What Is Account-Based Marketing? A Complete Guide On ABM

Account Based Marketing – a world where you could start the sales process by selling directly to your best-fit, highest-value accounts.

— HubSpot

Yes, that’s right, account-based marketing (ABM) is a highly efficient B2B sales process in which you target companies that can actually pay for your services. In short, you weed out the less-valuable businesses and strictly align your marketing and sales team in delighting the companies that are –

• Firstly, high-valued and,
• Secondly, they are the right fit for the service you offer.

So basically you reach out and communicate with high-value accounts by targeting them as individual markets. Today, with this article I’ll try to share some tips, tactics, and strategies for the ABM strategy.

The goal of this article is to show how you can use ABM to personalize the buyer’s journey and tailor account-specific marketing campaigns. As a result, you get a better ROI and a boost in customer retention.

What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

Account-based marketing (ABM) also referred to as key account marketing is a marketing approach that is based on account awareness in which you consider customer accounts as a single market.

ABM is a focused business growth strategy in which you have to synchronize your marketing and sales team for creating a personalized buying experience.

The ABM Funnel

 

To understand how ABM works it’s important to understand the stages of account-based marketing funnel. Yes, just like a marketing funnel, the ABM funnel is also performed in stages. However, in terms of the framework and structure, it is entirely different.

Just flip the traditional marketing funnel and there goes your ABM funnel, and now let’s see the stages:

1. Identify High-Value Accounts

The account-based marketing funnel begins with identifying high-value accounts. Therefore, align your marketing and sales team to make efforts for identifying and targeting high-value accounts. Also, this raises the chances of converting more high-value accounts right at the initial stage.

2. Nurture & Engage

Okay, after you have identified the high-valued accounts the next step is to nurture and engage these leads. The second step is exactly similar to the interest stage where you present content to your leads to generate their interest in your brand.

So basically in the nurture and engage stage you have to create a personalized experience for the accounts you’ve filtered with relevant content.

3. Convert

Okay, we’ve reached the most-awaited and important stage of the ABM funnel, the Convert stage. Before this ensure that the contacts you have filtered are aware of your brand and the value proposition of your product as it will make the job for your sales team fairly easy.

4. Build Long-term Relationships

Wait, did you think we’re done at the conversion stage? Well, ABM is more than just squeezing money from high-profile accounts, it’s about building a strong bond between businesses.

Once you have converted an account try building a long-term relationship as it will help in assuring orders and bringing referrals.

Benefits of Account-Based Marketing

Now we know what ABM is and a complete breakdown of how it’s done. But it’s important to know what are the benefits of account-based marketing and how is it any different from inbound marketing.

First, let’s learn the benefits:

1. More Direct and Personal Marketing Approach

Instead of a run-of-the-mill approach, ABM is more targeted specifically and highly personalized. ABM demands marketers to tailor personalized messages and creative assets that cater to customer-specific attributes and needs.

2. Alignment of Sales & Marketing Teams

ABM encourages marketers and sales professionals to work together for targeting potential accounts and converting them into qualified leads. For running a successful ABM campaign it’s very important that both the teams are in sync for crafting customized campaigns and moving the individual accounts through the pipeline.

3. Shorter & More Efficient Sales Cycle

Here’s what your typical sales look like:

A typical marketing-sales cycle has to consider multiple stakeholders which obviously slows down the sales process. In a conventional marketing strategy, you start from a very lower level and gradually move towards the decision-maker. As a result, you invest a lot of time and resources in delighting the prospect.

On the other hand in account-based marketing, your efforts are highly focused on converting primary decision-makers of a targeted account. Consequently, it reduces the sales cycle and makes it highly efficient.

Rather than experimenting with tacting for attracting and covering a large pool of leads, ABM ensures that you stay highly efficient by targeting accounts that stand with your service standards.

4. ABM is Precise & Measurable

ABM is highly precise and measurable that provides the highest ROI compared to any other b2b marketing tactic. In fact, 85% of marketers who measure ROI describe account-based marketing as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach!

5. Quality Over Quantity

Account-based marketing strongly stands with the principle of “quality over quantity”. The ABM process requires the marketers and sales professionals to invest a significant amount of time in delighting a well-researched list of high-value accounts.

On the other hand, in a traditional marketing approach, the goal is to quickly close deals with even inferior quality leads who are not the best fit for your company.

Since you’re investing so much time in building relationships with these accounts, therefore, in the long run, ABM helps you in expanding business by retaining the accounts.

