Account-Based Marketing For Dummies®
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Nothing makes me happier than seeing the market embrace a good idea that works. For account-based marketing (ABM), that time is now. Why is ABM the new big thing in business-to-business (B2B), especially when it’s not really a “new” idea at all? There are a number of reasons why you may be opening this book and starting on the road to ABM. Here are my thoughts on why reading it and deploying ABM will be a smart investment for you.
The first reason that ABM is getting so much attention these days is that marketing and sales leaders have determined that the natural next step in their relationship requires account focus. Marketing has made great strides over the last few years toward building credibility with sales. Unfortunately, the last mile to ideal alignment with sales has eluded marketing, because they’ve maintained a focus on delivering volumes of leads. What’s the problem with that model? If you ask a sales person where growth will come from, he or she will name a list of accounts. Marketing, on the other hand, typically starts talking about personas and segments. Now, with ABM, marketing is speaking the language of sales. Efficient revenue growth requires focus on the specific accounts, and the people in them, who are most likely to deliver that growth. To sales, and now for those who embrace account-based marketing, anything else is a waste of time.
The second reason is the reality of how buyers buy. Marketing and sales finally agree it’s no longer a battle for who plays the most critical role in the buying cycle. Instead, common sense and ample research evidence show that marketing and sales together are needed to support buyers on their journey. This requires a balanced strategy, where sales and marketing understand their respective roles and how those need to be coordinated in every stage of buying. ABM is the way to operationalize that strategy as a partnership that's focused on delivering growth.
The third reason for ABM’s rise, which Sangram points out in this book, is that both sales and marketing have been ignoring the most critical driver of B2B buying: the post-sale customer experience. Fully 71 percent of the reason that B2B buyers choose to buy from a specific company is based on either their own direct experience with a company, or what they hear about the experience others have with the company. This means that the funnel as we know it makes very little sense. The real battle for customer hearts, minds, and investments happens after customers buy. It’s essential to balance pre- and post-sale requirements when building an account-based plan, because those non-selling investments in customer success deliver both retention and growth. Marketing’s toolkit is essential to both customer acquisition and customer engagement.
The fourth reason is around technology. You may wonder why now there’s so much fuss about a marketing concept that has been around for more than a decade. That’s a fair question. In the past, ABM had to be executed as a one-to-one, customized approach, with a focus on just a small number of very significant accounts. This custom approach was, and remains, labor-intensive and not the right model for every business. What’s changed to support the current wave of ABM adoption is the availability of technology and analytics to make one-to-few (or more than a few) much more realistic, even for small teams with limited budgets. The current wave of ABM is fueled by a data-driven approach to marketing that begins with the identification of ideal companies and contacts to target, and then uses technology to engage with them at scale in useful ways, both pre- and post-sale. The traditional one-to-one model still makes sense, and is successfully used by many companies who commit the resources to do it, but technology has democratized ABM.
If you’re reading this book and just getting started with ABM, let me be the first to welcome you to the future of what B2B marketing can be: insight led, technology enabled and, above all, customer focused. Happy reading!
Megan Heuer (@megheuer)
Vice President & Group Director, SiriusDecisions
Our world is becoming increasingly connected. Today, the modern marketer is an innovator, creating new ways to connect with potential customers that defy the status quo. Technology has given a platform for business-to-business (B2B) marketers to reach customers, but it’s a blessing and a curse, because buyers are inundated with thousands of messages every day. This is why it’s essential for marketers to identify their best-fit customers before ever creating that first message. By targeting your ideal customers and determining how to engage them on digital channels such as mobile, social media, display advertising, and video, you can connect with your buyers on their own terms. This is called account-based marketing (ABM).
B2B marketing and sales teams have been doing ABM as a side project for years, but now it’s time to take ABM mainstream by making it a core part of your company’s go-to-market strategy. ABM is a program of various marketing activities, not using a particular software product. There are many elements to engaging individual accounts on their terms that go beyond just online or offline conversations. The question to ask is “Are you a B2B company that knows which accounts you want to target?” Focusing your marketing efforts on the best-fit accounts will allow your team to become more efficient and grow sales revenue faster.
