Account-based marketing (ABM) is gaining prominence in the B2B industry so much so that according to SiriusDecisions, over 90% of companies treat ABM as an essential component of their go-to-market strategy. Also, FlipMyFunnel has found out that companies using ABM, generate 208% more ROI on their marketing activities.
These two facts are potent enough for decision makers along with the marketing and sales departments to convince on the importance of ABM. However, the problem lies in both departments not being in sync with each other.
Your marketing and sales departments need to be in harmony for ABM to work. KTS can help you leverage ABM by aligning sales and marketing activities in the following ways:
1. Identifying the Key Target Accounts
You should begin by defining the key, high-value accounts to leverage ABM. Marketing and sales should come together with a list of prospects and agree on a few, high-impact accounts that would bring in the maximum results.
Doing this will allow both marketing and sales to align smarketing (Sales+Marketing) campaigns and send out coherent messaging.
2. Researching the Prospects
Once sales and marketing have agreed on a list of prospects, the next step is to find more information about your key accounts, their organizational structure, who the decision makers are, etc. You can also do an exercise of developing ideal persona templates.
Based on the analytics data, marketing can come up with the demographic and geographic characteristics, typical job designations, etc.
Using sales conversations and data, the sales team can contribute in terms of frequently asked questions, commonly faced problems, individual interests and preferences. By combining this data, you can get to know your prospects better.
3. Create Sales Enablement Content
According to a research by Aberdeen, salespeople spend up to 43 hours each month in finding sales information. A lot of it can be saved by implementing a sales enablement program. Marketing can contribute in this regard by developing content that converts, designing an onboarding and training program by coordinating with sales.
Marketers need to take into account the ideal buyers and the buyer’s journey and crafting content that is targeted at each step of the journey.
4. Run Coordinated Campaigns
This is the stage where the rubber meets the road. Marketing and sales both need to run campaigns in harmony. Sales can get in touch with prospects on a one-on-one basis and marketers can re-engage them through remarketing campaigns via social media and display ads.
Along with this, sales need to run their set of campaigns while the marketing department needs to engage the prospects through social media, email marketing, website, and other marketing avenues.
5. Encourage Transparency
Once the system is put into practice, you should start seeing results after some time. At this stage, the responsibility of marketing is to communicate the actions of prospects to the sales team and vice versa.
Salespeople also need to communicate the prospect updates on whether the prospect converted or not in a timely manner to the marketing department.
6. Analyze and Optimize
Marketers and salespeople should conduct meetings on a frequent basis to analyze the outcomes of ABM activities. The marketing and sales departments should discuss metrics that are relevant to the ABM process. They should also discuss any new leads generated in the process and their status.
The teams should also discuss which activities did not succeed, what went wrong and whether they should pursue these activities again by making certain tweaks or move on altogether.
The success of ABM depends on the marketing and sales departments are on the same page. You can bring KTS on board to speed up the ABM activities of your organization.
Need Expert Advice?
KTS is a full service growth acceleration and digital marketing company with expertise in demand generation, content creation and marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC), social media management, contact discovery and list building etc. Reach out to us to know more about how we can help your business to add value and increase sales revenues.
