Traditional marketing casts a wide net, hoping to catch a few leads that might convert. But what if you could focus on landing the big fish – the high-value accounts that can truly transform your business? ABM helps you stop wasting time on unqualified leads and start targeting the right accounts.
Let’s review the highlights from each step in the process:
1. Align Sales & Marketing
ABM by its very nature unites sales and marketing. Marketing and sales teams work independently, but in unison to deliver an effective program. Your plan should include jointly defining ideal accounts, establishing unified goals and KPIs, as well as how each team will function within collaborative workflows.
Establish Goals & Funnel Metrics
ABM, like any marketing strategy, begins with defining what success looks like. Setting clear goals will help keep the marketing strategy aligned with business objectives and ensure that marketing activity is focused on achieving those goals. ABM goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
To set accurate goals, analyze the customer journey to understand the variables that lead to the sale:
_______ (#) Number of Prospects Needed
_______ (#) Number of Qualified Leads Needed
_______ (%) Average Close rate
_______ (#) Number of new accounts needed
_______ ($) Average deal/account size
_______ ($) New Business Revenue Goal (over 12 months)
What are the funnel metrics for your organization?
Which metric could be improved with a more targeted approach?
Here’s a simple example for a company that wants to increase revenue by $6 million over a 12 month period.
With ABM, your close rates should improve as you learn to target the right accounts and build relationships with them more effectively.
If you know you need 1500 new qualified leads per year, that equals 125 per month. That means your marketing tactics and budget need a realistic chance of generating that many leads, and you must have enough salespeople to process that many leads per month. If any of the metrics in the funnel don’t seem realistic, then your strategy and your goals may need to be adjusted to align with reality.
With goals this clear, both sales and marketing can see where to focus their time and budgets to reach this many accounts. That leads us to the next step of determining the scale of your ABM activities based on your established goals and funnel metrics.
2. Determine Scale
One of the most important things to know about ABM is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. You can deploy different approaches for different account tiers. ABM purists would tell you to focus on as few prospects as possible, but our experience is that you should balance your effort differently for your Top 10 and Top 50 target accounts and use more traditional marketing methods for Top 500 prospects. For example, your Top 10 might garner C-level relationship investment, whereas the Top 500 may be more programmatic or automated.
3. Select Accounts
Finding the right high-value accounts to target is the key to unlocking ABMs effectiveness. In this step, you will develop your Ideal Customer Profile. To do this, we suggest looking for commonalities among your current customers, including revenue, headcount, industry, location, function, job title, and seniority.
Data sources that help you acquire a list of targeted companies and contacts for your team to pursue based on your Ideal Customer Profile are now readily available. These data companies can provide contact information for key influencers and decision-makers, including email addresses, work phones, mobile phones, LinkedIn profile URLs, and more.
The more sophisticated data sources also provide intent data that reveals which of your targeted companies are searching for your type of products and which have done so most recently (last 24 hours, last week, last 30 days, etc). This can be highly valuable in narrowing in on the warmest accounts. Other data is also available, such as which companies have received funding recently, which have been in the news lately, and even which software they use (great for SAAS companies to target competitor accounts).
You can also use these data sources to determine which companies are visiting your website. This helps you determine how your target accounts respond to your sales and marketing efforts and discover new accounts that are not on your radar yet.
4. Create Workflows
ABM collaboration workflows outline how sales and marketing will work together to create targeted campaigns for high-value accounts. This dream team personalizes messaging, streamlines lead nurturing and ensures a seamless handoff from marketing to sales, ultimately driving higher conversion rates and bigger wins.
Below is an example of a 30-day workflow. Yellow items are tasks done by marketing (some automation technology involved), and blue items are done by sales. The split of tasks may be different for any given company based on capacity, bandwidth, and technology available.
Marketing should collaborate with sales to create scripts and message templates for phone calls, LinkedIn connection requests, personal emails, and even text messages to ensure brand consistency and alignment with best practices and decision-making criteria.
The more transparency between the teams, the better. As your teams try out these workflows, it’s important to know that each team is fulfilling their commitment to the process to build trust. It’s also important to get feedback from each team to know how to adjust and improve tactics. Obviously, a CRM helps both teams see activity, and reports should be easily accessible and shared often across teams.
5. Build Campaigns
Create aligned content tailored to your selected accounts based on your determined scale. Typical B2B campaigns include personalized landing pages, how-to guides, email sequences, LinkedIn ads and posts, text message drips, webinars, and more. Trade shows, Direct mail, referral programs, and other non-digital entry points are often part of a B2B ABM strategy as well. Whichever channels you choose, we believe that the most engaging content is purpose-led and relationship-driven and demonstrates how you’ve solved your ideal customer’s challenges.
What part of your campaigns and content could be more purpose-led?
Are there parts of your funnel that need more attention or improvement?
6. Measure & Optimize
Just like steering a ship, successful ABM requires constant monitoring and adjustments. You need to track key metrics like website visits from target accounts, engagement with personalized content, and conversion rates to qualified leads. By analyzing this data, you can refine your messaging, identify what resonates most, and ultimately optimize your ABM strategy for maximum ROI. Let’s explore the essential ABM KPIs that will help you evaluate the success of your ABM initiatives.
Metrics should line up with your determined scale. For Top 10 and Top 50, you should measure account level activity. For Top 500, you should measure broader channel activity.
A B M M A R K E T I N G M E T R I C S
Opportunities generated from target accounts (#, $)
Revenue generated from target accounts ($)
Customer lifetime value (Total $, Avg $)
A B M S A L E S M E T R I C S
Opportunities generated from target accounts (#, $)
Revenue generated from target accounts ($)
Customer lifetime value (Total $, Avg $)
Just like steering a ship, successful ABM requires constant monitoring and adjustments. You need to track key metrics like website visits from target accounts, engagement with personalized content, and conversion rates to qualified leads. By analyzing this data, you can refine your messaging, identify what resonates most, and ultimately optimize your ABM strategy for maximum ROI. Let’s explore the essential ABM KPIs that will help you evaluate the success of your ABM initiatives.
1. Account Engagement Score (AES)
AES measures the level of engagement and interaction with your target accounts. It assesses how well your ABM campaigns resonate with prospects and if they are actively responding to your outreach efforts.
2. Account Conversion Rate (ACR)
ACR tracks the percentage of target accounts that have converted into paying customers. A high ACR indicates that your ABM strategy is effectively nurturing and converting accounts.
3. Deal Velocity
Deal velocity measures the speed at which deals progress from initial contact to conversion. A shorter deal velocity implies that your ABM efforts are driving efficient sales cycles.
4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV assesses the long-term value of customers acquired through ABM. A higher CLV indicates that your ABM strategy is attracting high-value accounts with long-term potential.
5. Marketing-Qualified Accounts (MQAs)
MQAs represent accounts that have been qualified as valuable targets by marketing. Tracking MQAs helps you identify the success of your ABM efforts in identifying and attracting ideal accounts.
Implementation
As you can see, the Ovrflo Culture System creates meaningful conversations throughout your organization. Most companies should not try to do all of this at once. It needs to be built upon in layers to successfully adopt and ensure long-term success. To begin, we typically pick one part of the HR side of the processes and one part of the Internal Communication side (Ex: Onboarding and Messaging/Content). Implementing all 8 parts of the system takes most organizations between 12 to 18 months.
- Are there areas of your culture that could use more intentional and meaningful tools and processes?
- Are your purpose and values the foundation for your HR and internal communication processes?
- Which areas would be the best place to begin?
The best time to start is now.
Let’s find a time to discuss how we can help your culture be more transformational in your organization.
