Taking an account-based marketing (ABM) approach pinpoints your focus on a few high-opportunity, high-value accounts who are more likely to pay attention to your communications because they actually need your product and have the budget for it.
With ABM, Marketing and Sales collaborate to remove less-than-valuable accounts and, instead, focus marketing resources on mutually identified key prospects - engaging them with more targeted and personalized communications. ABM methodology addresses many of the challenges B2B marketers face when trying to connect with prospects, including:
- Working with sales and marketing silos - ABM bridges the communication and workflow gaps between marketing and sales because both teams are now responsible for generating revenue and ROI from a single account. Also, instead of a linear lead-generating process from marketing to sales, the teams work in tandem, with leads flowing both ways to ensure prospects are qualified, decision makers identified, and objections addressed before closing can commence.
- Getting lost in the noise - As technology advances, as more competitors emerge, and as more information clutters the buyer’s inbox, your message will likely get lost. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping you can “catch” some customers, adopting account-based management focuses only on accounts that truly matter. Communicating to these accounts with a more targeted and personalized message will grab the prospect’s attention and ensure your message gets read.
- Making customer experience more personalized - Merely offering product information is no longer enough to connect with in today’s more sophisticated customers. They want their pain points addressed, their questions answered, their concerns assuaged. This requires personalization, not just as an afterthought, but as part of crafting the strategy. In account-based marketing, you don’t target companies, but the needs and wants of specific individuals and roles within these companies.
- Dealing with “quantity over quality” leads - What to do with leads that simply languish? Move up to account-based management, in which you identify your most valuable accounts, pinpoint individuals within those accounts whom you want to target, reach out to these targets with relevant and fully customized messaging, and watch your qualified leads grow – delivering higher ROI. By treating accounts as individuals, there’s no wasted time, squandered efforts, or wrong guesses.
- Mining data for success - True personalization is anticipating and answering your prospect’s needs, which requires that you mine customer data. With account-based management, marketing and sales work together - with marketing drawing on customer information to create targeted content and messaging and sales providing marketing with feedback on how prospects understand and feel about the messages.
Kate Owen, Director of Strategic Client Marketing & Services at Capita, said, “The best ABMers come from a PR background because they are better able to ‘read’ their clients…”
When you’re ready to align your sales and marketing team and sell directly to your best-fit, best-value prospects, look up K2 Global Communications - a PR and account-based marketing group who's has spent more than 15 years synching communications to your business goals.