A 5 Step Process to Kick Start Your Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Strategy

Are you one of the thousands of marketing leaders working on getting your account-based marketing strategy off to a great start?

We have been talking to a lot of customers and we figured that’s what marketers have been struggling with. Every marketer knows that account-based marketing (ABM) is going to help them achieve their targets. Every leader knows that account-based marketing (ABM) is going to help him align his sales and marketing teams around the same targeted accounts.

But most marketers don’t know where to start. They don’t know which target accounts they need to go after and they don’t know how to begin to engage with them. In this blog post, we are going to break down how to kick start your account-based marketing strategy (ABM) in a simple 5-step process.

#1 Analyze your best customers

The first step towards kick-starting your account-based marketing strategy (ABM) is to find more prospects that look like your best customers. Engage with your operations and finance teams and get a list of your top 20% to 25% of your best customers in terms of the revenue they bring to your business, retention rate, and profitability. Understand what is it about these 20% to 25% of your customers that separates them from the rest. How large are they? Where do they operate? How similar are their goals and challenges? You could use SMARTe data platform to get a better idea of their industry base, revenue characteristics, size, technographics, and more.

#2 Identify more companies that look like your best customers

Search for prospects who are similar to your best customers in terms of revenue base, employee size, installed technologies, and more. A large dataset of matched accounts certainly looks impressive, but if those accounts are not qualified with the right contacts, it might not deliver results. Identify important people or prospects that you should target in these companies. For instance, if you sell into the technology team, you need to identify who are the target prospects at those companies that look like your best customers. You need to understand that there is a chance that you might end up with a list of 5000 companies and 20000 contacts in those companies that look like your best customers. While that is a great list to start prospecting with, the list might not be qualified enough for you to execute a comprehensive account-based marketing (ABM) program. You might also want to categorize this list into segments and run campaigns that are more specialized and personalized to that particular sub-segment.

#3 Understand Your target accounts and prospects

Gather account intelligence like recent funding or a recent senior executive move and find ways to leverage this change. You might also want to find out things like an org structure to really begin to understand who are the right contacts you should engage within the shortlisted accounts. Now, that you possess intelligence on these accounts and you have intelligence on the key prospects within those accounts, you need to move ahead and rank these accounts and prospects.

#4 Rank your target accounts and prospects

Of all these accounts, you need to know which of these accounts are most likely to purchase my product or at least be interested to engage with me. Rank these accounts in terms of the likelihood of making a purchase or engaging with you. Data platforms like SMARTe can help you arrive at a list of prospects who are currently in the market to make a purchase. Rate those 5000 companies on a scale of 1 to 10 and rate the contacts within those companies on a scale of 1 to 10.

#5 Engage

After completing steps 1 to 4, you might at a list of say, 300 companies and 3 to 5 contacts within those 300 companies. You might want to start engaging with these prospects and companies first and later expand beyond that. Start with your top targets, build out your best account-based marketing (ABM) strategies, and develop them as you grow bigger. Make sure your sales, marketing, and customer success teams are aligned around those target accounts. Run email campaigns, direct mail campaigns, cold calling campaigns, and advertising campaigns in harmony to build your account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. But if you haven’t done steps 1 through 4 well enough using data, it doesn’t matter how great your engagement is and how efficient your sales team is, your account-based marketing strategy (ABM) is bound to fail.

We hope this post helped you get your account-based marketing (ABM) strategy off to a great start. To know more about how SMARTe data platform can help you, click here to reach out to one of our experts today.