ABM is the exact opposite of mass marketing and B2B companies are ideally suited for this tactic. It focuses your marketing and sales efforts on only the perfect targets.
Have you heard of ABM?
Many marketing directors haven’t. Most who have don’t use it. Of those who use it, most aren’t getting the results they want. We’re here to fix that.
Our Proprietary Account-Based Marketing Process
Define your USP –
Start with Unique Selling Proposition. This will inform your marketing strategy, which will guide your creative messaging. The greatest ABM campaign in the world won’t generate revenue unless your company has a unique way to solve your prospects’ problems. Use a pain point approach – what does your offering solve for companies who work with you? For instance, “PowerPoint for financial presentations exposes you to a compliance nightmare. We’ve got the best solution.” That example leads with a meaningful pain point, and says you can solve the pain.
Define and stalk your target companies –
Keep the list short, one business sector and restricted to only as many companies as your sales team can manage.
Answering questions like the following will inform everything from your target list to your timeline:
- Does your prospect industry have purchase cycles for solutions like yours?
- What are the hot button issues in their field?
- Will your offering be viewed as new and interesting?
- What are the industry trends and how does your offering interact with them?
- What’s the scuttlebutt on the street about your target company?
- What’s a win for them if your solution works?
You can’t get all the answers you need digging on Google searches. You’ve got to get inventive and even sneaky.
Build your perfect list –
Building your list of targets is an essential part of the process. The most creative and well-executed ABM campaign will fail if it’s sent to the wrong people. But buckle up, because this step can take more time that you imagine.
We start by using Linkedin Sales Navigator to drill into the target job titles in the prospective company, digging through job titles and making decisions about who reports to whom, what their real duties are and drilling into their profiles to determine experience level and certain psychographic traits. We’ll show your team how to spot the precise targets who are motivated to purchase a solution like yours.
Once we like the target list on Sales Navigator, we dig much deeper to understanding our prospects. We get to know their likes and dislikes, bits and pieces about their personal life, and more. This is critical information that will inform the sales team.
We have a tiered approach to targeting that saves you money and gets the right message to the right people.
Get the messaging right –
Guided by your Unique Selling Proposition, ask yourself how you can really help this company? Who needs to hear which message? What are their pain points? The more you know about your target, the more empathetic your outbound marketing can be. Think of it as insight selling, knowing your target’s problem and immediately turning that into a solution shows your knowledge, awareness and expertise. If your company has a solution to their particular pain, then you’ll become more than a vendor. You’ll become a trusted advisor.
Creative is critical –
Creative ideation is where we take your pain-point messaging and turn it into something attention grabbing; something fun that everyone gets excited about. We view creativity as an essential part of an ABM campaign. While a campaign won’t work if it’s sent to the wrong people, it also won’t work if it’s boring as hell. Your targets want to be educated and entertained at the same time.
An important point: the creative messaging cannot be all about you. Start with their pain point, mention their sector, even their company name in the communication.
Executional details make all the difference –
Once an idea is agreed upon, you can dive into the executional layers of actually getting it done and done right. Our standard multi-media campaigns look like this:
- Everyone: Guerilla-like Stunt (in some cases)
- Tier 1: Impact mailer (box, gift, etc.)
- Tier 2: Brochure
- Tier 3: Digital Touchpoint(s) – our influencers’ influencers will receive an email, Linkedin sponsored content, etc.
Each of our targets takes a journey through our campaign. Once they’ve been “touched” by a physical gift or digital communication, what information do they see? How do they get there? This is a very data-driven process that includes unique landing pages, video metric tracking, software that reports the precise moment a target has been on that specific landing page, and many more sneaky data gathering tactics to feed your sales people the exact information they need to make the most productive sales call possible.
This video will give you a sense of how all the elements work together:
Coordinate with your sales team –
Sales / Marketing coordination is one of the keys to success, preferable at every stage of the process. We recommend building a clear structure of which salespeople will be point persons for which individual target prospects. For instance, you will pair up a director-level salesperson on your end with a director-level target. These “pairings” will impact every stage of the contact plan, from early contact on Linkedin, to the final sales outreach efforts.
We recommend including your sales team in the entire process. They should know precisely what’s happening at every step because they will be the ones making contact. Don’t build your ABM campaign in a marketing silo.
Prepare for D-Day –
The day the campaign gets to the prospect, Delivery Day, every element of the campaign must work flawlessly. You’ll know which executives hit the microsite, whether they watched your video, which parts of the video they found most interesting, and whether or not they’re ready to receive a phone call from you. Your sales people make the right phone calls, at the right time, to the right target, about the right pain points. This requires intense focus and full attention.
Long-term lead nurturing –
No matter how great your approach is, your target company may not be ready to buy. From our earlier research, you’ll know the prospect’s buying cycles and will begin careful on-going contact and long-term lead nurturing using Linkedin and your content marketing as bait.
We’ll train your marketing and salespeople on Linkedin Sales Navigator, a powerful solution that turns the Linkedin database into a customer relationship management tool (CRM).