Account-Based Marketing (ABM): What for and How to?

Our Head of Marketing, Gabriela Scatena wrote this article for our Knowledge Center. Feel free to also engage with our blog to learn more about Salesforce and what it can do for your business. In case you're looking for this content, access it here.

If you, just like me, were used to focusing all your marketing efforts on inbound strategies, this article is completely done for you. But let's take it easy! This doesn't mean your plan hasn't been good. On the contrary, it just means that, depending on your business, many other opportunities can be worked on together to reach customers. Account-based marketing (ABM) is the tactic with the best results!

1. What is an account-based marketing strategy?

According to an Alterra Group survey, 97% of respondents said that ABM has brought their companies a higher ROI than other forms of marketing, but what is this acronym anyway?

Account-based marketing is quite literal! It means that we have personalised content for directed accounts instead of having your communication aimed at a massive volume of people. Your goal is to impact specific prospects. And we all know that personalisation generates results, right?

This concept is not new and started to be used in the late 1990s. B2C and B2B companies realised that a targeted approach to their strategies was more effective. Fun fact: it wasn't until 2013, along with the increase in searches for inbound marketing, that the term started to generate enough traffic to appear on Google Trends. And in my opinion, it is nowadays, with the development and accessibility of automation technologies and tools, that the strategy is more available and possible for more companies.

Of course, the text seems simple, but in approach, the process requires a combination of technology, marketing, sales and service. After all, one of the first steps to implementing planning is identifying the target accounts, but we will get there.

Before, I also wanted to put that the idea is not to replace your other broad-based marketing strategies and tactics for ABM. We are talking about different needs and goals. ABM works best when executed in conjunction with other types of campaigns.

1.1. Who is it for?

B2B companies

The ABM strategy is more suitable for companies that sell complex products and services, which involve several people and/or departments in the purchase decision and, generally, have a higher ticket, which ends up happening more in B2B companies. All these factors will be justified as the strategy will require more time and dedication from the areas involved and a higher cost for the company.

Companies with a smaller range of customers

The strategy is ideal for companies with a small range of potential customers. Because this type of company usually perceives that traditional marketing initiatives (e.g. Google Ads, etc.) for mass actions are less effective in bringing customers.

And these companies reach the fittest customers through sales teams. They seek to achieve the accounts through intense, long-term commercial work using cold-calling, networking or trade fairs. This is where ABM can be helpful, as they need customized marketing and surgical actions to identify profiles and directly develop/impact these accounts and people.

Companies with high-value customers (Customer Core Value)

With a high-value customer, ABM campaigns lower the customer's management costs than the value of the customer. Therefore they can (and should) combine the strategy with their other marketing actions to be more efficient and profitable when it comes to winning over customers.

1.2. Types of ABM

One-to-Many ABM

This practice is the one that works with the most significant volume of accounts, something around 1000 or more. It even allows personalization through accounts around common characteristics such as industry, stage in the sales cycle, location, etc.

One-to-Few ABM

In this type of strategy, it is possible to work using clustering. That is, we are going to group accounts that have similar characteristics. For example, an oil company can group its key accounts according to the final destination of its raw material: fuel, lubricants, etc.

In these cases, the groupings usually have between 5 and 15 similar companies, which allows the creation of campaigns and content that are slightly personalized.

One-to-One ABM

As the name shows, this is the most personalized type. In this case, it is common for companies to build complete documents about each of their accounts of interest (e.g. organizational charts, professional history and type of profile of decision makers, main arguments, sales, market news, etc.).

Based on this data, marketing and sales teams can think of highly personalized actions. The point is that gathering this data and ensuring it is reliable are tasks that take much time. Therefore, this type of practice is only recommended for working with a few key accounts, between 5 and 50.

2. What are the benefits of an ABM strategy?

More efficiency

ABM brings sales optimization. With the marketing team using their budget, time and energy on personalized campaigns that have a greater chance of sales, this increases the productivity and morale of all team members within the company, in addition to making a difference in the final calculation of profits.

More quality

By having more efficient work, Marketing will no longer need to worry so much about volume (some brands may have combined strategies to also work on their awareness). They will already be working on the accounts that interest the sales team, so the quality of accounts and leads areguaranteed (and the highest ROI).

More collaboration

Account-based marketing is only possible with the interaction between the areas of sales, marketing and services. It, therefore, works with metrics, objectives and activities shared and aligned between the teams.

More proactive

The company actively sought out its target customers and approached them with personalized content and strategic information that could facilitate negotiation.

3. How to create an ABM campaign?

There is no right approach to ABM, and each company will feel the most suitable for them. I will put in this article the steps to get organized and plan a campaign. The ideal will always be to adapt to your needs and test (always test and readjust!)

Here at Stellaxius, we have Salesforce as our leading partner, and that's why we also inspire and absorb a lot. From their expertise, one of them is also having four fundamental pillars to support the ABM strategy: identify key accounts, engage buyers everywhere, deliver connected engagements, and cultivate customer relationships.

