Identifying High-Value accounts
You have spent a lot of time identifying your target customers, “best fit” clients, and buyer personas. While all this information is valuable for defining and guiding your marketing strategy, it doesn’t specify which accounts you should be targeting.
Analyze your existing customer base and identify which accounts were most profitable for the company, these are the accounts that should define your ideal customer. This often breaks down to the most profitable, long-term, happy customers who are a pleasure to work with. They are a strong fit for your company, enjoy success with your solutions, and deliver the greatest lifetime value. Armed with this information you can now go out and find look-a-like companies, these are companies with similar needs and budgets to your best fit accounts.
Hierarchy Mapping
When a business is making a significant purchase or investment in your products and services, there are often multiple people involved in the decision. These individuals are known as stakeholders. Your sales and marketing team will need to help drive consensus among the key stakeholders throughout the decision-making process. Identify those individuals who can wield influence on the final buying decision. These are the people you need to engage and pursued to take action.
Stakeholders can include members of the Executive branch, Management, and Staff. Your job is to identify who the decision-makers are vs those who hold influence.
Individual contacts are important, but in the context of the entire account. You need to connect the concerns and needs of each stakeholder back to their objectives within the target account.
Targeted Campaigns
When building a targeting campaign within your ABM strategy it is important to think about the account’s buying cycle. You want to create personalized campaigns to nurture relationships. It is paramount that you offer educational materials and consultation at the appropriate times in the account’s buying cycle.
Start by aligning your content and messaging to the interest, needs, and challenges of each account stakeholder. Ideally, you will have valuable content for each stakeholder.
For example:
- CEO - How does your solutions solve problems while reducing friction in your target accounts current process?
- Manager - How does your solution align with their budget and goals?
- User - How does your solution help with their jobs to be done?
You probably already have a terrific message to the user, the features and benefits of your solution are ideal for their situation, this is “preaching to the choir”. If the other key stakeholders do not have the same objectives then this messaging will not resonate with them, and they are less likely to consider your solutions.
How to create personalized content?
- Understand what stakeholders believe. Research the existing content related to your solution and look for an opportunity to inject yourself as an expert.
- Develop a well-informed point of view. Position yourself as an expert in the field and make it clear you have the authority to take a definitive stand on the subject.
- Deliver value by example. Support your viewpoint with demonstrations of your solution in action.
Personalizing your message goes beyond adding {insert name here} to an email or document. Present your solutions as they relate to solving your target account’s needs at each stakeholder level.
Identify Optimal Channels
This is where your marketing team will step up and deliver the content you have so carefully created to the stakeholders in the places where they are most likely to see it. This is going to vary by role and industry. There is no single channel to reach all stakeholders so do not assume you can apply a one-size-fits-all strategy.
Develop the Playbook
Like any great team, your sales and marketing department will need clear guidance on roles and responsibilities. Creating a playbook that outlines who does what and when will help define these roles and responsibilities. Identify the tactics that both sales and marketing will use to engage contacts within the target accounts in order to engage. Design a cadence for your campaigns which maps out each touchpoint with the appropriate channel, messaging, and content.
Execute Campaigns
Your sales and marketing teams engage with the target accounts on a stakeholder level implementing your personalized strategy. Campaigns will include a variety of tactics including: email, special events, direct mail, ads, social media, and more. Keeping in mind that relationships drive a successful ABM strategy, look for opportunity to present your message and introduce your solutions to individual contacts within the target account.
Measure and Optimize
Measuring the success of ABM requires a more holistic approach. In other marketing strategies, you can measure ROI with simple formulas. A lead generation campaign would measure success based on the number of leads generated, but not necessarily the revenue generated by those leads.
Depending on the revenue-based goals you established in the early stages of your ABM strategy you will measure the success of your strategy by your pipeline, not your funnel. You care about moving accounts through the purchasing process, not the individual stakeholder.
Track account engagement, tally opportunities created and deals won along with their value. Commit to the strategy long enough to get measurable results and then adjust your strategy accordingly. Identify successful tactics, and messaging - what made them successful compared to tactics and messaging that failed to generate results?