In this book, I tell you all about account-based marketing: how it has evolved from traditional lead generation and why you should strongly consider using ABM in your B2B marketing and sales efforts. I show you how to use marketing technology (MarTech) and software to target your best-fit prospects, create contacts that expand into accounts, and engage them through content and marketing activities generating sales velocity to drive new revenue for your company. I discuss how to retain your accounts through customer advocacy, continuously engaging your clients throughout the customer lifecycle (and reducing churn). I will walk through a game plan with real-life examples based on my experience in seeing how more than 100 companies implemented ABM in their go-to-market strategies.
This book exists to help you understand this new trend called account-based marketing. Whether you are new to the world of B2B marketing, work as a salesperson for a B2B organization, or you’re an experienced CMO, having a strong understanding of account-based marketing is a must. The reason account-based marketing has become such a buzzword in the B2B marketing world is because it solves an issue of how to target and engage your best-fit prospects and customers at scale.
I will give you an overview and blueprint of how to do account-based marketing unlike any other publication available on the market. I’ve laid out this book to give you a foundation of B2B marketing, how account-based marketing takes your efforts to the next level utilizing readily available MarTech solutions, and increase new and existing revenue for your company.
Here are some terms used in this book that you should know:
The most foolish assumption you can make about this book is that you already know all the intricacies about B2B marketing and therefore can do account-based marketing. The basic concepts for account-based marketing are different than the traditional lead-based marketing techniques used in B2B marketing, especially for the sales funnel. With account-based marketing, I literally flip the funnel on its head so B2B marketing teams are no longer concerned with generating tons of leads to pour into the top of the funnel. I show you how to think correctly about account-based marketing so you identify your best-fit contacts, expand those contacts into accounts, and engage them on their terms through digital channels to accelerate pipeline velocity and close deals faster.
If you’re a beginner in the field of B2B marketing, I want to encourage you to start reading from the beginning of this book to understand the basics of our industry. The world of B2B marketing is different from business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, or the world of mass consumer advertising. B2B marketing is about selling your company’s products and services to companies who can and want to use what you’re selling successfully. B2B and B2C marketing require different activities and tactics, and account-based marketing adds another layer of complexity. However, if you're new to the world of B2B marketing, starting your experience with account-based marketing early will help put you ahead of the curve. Because you aren't used to the old ways of lead-based marketing, you can start your career in B2B marketing as an innovator who already understands the principles of ABM.
If you've already established a career and are experienced in the world of B2B marketing, you can skip around the different chapters of this book. Make use of the information you want to learn to help improve your existing marketing and sales techniques. If you’re doing traditional lead-based marketing, which most B2B marketers are, then approach this book as a new way of taking the good data you already have about your customers and prospects and make it work even better using targeted account-based marketing strategies.
Lastly, if you work for a B2B organization that's using a customer relationship management (CRM) software (such as Salesforce), plus a marketing automation tool (such as Marketo, HubSpot, Eloqua, or Pardot), and you have a website and social media, then you must read this book. You already have all the tools to do account-based marketing. I will show you how to use these technologies to impact your marketing efforts for increased sales revenue.
If you approach account-based marketing without having an appreciation and understanding of marketing technology solutions such as a CRM, marketing automation system, and digital presence on the web then you will not accomplish your goal as a B2B marketer, which is to help drive business for sales. In the end, you will end up having to hire a consultant who can set up your CRM and create a process for your marketing and sales teams to do account-based marketing, which could potentially cost tens of thousands of dollars. Reading this book will save you time and resources as it will give you the steps to implement account-based marketing strategies: the basic elements of identifying accounts, targeting them using technology, and how to improve your marketing campaigns over time.
The B2B marketing industry has new buzzwords every day. Account-based marketing is more than just a buzzword because it’s a proven strategy to make more money for your business. ABM is laser-focused B2B marketing.
