A contact that your sales team has qualified as a potential customer.
Opportunity: A contact who is a real sales opportunity.
Customer: A contact with a closed deal(s).

Lead Statuses

Prospect: No marketing automation. Contacts with this lead status are being hunted by sales.
New: All new leads will be assigned this status by default.
Open: A lead that is currently being worked by sales.
In Progress: A connection has been and the lead is in progress.
Open Deal: There is an open deal with the contact.
Attempted to Contact: Sales is attempting to contact or follow up with a lead.
Connected: Sales has connected with the contact.
Unqualified: Lead is not qualified to do business.

Pro Tip: Identify your lifecycle stages and statues as part of your Service Level Agreement. Learn more about Lake One’s SLAs here.

Contact Field Basics & Defaults

You’ll also want to work with key stakeholders to define your default required fields. For any field that has a dropdown, you’ll want to make sure those are well-defined among internal teams as well. The basics range from specific contact information needed down to current solution provider, market or buying role. Most CRMs will allow you to customize fields to your business needs.

Pro Tip: Think wisely about the field ‘type’ you select when creating properties as it’s nearly impossible to use a single line text field in list segmentation or workflows. This is due to the room for error in data input. For workflow usable data, dropdown selects are one of my favorites! We reserved single line text for fields like phone numbers, addresses, notes, etc.

Segment Contacts for Personalized Communication

Personalization in a B2B email can improve click-through rate by as much as 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Personalization starts with list segmentation. Of course it can come in to play via the actual insertion of personalization tokens (names, role, etc.), but deciding who you are communicating with is the first step.

B2B CRMs allow you to segment contacts by where they are at in the buyer’s journey (lead, customer, MQL), their product interest, industry, etc. without needing to think about each contact and manually emailing a custom communication. This is also critical for sales and marketing alignment and allows both teams to tailor communications. Get more tips on writing B2B sales emails here.

Close the Feedback Loop in Real-Time

A key component of sales and marketing alignment is closing the feedback loop between sales and marketing. It’s absolutely essential that sales provides feedback on lead quality and lead status in real-time.

Closing the feedback loop entails:

Sales communicating a lead is rejected
Sales communicating why a lead is rejected (poor timing, bad contact information, no budget, etc.)
Communication on when lead nurturing is taking place
Communication on if and when to resume lead nurturing once it’s been paused

All of the above is made possible by a B2B CRM in a relatively quick and painless way.

Leverage Lead Scoring That’s Based on Engagement

Lead scoring is a systematic and scientific way of ranking leads based on their readiness to purchase a product or service from your company. Scores are assigned to certain criteria such as a lead’s fit for your product or service, expressed interest through different activities like filling out a form or watching a webinar, and position in the buying cycle.

Lead Scoring provides a reliable, predictable, recurring means for deciding which leads are sales-ready, and ordering them by importance takes the guesswork out for both teams.

Lead scoring can be done by either using explicit data/demographics and/or implicit data/actions or behavior. A B2B CRM allows you to track and gather implicit data more easily such as: email opens, click-through-rates, key page views, and form fills. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to track and leverage the data across teams.

Related Reading: Lead Scoring Basics

Universal Deal Stages & Pipelines That Reflect Sales Cycles

Pipelines and deal stages help to break down complex B2B buying cycles into a measurable process that’s easily digestible. Whether you have an established sales process or you’re starting from scratch, B2B CRMs like HubSpot make it easy to create your ideal process.

HubSpot B2B CRM Strategy — Image Source: HubSpot

Most processes of course start with a meeting and end either in closed won or closed lost. The pipeline gives you visibility into what’s in process, when things will hit, and most importantly, what’s stuck in the process.

Use Forecasting & Reporting to Better Manage Teams

B2B CRMs like HubSpot really shine when it comes to taking your data inputs and turning it into dashboards and usable reporting. Maybe you could create manually? But the time savings and accuracy that come with CRMs are too good to pass up. Here are a few ways to leverage CRM data for forecasting and better managing your teams.

Related Reading: 6 KPIs for Sales & Marketing Alignment

Sales Team Activity: View activities by sales rep on a rolling basis. Activity includes number of calls, meetings, emails, new contacts, deals closed, etc. It’s easy to see top performers and those who might be phoning it in.

Forecasting Deal Revenue: Get a clear view of what’s coming down the pipe associated with the deal stage and its likelihood to close. The benefit of these reports are two-fold. It keeps your sales reps accountable knowing that their estimates will be used in reporting and it also allows you to better forecast.

About Sales & Marketing Alignment Services at Lake One

At Lake One, technology is at the core of all our sales and marketing thinking. We call these services basecamp.

We work with our partners to make sure their basecamp is “right sized” for their organization.
That the goals and strategy are leading the technology choices and not the other way around.
But most of all – that the technology is embraced and providing value to the organization.

Tools To Grow Your Business

5 Account Based Marketing Tools to Execute an Effective ABM Strategy