Actually …
Four Factors Control Your Account-Based Marketing Success
In the days of yore (say, 2013), people saw that the global adoption of smartphones and social media took place faster than researchers’ ability to understand their impacts on society.
We were all on board — but what the heck were we really doing? We weren’t sure.
Similarly, account-based marketing (ABM) has taken off in recent years, sometimes without a clear picture of its best practices or long-term viability.
Happy for us all, we have data now. And we can see four factors that are significant drivers to ABM success, regardless of industry.
DON’T BE EMBARRASSED IF YOU NEED A REFRESHER.
1. The Committee of Destiny
In ABM, your job is to focus on a narrower group of accounts and leads than a traditional “sell to the entirety of the internet” approach. Typically, that means you’ll be addressing an account’s “buying committee” — that all-important group of deciders who actually drive business.
However, the identities of this buying committee might surprise you:1
In other words:
- In tech, the buying committee is more technical/operational than strategic/managerial.
- People with the word “senior” in their description are the least influential members of the buying committee.
This means that if you want action from your leads, you’d better be able to speak the right technical languages, address the group’s real problems, and convince the day-to-day users and subject matter experts.
How, though?
That starts with personalization.
2. PERSONALLY, WE PREFER PERSONALIZATION
How personal is personalized? Quite, it turns out:
There’s a whole spectrum of possibility here, depending on your available time and resources, and your confidence that you’re reaching the right Committee of Destiny in the right way.
Today, we’re helping many of our clients make a subtle (or not-so-subtle) pivot toward audience specificity in their content, and often this is in support of ABM efforts. A word of caution, though: Just doing a find-and-replace to substitute one audience with another is not personalization. Folks don’t fall for that trickery.
If you’re going to personalize, you need to make damn sure the audience sees — and believes — that you are talking to them. It takes more than vocabulary to do that. If you’re thinking of content, that means you’ll need authentic subject expertise, (probably) new case studies or supporting material, and a sense of your audience’s voice and their pains.
3. Hierarchy of expenditures
You’ve heard the adage, and it’s true: You have to spend money to make money. ABM shows us this reality in the tactics you might choose to address more- or less-focused audiences:
Segmenting ABM tactics
You can guess that the more targeted (ahem … expensive) tactics, like the one-to-one approaches above, are likely to produce a higher yield. Somebody who’s seen a few ABM campaigns come and go will be able to advise you on how to balance your investments here.
4. Role with it
Your Committee of Destiny’s roles aren’t the only ones to consider. In fact, your colleagues and their internal roles are at least as important and ought to shape the goals and processes of your ABM effort.
By its nature, ABM brings sales, marketing, operations, and other internal groups to the same table. That’s part of its magic, but it requires that you consider the perspectives of others as much as your own. A campaign that’s clear as day to you might be clear as mud to them.
The players and their roles
In the diagram above, you can see that this is really a never-ending loop. By the time your ABM campaign has activated new customers, your customer success team ought to be identifying expansion opportunities for upsell/resell and feeding those back into the system with sales/marketing, et al. If that momentum fails, your ABM program is essentially starting over from scratch.
Ready, set, go
ABM is an endurance race, not a quick fix. Still, you can start quickly if you pick a small test group. Here’s a good sequence:
We’ll tell you much more if you want. Reach out anytime.
1Tech Target 2023 Media Consumption Study Worldwide