I have written extra articles you won’t find in the book itself. Go online to find the following
Online articles covering additional topics: www.dummies.com/extras/account-based-marketing
Here you’ll find resources such as the ten ways to get started with account-based marketing, building a game plan for your company to switch from lead-based marketing to ABM, and much more.
The Cheat Sheet for this book at
www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/account-based-marketing
Here you’ll find additional articles about the stages of account-based marketing, including how to identify, engage, and accelerate your accounts across all stages of the buyer’s journey, creating customer advocates.
I wrote this book with the goal of having you read modularly. You can jump between different parts of this book to find the information you need to be successful with account-based marketing. Use it as a guide to start doing B2B marketing campaigns from scratch, or to take the contacts you already have in your CRM to create accounts and segment into lists to tailor your messaging based on the particular needs of your best-fit customers or personas. Keep it on your desk at the office or where your marketing and sales teams sit so they can have it handy.
If you follow me on Twitter (@sangramvajre) and Tweet a photo of yourself (even a “selfie”) reading this book, then I’ll send you an autographed copy to help share the good news about account-based marketing and how it will revolutionize the B2B marketing world.
Part 1
IN THIS PART …
Understanding ABM and how it’s changing the status quo of B2B marketing and sales
Flipping the traditional lead-based funnel on its head for an account-based approach
Unifying marketing and sales for one “smarketing” team to drive more revenue
Leveraging marketing technology (MarTech) to remove manual processes
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
Applying the fundamentals of account-based marketing
Dissecting traditional B2B marketing practices
Getting away from leads and the traditional lead-based funnel
Flipping the funnel for account-based marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a hot topic. #ABM and #FlipMyFunnel are trending on Twitter. At business-to-business (B2B) marketing events, featured speakers illustrate the value of account-based marketing. If you’re unfamiliar with ABM, this chapter shows exactly what account-based marketing is, and how it can change the status quo of how your company measures its success metrics.
This chapter defines account-based marketing, and shows why ABM is such a powerful movement in the B2B marketing industry. I list the major reasons why companies need to implement account-based marketing, and how you flip the traditional B2B sales and marketing funnel. Instead of collecting tons of leads at the top of the funnel, I describe how to quickly identify your best-fit customers, then convert these prospects into your accounts for targeted marketing.
The essential definition of account-based marketing is focused B2B marketing. The term account-based marketing isn’t new. Identifying and targeting key accounts has always been a best practice for B2B marketing and sales teams. What’s different today about account-based marketing is that improved technology gives marketing teams the tools for account-based marketing at scale.
Account-based marketing is about identifying your best-fit prospects, then focusing all your efforts on engaging these prospects on their own terms. For B2B marketing, this is essential, as it’s the most efficient way to use your time, energy, and resources. You target businesses that are most likely to buy from your company. This is very different from old-fashioned B2B marketing.
The forecasting model that is used by B2B marketing and sales professionals to monitor potential new revenue is the sales pipeline. The pipeline is commonly referred to as the funnel.
The traditional B2B marketing and sales funnel tracks the various stages of a revenue opportunity as it moves through the sales process. The pipeline itself is named from the funnel. A lead became an opportunity as it progressed through the funnel, or pipeline, where it eventually became a closed deal. Marketing and sales teams are familiar with the CEO or President examining all of the opportunities in the sales pipeline. This is why marketing has been focused on pouring leads into the top of the funnel. New leads were acquired through purchasing lists, advertising, sending emails with content, and a variety of marketing efforts. When more leads came in, more potential deals entered the pipeline. Figure 1-1 illustrates the traditional B2B sales funnel.
From beginning to end, your prospect moves through a few predictable stages in this funnel. These are the stages of the traditional B2B buyer’s journey:
Awareness: A potential new customer hears about your company’s product or service.