So this was all about ABM. Till now we’ve learned the benefits of account-based marketing, the ABM funnel, and the benefits. Now, it’s to learn some of the practical implementations and take a look at other aspects such as:

• Pros & cons of ABM
• Common problems with ABM and their solutions
• How to perform ABM with HubSpot
• Top account-based marketing best practices

Let’s cover each of these ones by one.

Pros & Cons of Account-Based Marketing

There are always two sides to a coin. If ABM has so many benefits there are also some disadvantages that you might witness if you’re planning to go with this approach. Therefore, before you make a final decision and choose to revamp your current marketing strategy, it’s important to know the pros and cons of ABM.

Pros of Account-Based Marketing

1. Don’t Have to Target a Mass

ABM is all about creating highly audience-specific marketing campaigns that help you in moving away from everything that sounds mass-produced.

In fact, you do proper research to get the personalization right for converting accounts into a specific lead.

2. Efficient Expenditure of Time & Resources

The ABM strategy encourages the alignment of your marketing and sales team to delight only customers holding high-value accounts. As a result, you focus primarily on providing comments which will also work in your favor in the long term.

Cons of Account-Based Marketing

Let’s talk about the other side of the coin, I mean let’s see the cons of ABM.

1. Multiply Content Across Accounts

Depending on the accounts you’re targeting you have to make subtle changes to the already prepared content according to the brand. This can be highly intensive labor if you’re having a small team.

2. Management can be Hectic

Account-based marketing is a very targeted approach and requires you to carefully filter your choice of accounts. Targeting, managing, and paying close attention to too many accounts can be a mammoth task for your marketing and sales team.

These were some of the pros and cons of ABM you can consider before revamping your marketing strategy. Now, let’s look at some of the common challenges that you might face if you’re new to ABM and see their solutions as well.

Common Problems with ABM and Their Solutions!!!

After taking a close look at the pros and cons of account-based marketing, the traditional marketing approach that targets a broader mass might make more sense. But if you compare the ROIs of ABM and traditional marketing, ABM will always win.

Therefore, let’s go through some of the common problems that businesses face by going with the ABM approach and learn their solutions.

Problem	Solution
Aligning sales and marketing teams.	ABM cannot be properly implemented if your marketing and sales teams aren’t in sync. The only way to overcome this challenge is to bring your marketing and sales teams together and carefully decide their goals. it’s Basically, important that your teams should be aware of KPIs and metrics to gain effective ABM results.
Identifying target accounts.	ABM begins with finding the best-fit accounts for your business. There are two ways in which you can find the right accounts: Firstly, start considering your pool of inbound leads and filter the top-level leads for nurturing and closing deals. Secondly, you can make use of your data and analysis to identify the best accounts from closed leads.
Developing account focussed web pages.	This is very simple. For creating a personalized experience for the targeted accounts simply look at the content on your website that gets maximum engagement. You can take the help of tools like HotJar for visualizing user engagement.
Delivering the right content at right time.	Delivering the right content at the right time is very important for capturing the attention of the prospects. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that you are sharing content that is relevant. To overcome this challenge it’s important to consider the ABM funnel. This will help you in creating and delivering distinctive content for each stage of the funnel.
Developing a scalable strategy.	For unlocking the full potential of account-based marketing a scalable strategy is critical and, there’s only one way to overcome this challenge which is to invest in technologies that can help you scale the right accounts. HubSpot’s ABM software is a solution that unites your sales and marketing teams and helps you in developing a scalable account-based marketing strategy

How to Perform ABM with HubSpot?

No doubt account-based marketing approach has the highest ROI but, it works best only if it’s backed by a scalable strategy. For creating a scalable strategy you need to invest in the right tools that help you in creating seamless buying experiences and HubSpot’s ABM software is the right choice for your business.

HubSpot’s ABM software unites your marketing and sales teams with collaborative, intuitive ABM tools that create seamless buying experiences for your highest-value accounts. In short, it makes selling to high-value accounts easier than ever.

Prominent Features Of HubSpot Account-Based Software

The prominent features of the ABM software are:

1. Set up your ABM strategy with ease

Setting up an ABM strategy with HubSpot is easy, fast, and intuitive. The software uses the classic workflow templates for defining and identifying your ideal customers. As a user, you just need to set up default properties to tag accounts.

2. Collaboration Between Teams

HubSpot’s ABM software provides shared tools for your marketing and sales teams that unite them efficiently around the same data. The Target Accounts Home feature of the software gives your teams a crystal clear view of the progress of all the accounts across the targeted accounts.

