How do you market to Enterprise accounts?

Well, let me begin with an analogy. Have you ever hunted for a house for your family - whether to buy or to take it on lease? What everyone in the family (spouse and the kids) does is evaluate that offering (called house) from their own particular context. Some would evaluate the amount of sunlight in their room, some would look at the kitchen, some at the safety aspects for the kids, some at the bathroom, etc. Unless everyone is happy (or ready to compromise on a few things), the dealer would never be able to sell the house. 

That’s exactly what happens when we make a B2B sale. If you were selling a technology product to a restaurant chain that will make it possible for them for them to deliver a better customer experience in their restaurants, you would need to convince the entire ‘family’ of the brand - CMO (owner of customer experience), Operations folks (owner of on-ground delivery of that experience); CIO (owner of technology integrations), and even the CEO maybe (owner of overall decisions if it needs, say, changes in stores across the world). In short, the family’s decision maker, their spouse and children - you will need to convince them all if you want the sale to go through. And mind it - everyone will look at it from their own individual lenses - and judge the offering based on how it will impact their respective lives.

This is where Account Based Marketing (ABM) comes in - focussing on not the target ‘market,’ but the target ‘account’ aka organisation as a market in itself. An account could have:

1. A buyer, whose department will actually be benefitting from the product;

2. A decision maker, who could just put his foot down and say no to budgeting your product in for the year;

3. A technology guy who can simply refuse to accept your product if he doesn’t think it suits his tech beliefs or infrastructure;

4. An end user who will actually use the product who can just go up and say it doesn’t work because he thinks using your product means more work for him;

5. An influencer from another department who has seen the team use a similar product in previous company and wants them to look at it instead because he thinks it was really nice;

6. An outside consultant who could tell the team that there’s another and a batter way to solve the problem that your product solves;

7. etc.

On the surface, your sales folks might just be talking to the IT manager in their sales calls, and they might be reporting back the excitement he is showing towards the product, but do you think you could make the sale go through without convincing everyone (the part of the family currently NOT visible to you) of the product’s benefits to them or the organisation? Would you rely on the IT Manager and his convincing skills and credibility within the organisation for your sale to go through? You don’t want to be so naive. Which means that you need to sell your idea to this entire family - called the buying committee in B2B lingo. 

Why shift our approach to ABM from traditional marketing?

That’s a genuine question, and you won’t be the first one if you have it. But you will be surprised to know what the marketing world thinks about ABM. In one of the biggest B2B Marketing conferences early this year, I heard a speaker saying, “By 2024, ABM will be the only way how B2B organisations will be marketing themselves.” Now that statement was not a slip, but a confident remark because ABM is nothing but an extension of traditional marketing. It brings the power of technology and analytics into traditional marketing, and scale it to levels, and make it effective to the extent not possible before. So, rest assured, the basic principles of marketing remain the same. We won’t defy Philip Kotler’s approach to marketing ever - don’t worry! We will just make a few tweaks to how organisations have been marketing traditionally to help you achieve the following:

1. A far easier penetration into the C-Suite of enterprises

2. Upto 50% higher deal size from the same level of accounts

3. Upto 67% better at closing deals as a result of sync that develops between Marketing and Sales

Well, that’s just a few pieces of statistics among many. For a longer list of such stats highlighting benefits of ABM, this page by Rollworks (an ABM platform) would be a good reference. 

What does it take to build an ABM program for your startup?

What is required for this approach is that you have as much information as you can possibly gather about each of your customers. What this entails is a close alignment between Sales and Marketing so they can work as one team where Marketing brings behavioural intelligence from the digital interactions they are able to have with the customers through content and from other online sources, and Sales brings other on-field intelligence about what is happening within those accounts. Thought this is where it just begins, its value in Account Based Marketing cannot be undermined. Your entire ABM plan can fall flat on its face if you are unable to bring your marketers and sales folks to work together as one team, with a single larger goal of getting revenue for the startup.

Beyond that, it’s important to:

1. Select the right type of accounts to invest your energy in 

2. Use several (but right) channels to engage with the buyers in the selected accounts - to cover the ground fully and give your best to convert the account into a customer

3. Measure ROI of every interaction and touchpoint you have with the customers.

This is what Account Based Marketing is - in a nutshell of course.

Continue to read on here, if you want to learn about the nitty gritty of how to execute Account Based Marketing for your startup.