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Last week, i got the honor of being a part of the RevGenius Revcon event as a speaker on the topic of Account Based Marketing. It is cool to be learning and collaborating amongst a group of fun, hard-working people who share a similar set of challenges and goals. If you missed my session, I can't replicate the hype / love that was going down in the chat with so many friends, but i would love to share a quick recap for you here!
WHY ABM IS A TEAM SPORT
It's important to think of ABM as account based engagement as opposed to just marketing. The plays you want to run span multiple teams from marketing to sales to customer success and usually include help from product and operations. If you can build a roster of stakeholders from different sides of the house, you'll have a more aligned (read: successful) approach.
The idea is to assemble teammates from across a number of disciplines and rally everyone around a shared target list and shared goals. This usually means marketing and sales development are very close which has brought a trend of sales development moving out of sales and into marketing 👀!
CALL YOUR SHOT
Part of how we built our account based engagement program was to carefully curate common firmographic characteristics to help us choose our target list. We studied our best fit customers and identified the industries, size, and selling motion of the customers that churned the least, best utilized and adopted, expanded the most, and we built our ICP for our targets around that.
We then had to study our CRM to see what options existed in those ICP characteristics and knew we'd need to grow the CRM with more accounts. We use intent data from Bombora to help us create new potential targets as well as industry specific events.
We use an account scoring model based on firmographics, website engagement, content interaction and more to help us priioritize targets.
SHOOT YOUR SHOT
Once you have your target list and you've called your shot, it's time to start shooting your shot by putting your campaigns out there in the world. You can start simple and build from there. Some ways to get going are to think about bucketing targets by verticals and creating content, landing pages, and emails specific to those groups.
You'll also need to grow the contacts you have at your target accounts. Content syndication and LinkedIn ads are two great ways to achieve that particular objective. We use PureB2B for content syndication at Ambition.
Another thing ABM will guide is your event strategy and roadmap. We host persona and industry based events, sponsor events where we know our target accounts will be (example: we sell into other software sales teams so the Gong and Outreach events are great for us to sponsor).
We also do personalization on the website and in content that aligns to the exact sales development rep the accounts are hearing from to create a personal experience.
THE ALLEYOOP
Back to the team sport concept for a minute, a clutch part of running ABM has been standing up a smarter process that better integrates marketing and sales dev for what we like to call the alleyoop. If marketing can warm up the contacts at the target accounts and pass them to sales dev at the right time, we have a higher success rate vs. true cold-calling. The way we do this ranges, but everything from automating G2 Crowd shoppers into their outreach sequences and score up alerts when a contact has reached "hot status" to direct mail and chat bot plays on behalf of the rep. When we started to spend less time worrying about solving attribution and more time focused on the end goal, we noticed closer alignment and more target account demos scheduled!
Want to see the session in action? Watch the recording!