3.1. Identify and target accounts

This step is one of the most important! Because, at this stage, we define the accounts we target and for which we will create campaigns. I usually divide it into three moments:

Align teams

Firstly, this is the time to align objectives and metrics with the sales and service area.

Defining KPIs and SLAs together will help teams look at the same numbers and know what to expect from each other. And having a baseline will help track evolution, improvements, and opportunities.

This macro view of the project will facilitate monitoring the areas involved and may be used as your new report.

Define the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

Taking advantage of the alignment between the areas, the definition of ICP is a moment where we create a document with the profile of the ideal customers.

The ICP is a concept that resembles that of persona. But instead of being focused on people's characteristics, it maps the features of companies.

An important point for us to arrive at this list of "wish" customers is to evaluate historical data from your sales team and the information acquired after companies became customers.

Below, there's some information that should be in your document and that will give you an idea of who would be the ideal and most profitable customers for your company:

• Occupation area
• Target market
• Company size
• Budget available

Obs.: it is also possible to study situations opposite to these to understand what type of customer your company does not want to attract!

In the case of Stellaxius, we can count on data from ourSalesforce, and I can say that this makes it much more manageable. You also can study the guide created to explain ABM, the area roles, and Salesforce tools and channels that can help with all the processes.

Building your prospect list

With the definition of the ICP, it is necessary to start looking for companies that fit these criteria. Some companies have operational and/or intelligence areas responsible for this area. Other smaller companies will continue to depend on the partnership between the areas involved to search for these companies in channels such as the company's database, Linkedin or specialized websites.

I recommend that this list is short. Of course, this depends on what ABM strategies will follow (one-to-one, one-to-few or one-to-many). But for the pilot program, I would create a list of 50 companies at first. You can constantly update this list over time, but it is recommended that this be done once per semester so you don't lose focus.

A tip that I like is: that once the list is defined, share it with everyone. This way, you ensure that all employees know what their focus accounts are and someone from another area can even have contact with someone and facilitate an initial communication.

3.2. Account personalisation

Now, the list is ready and shared between the company. It's time to cross-check some information and start the process of planning and developing the content to be shared.

Some points that we can evaluate early on to understand the moments of our key prospects:

• Do I have the contact details of any of the companies that are on the target account list?
• If yes, what data do I have?
• Of the accounts on your list, how many contacts have visited your site in the last three months?
• This information is crucial because it even shows the moment the company is about in this service. At Stellaxius, we have this type of information available thanks to MCAE (formerly Pardot).

As for content, remember that document that we shared with the sales and service areas? So, it should also be complemented with information such as needs, pains, main doubts, and themes these people have already interacted with/are interested in.

Some of this data may be based on our existing key accounts. As they are also the basis for building our list, these accounts can be used as templates to create lookalike audiences for one-to-one, one-to-few or one-to-many ABM programs.

Now the marketing team will focus on producing materials (landing pages, emails, e-books, etc.) aimed at the audience on our list. Shipping to target accounts is also usually done in the ways they prefer.

3.3. Engagement orchestration

This topic is about sharing leads and adjusting tactics across marketing, sales, and service teams based on engagement data.

So let's go back to using your data (CRM + MCAE) and choose companies that have already interacted with your brand. Either because they have already accessed a landing page, participated in a webinar, or because they have already accessed the site in the last few months, to be the first that we will approach with personalized content according to the chosen strategy.

3.4. Insights and measurement

One thing that fascinates me most about digital marketing is the possibility of testing, adjusting, using data to improve, and retesting. Nothing is constant, and with ABM, it is no different: Research from the Boston Consulting Group found that 50% of the ABM programs failed in their first attempt — but 75% of scaled ABM programs succeeded after regrouping.

Based on the baseline defined above, monitor the evolution of your strategy. An excellent way to track results is to break them down into three levels:

• The macro can compare the closing rate (sale), average sales ticket and speed of the sales cycle. Bring a comparison between your baseline (non-ABM) and your key accounts.
• The intermediary brings information such as engagement, pipeline, percentage of the pipeline from key accounts, number of key accounts accessing the site, conversion rate, and cost per opportunity, among others, and evaluates the performance of the marketing team.
• The micro consolidates data from campaigns and web metrics. Here the most exciting thing is to compare the results between ABM and non-ABM. Traffic sources, number of sessions, and behaviour on the site (session duration, bounce rate, etc.) can bring good insights to the project.

3.5. Make improvements

Here it is time to evaluate your pilot project with data aligned once again, the areas involved in the defined objectives, and if there is room for improvement and new tests.

The data will help to understand whether the final result was positive, how much the project affected the teams' budget, timings and internal processes and the company's revenue, for example. And this assessment will be fundamental for the next steps!

Therefore, it is worth emphasizing that ABM requires a significant change in the processes of the marketing and sales teams. This is challenging for some companies. But remember, if you plan a solid pilot project, you'll gain the experience you need to find the best format for your business.

Did you like the article? Do you have any doubts? Do not hesitate and get in touch with me. I would love to discuss this matter with you a little more. Anyways, it is always good to have different points of view and research a series of sources. For example, here you will find tips and the InsideView CMO's experience with ABM.