Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is one of the most effective strategies for maximizing sales and marketing ROI, growing revenue and delivering long-term value for B2B companies. Focus on the quality vs. quantity of prospects by identifying fit, intent, recency and engagement. Enable marketing and sales teams to work towards the same objective of increasing a company’s bottom line, writes, Peter Herbert, CMO, Fullstory.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is proving to be one of the most effective strategies for maximizing sales and marketing ROIOpens a new window , growing revenueOpens a new window and delivering long-term Opens a new window value for B2B companies. What makes ABM so powerful is the fact that it gives sales teams the ability to strike precisely when the iron is hot—to reach out to prospects when they know with a strong degree of confidence that they are in-market for your solution. The right customer, right time, right channel approach not only saves marketing and sales a tremendous amount of time, but also substantially increases conversion rates,deal size, and retention while also creating a better experience for buyers.
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But implementing and executing a successful ABM strategy can be hard work. There’s no shortage of solutions on the market that claim to be the answer to all of your ABM problems, so simply sorting the wheat from the chaff on the technology front can be a hurdle. That’s especially true when those platforms are a black box solution, offering no real insight into the “magic†that goes on under the hood. ABM absolutely requires a smart technology, but it also requires easy access to inights for sales and marketing and incredibly tight process to know who, why, when and how to engage with customers.
Are you Missing the Full Story?
At FullStory, we believe that everyone benefits from from a more perfect online experience. To the product managers, marketers, developers, support teams, CSMs, and UX designers who use our software, exceptional customer experiences online are essential. In fact, great customer experiences are revenue to them! It would be easy to assume that any company with a website or SaaS product is a prospect.
Who doesn’t want deep insight into how people see and use their new websites, engage with that new brand and messaging, flow through their online checkout or trial signup process, and navigate new features? Who doesn’t want to identify bugs, slow web pages, broken forms, and rage clicksOpens a new window ?, The reality is, however, as much as we hate to admit it, we’re not always a perfect fit for everyone. But when we are, we want to know about it.
However, finding companies that fit an Ideal Customer Profile, your target market, is a bigger challenge than it might seem. I’ve been at several companies where databases have been built on broad-based, inbound lead generation and an increasing number of sales reps eager to put new accounts into the CRM. Rarely have those databases done a good job of representing the sweet spot of the market – the accounts most likely to buy. In fact, when I first started ABM (a couple companies ago), we identified target accounts by filtering our existing database on a few points of data such as geography, employee size, revenue, and maybe some data about their existing technology stack if we were lucky. There was still a lot of educated guesswork.
And, these were just the companies we knew about— for many companies, simply looking at your database without building your target market in your CRM can mean leaving a lot of opportunity and potential revenue on the table because you just don’t know who else is out there.
For some companies, the blind spot in your target market could be massive.On the other hand, the ability to discover even a small percentage of missed market could have a huge impact for companies with many potential customers or a few very large ones. For this reason, I have made target market identification and target account data a priority as a marketing discipline.Â
The Key to Successful ABM: Stoking the FIRE
The challenges I first encountered implementing ABM are not unique. Identifying high-value prospects requires surfacing not only new accounts that you didn’t know existed but also those among them that are actually worth spending your time to cultivate. For this, the FIRE strategy is a game-changer. Teams I have led at three companies, including FullStory, use this method to activate demand in the target market without relying primarily on form fills and booth scans. FIRE works like this:
- Fit— Which accounts are a good match for your product or service? To quote one of the marketers I most respect, Matt Amundson of Everstring (the AI-based platform I use to surface best-fit accounts),“There’s no point in even running ABM if you don’t know what accounts you should be marketing to.It could be that a lead is actually interested, but still not a good fit. Sales needs to be able to make those determinations before they spend a lot of time nurturing a prospect who may never convert.†What determines fit is different for every business. It could be industry or vertical market, company size, existing technology stack, geographic location or any other type of broad or specific parameters that make sense based on your ideal customer profile or your current best customers. The bottom line is that your model is going to be far better with an AI-powered computer brain that considers thouands of data points than simple filtering on a few data points.
- Intent—Who’s doing research and signaling intent to buy? Even if they’re a great fit, leads may not be in-market for your solution. Could you spend time convincing them of how badly they need it? Certainly. But, wouldn’t it be better to know that they’re already researching?? Uncovering intent data that goes beyond your own field of view (your website), that taps into the vast expanse of the internet, provides broader visibility into who’s researching your space Identifying intent greases the gears and enables marketing and sales to reach out knowing the prospect understands the value prop and is educated on the options. If the prospect has indicated they’re ready to buy, your mission is to make sure it’s from you.
- Recency—How long has it been since the account showed intent or engaged? In order to strike while the iron is hot, it must actually still BE hot. By filtering for recency as part of an ABM strategy, marketing and sales can distinguish prospects that are very likely still in-market from those who are over it—perhaps because they’ve gone another direction or already purchased from a competitor. Recency data can help you focus on just-in-time outreach for great fit, in-market prospects.
- Engagement—When and how are prospects engaging with your brand? This could be anything from visiting your booth at an event to downloading a whitepaper. This gives you a better sense of where prospects might be in the funnel and measure how your efforts are increasing engagement. But, layered together with fit, intent and recency, this combination results in a powerful story of your relationship with the buyer—you know them, and they know you. It’s time to seal the deal and make it official. Finally, engagement should be viewed in a comprehensive way – ideally you are looking at both known and anonymous contacts engagement, both online engagement and real human interaction. Don’t overvalue anonymous web engagement, measure all forms of engagement, particularly with the right personas, to really understand it.
Also Read:Â 3 Ways ABM will Evolve in 2018Opens a new window
Start Smaller to Grow Bigger
With a FIRE-based ABM strategy, your team can focus on quality, not volume. They can be selective about who to go after and spend more time nurturing high-value prospects who are far more qualified. Yes, that means your account list may be smaller, but the value gained from aligning the marketing, sales development and sales teams and their coordinated account-based plays onto a smaller list of highly-qualified prospects is far superior for many B2B businesses to casting a wider net.
Solutions like EverString that operationalize FIRE add incredible speed, efficiency and agility to this process, giving go-to-market teams a new model for focusing campaigns and outreach as well as a game-changing way to activate progression of target accounts through the buying journey. It also helps to standardize processes based on a data-driven approach. Rather than relying on hunch and intuition—which may vary between marketing and sales—a FIRE-based approach ensures that marketing and sales are pursuing the same objectives, which enhances the performance of both, strengthens the relationship and delivers measurable business growth.