3. End to End Tracking and Measurement

Whether it is account-based marketing or inbound marketing, keeping a track of important metrics is very important. The HubSpot ABM software allows you to track and measure the key milestones in framing a marketing strategy for an account.

The software measures the performance in the following ways:

1. Firstly, you get a detailed understanding of the key performance indicators at an account level with the account overview feature.
2. Secondly, with the help of reporting dashboards you get a higher-level view of all the accounts you’re managing.

Also, you can use company scoring to identify the highest value accounts.

These were some of the important features of the ABM software that makes managing and targeting high-value accounts very efficient.

Now let’s see the step-by-step process of setting up account-based marketing with HubSpot.

How to Set Up Account-Based Marketing in HubSpot?

For setting up account-based marketing in HubSpot you need the following:

• Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise
• Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise

Now let’s see how you can activate your ABM tools:

1. Activating ABM Tools

To activate the ABM features in your HubSpot, follow these steps:

1. Firstly, from your HubSpot account navigate to Contacts → Target Accounts.
2. Secondly, click get started

Note: Only the Super Admins and users with Account access permissions can activate the ABM features.

2. Update ABM Information

Next, we’ll be updating the ABM information which includes updating contact properties and company properties.

Contact Properties

Buying Role: This defines the role that a contact plays during the sales process. You can edit the buying roles but the default values cannot be deleted.

Company Properties

Target Accounts: This finds and identifies the companies that you want to market and sell as a part of your account-based strategy.

Ideal Customer Profile Tier: It represents how close a target account is to your ideal customer profile in three tiers.

3. Update ABM Properties Using Workflows

We’ll be using a default workflow template to sort the companies based on a company’s annual revenue to identify high-value accounts.

You can select this template when creating a company workflow:

1. Navigate to Automation → Workflows.
2. In the upper right click Create Workflow.
3. Now from the left panel, click the Templates tab.
4. Select the Companies from the Type dropdown menu.
5. Finally, choose the Sort companies by ideal customer profile fit template.

Lastly, you have to customize the template to fit the profile of your ideal customer.

So this is how you set up and implement the ABM model in HubSpot to target and identify high-value accounts.

Now finding accounts and managing them is a totally subjective process and there’s no direct strategy that can be followed, however, there are some key best practices that remain a staple, let’s have a look at them.

Top Best Practices for Effective Account-Based Marketing

Here are some best practices that you can consider while framing an effective account-based marketing strategy:

1. Focus on Relevance and Personalization

Whether it is ABM or any other marketing strategy, relevance and personalization are the two most important spices that go into cooking the best marketing strategy. Therefore, ensure while attracting high-value accounts ensure that you are creating campaigns that are highly personalized and relevant.

In a typical account-based marketing setup, the quantity of targeted potential accounts is very less and relevancy can help in delivering high conversion rates.

2. Segment and Repurpose Data

Data is a goldmine for ABM.

If you are creating large-scale reports for your business I’ll highly recommend that you take your main report and separate it and repackage the stats in a way that they are specific to various industries.

As a result, during the process, you can use the segmented and repurposed data to target more accounts and add them to your profile.

3. Use Retargeting to Engage Specific Accounts

It might happen that you’re not able to close a deal with a targeted account in the first approach and, herein comes retargeting.

Retargeting is a great way to repeatedly engage with accounts while the employees of those accounts are consuming online content.

4. Combine ABM with Inbound Methodology

Combining inbound methodology with ABM makes the process of finding potential accounts highly efficient by helping you attract contacts associated with the accounts.

Here’s how combining the two can help you:

• Inbound marketing helps you in attracting the targeted accounts and then ABM accelerates the flywheel.
• You lay the foundation with inbound marketing for a strong ABM strategy then, account-based marketing uses inbound for allocating efficient resources for closing the deals.
• The combination of inbound and ABM allows you to target a broader yet fruitful group of prospects.

5. Proper Alignment of Marketing & Sales

Throughout the article, we have been discussing that account-based marketing is all about building a synchronous relationship between the marketer and sales professionals.

If you want a comprehensive approach toward ABM and ensure that the target accounts are receiving an engaging buying experience, it’s very important to bring the marketing and sales professionals on the same page.

Ready to Grow Better with Account-Based Marketing?

So this was all about account-based marketing and if you are reading this part of the post, I believe you found it interesting and informative. As we saw that there are some challenges with ABM and revamping your current marketing scheme might look tedious however, let me assure you that ABM isn’t overwhelming.

Just replace a broader mass with some highly valued potential business accounts and identify the accounts that go with your business standards and, this is how you implement ABM.