6 Steps to Execute Account Based Marketing
What does the process of ABM look like?
If you read my previous blog on why Account Based Marketing (ABM) is probably the best approach if you wish to target and sell to enterprise level customers, it’s the right time to jump into the “how” of ABM. I am laying down the aspects of execution of ABM in your startup. But mind it, the pointers below are not sequential. Rather, the flow of the blog is designed for your in-depth understanding of the nitty gritty of the overall process.
So, let’s begin with probably the most important layer of ABM:
1. (Hyper) Personalisation
Whatever content you send an Account’s way, you need to do it in a language that resonates with them. So, if you are talking to Dell, an Account based Marketing approach means that your website could have a specific landing page which discusses only the use cases relevant to Dell. Imagine their CIO landing on the page and it has an image of Dell’s headquarters, and discusses the problems their Chairman highlighted in their annual report of the year, and talks about the different ways you can solve a few of those problems - DIRECT and up to the point! Would you still be doubtful of the impact it will have on the CIO? No! You are likely to get a meeting request in the next few seconds! Not just that, when you are showing an ad to the Marketing persona of Dell, it should discuss the Marketing or Customer Experience related use cases or benefits that Dell can expect from your product. If it’s targeted at the CIO, then technology related or since a CIO is expected to hold a Management level position, maybe the benefits your technology can impart to their organisation. So think specific while creating your content.
But, what that requires is:
2. An in-depth understanding of your market and customers
This means two things: One, we need to understand our target market properly, which means we should know the accounts we are going after. But what this does not mean is “Financial Organisations with Revenue > $ABC; employee size > 5000;” etc. but ‘names’ of those companies. What you also need to know is the focus areas, , pain points, etc. of those organisations. This is where market research helps, supplemented with the information sales brings from on ground understanding of accounts.
Then within these organisations, we need to understand the buying committee in depth - buyer personas for each of them based on extensive research based on their behaviours.
But since the entire process of Account Based Marketing needs a lot of energy and resources, we need to prioritise the accounts to go after. How do we do that? By:
3. Understanding “Intent” of the target companies / personas.
According to me, Intent is one of the most important word in the ABM dictionary. What it means is the “why” behind the behaviour of a persona within an account or the account itself for that matter - why is someone consuming a particular piece of content and why not the other one; why a person is searching for XYZ on the internet, why an account is taking so long to come back with data for pilot, etc. etc.
Today, there are tools out there like DemandBase, Bomborra which tell you the companies in your target list which are “searching” for topics that are relevant to you. For example, if you had Dell in your target account list as one of the large enterprise account with a potential revenue of a $100k, imagine the tool tells you that someone from the company was searching for a product like yours last week. I don’t need to emphasise how excited you will get hearing that. Not just that, it will make sense for you to customise your landing pages and create other targeted collaterals, created especially for them, and channelise your Sales focus on that account rather than hunting for deals in random accounts.
But this is just one way of gathering intent. As a startup, you can identify intent of a particular persona / account on your own based on the kind of content people from their target accounts are consuming. Automation tools allows you to measure all of that today - to the level of how many impressions of what advertisement did what guy in what company see, and which ad he chose to click on after how many impressions, etc. This can help you understand the use case that interested him - or didn’t interest him for that matter; how eager is he to know more about this particular topic; etc.
But in order to understand intent of your customers this way, you will need to deliver relevant content to them where they are (a particular tech website for example). This needs you to:
4. Deliver them the right content, at the right time
There are Account Based Advertising tools which can go after a single persona with a single account and show your display ads, Linked ads, etc, to that person depending on his behaviour or interactions online. With that, you not only save money by not showing your ad to a broad group (and hence save of wastage or leakage of impressions), but you can also be very specific in your messaging for the persona you are targeting. If you really want them to engage with your content, you need to make it very “relevant” for them. For that, you need to understand something called the:
5. Buyer’s Journey
A Buyer’s Journey is what every buyer in the buying committee of an organisation goes through before you close the deal! It generally has three stages:
Awareness (when the person is understanding “why” he should solve the problem your product solves. For example, you will have to first convince the Product Head from Samsung why they should technology in addition to their existing team of Ivy Leaguer scientists if they really want to speed up production on new types of screens. For another example, the blog that preceded this convinced you why you should change the way you market and use an Account Based Marketing approach.)
Consideration (when the person is going through the process of getting convinced on how they can solve the problem, or why he should solve the problem now, and not later. For example, you will need to convince the Product Head on why it is time to invest in technology oriented solutions like yours because Apple has already started building a team of ML scientists who will be working on speeding up roll out of new products. “Better late, than never.” For another example, this blog is trying to convince you how you could implement ABM to target your enterprise level accounts.)
Conversion (when the person is trying to make a decision on which service provider to onboard to solve the problem. For another example, after this blog, maybe you would want to know about startup growth consultants like me who can help you implement this for your startup, and what is good about each. Taking you to my testimonials where some promising entrepreneurs say really good things about me might be good way to convince of how I will be a promising fit to help you achieve your goals)
That said, you might have buyers in different stages of the journey already and you need to understand their intent based on their engagement with your content, that is tailored to different stages of the journey. If they interact with Consideration stage content, you know what the person would like to learn about next. Show them that, and not the Awareness level content - they are already past that stage.
But in order to do some much with so many accounts in your target list, you will need:
6. A Healthy Marketing Tech Stack
The world of Marketing technology is exploding and we have over 6000 vendors today dealing in this space. All of them, trying to make one or the other aspect of the above possible for you. And it’s only because of them that ABM can now be scaled up to large markets, which otherwise wouldn’t be possible to do beyond 30 -40 accounts every quarter for an average sized company.
You can do a one to one ABM (talking directly to Samsung); a one to few ABM (talking to all the smartphone giants like Samsung); and one to many (talking to the entire smartphone vertical in the US).
Rest, we will dive deeper into each part of the process in the coming weeks.
About the Author
Sahil Batra is a Fractional CMO, working closely with global startups, helping them steer the ship and grow in the right direction.
Know more here.