This potential client is called a prospect, or lead. Leads are the most common metric that B2B marketers use to measure the success of their marketing activities and programs. In the Awareness stage, marketers pour leads into the top of the funnel to identify any and all prospects who want to learn about your product or service.
Interest: A lead becomes a marketing qualified lead (MQL).
The marketing team examines the lead’s title, company information, and other attributes to determine whether this prospect should be forwarded to sales. If the lead becomes an MQL, then it’s time to start engaging the prospect at a deeper level. The lead is passed on to sales, becoming a sales accepted lead (SAL). Now, the salesperson engages in a series of calls and emails to engage the SAL in an in-depth conversation or discovery call. In the discovery call, the salesperson learns more about the issues or pain points the SAL is experiencing. During the call, if your salesperson and SAL agree that there is a potential opportunity to do business, the SAL becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL).
Consideration: The time when your SQL becomes an opportunity.
Often, this stage is the breaking point for a lead. Your SQL is getting more people from his or her company involved. In B2B purchases, the decision rarely is left to a single decision maker. Your original lead, or champion, probably must persuade his or her internal stakeholders that they should purchase your product or service. This is when you negotiate with your potential new customer. At the Consideration stage, the marketing and sales teams must work in alignment to provide content that can overcome objections. The more handholding your team does during this stage of the traditional funnel, the more likely that a deal closes. Advancing a deal through Consideration always is an uphill battle for B2B sales.
Purchase: The final stage of the traditional B2B marketing and sales funnel ends with a decision.
Your prospect has progressed from an MQL, SAL, or SQL to opportunity. Now, the opportunity either chooses your company, chooses another competitor’s products or services, or abandons the purchase. Your business either has won the deal, or wasted a lot of time and energy on the sales process.
Working in B2B marketing is tough. According to Forrester Research, only 0.75 percent of leads become closed revenue. If you can induce a lead to purchase, you deserve praise for making it to the bottom of the funnel. Your team hustles all quarter to pour leads into the funnel. However, sometimes it doesn’t generate revenue, because not all of the leads marketing generates become sales opportunities.
The biggest problem with the traditional funnel is that leads fall out as they move through these stages. Only a small percentage of the leads collected at the top of the funnel in Awareness will make it all the way to Purchase at the bottom, which is why the traditional sales funnel looks like an upside-down triangle. With the traditional funnel, four major problems can cause lead-based marketing efforts to fail:
But what if your company flipped this funnel, so that your customers are at the top and the channels you’re targeting are second? Instead of asking which technologies and channels you should use to target your buyers, you should ask “Which customers?”
In 2006, renowned author Seth Godin wrote about flipping the funnel to give your fans a “megaphone.” Through the rise of the Internet, your customers can voice their opinions more loudly than ever before, and they will get louder. Your marketing and sales team also can flip the funnel with account-based marketing. Figure 1-2 shows how we flip the funnel.
The traditional lead-based sales and marketing funnel has been turned into a cone by using account-based marketing. The tip of the cone is your initial lead. This lead becomes your first contact and is then developed into an account. That’s how account-based marketing got its name. You’re identifying the accounts you want to engage, then strategically marketing to each contact in the account. Throughout this book, I discuss all levels of account-based marketing, and I show you how to use technology for marketing to these contacts.
There are four stages of account-based marketing: Identify, Expand, Engage and Advocate. The four stages of account-based marketing apply different processes and components of technology. By using technology, you can implement account-based marketing. Figure 1-3 shows the stages of account-based marketing.
I cover each of the four stages in detail in each of the parts of this book. Part 2 shows how to identify your contacts. Part 3 shows how to expand contacts into accounts. Part 4 shows how to engage accounts. Part 5 shows how to turn accounts into your customer advocates. Part 6 provides the metrics to determine whether your account-based marketing activities are successful. Part 7 has additional resources and tools for account-based marketing.
In the rest of this chapter, I provide a high-level overview of each of the four stages.
The first step of account-based marketing is to identify. With traditional lead-based marketing, your marketing team focused on feeding as many leads as possible in the top of the funnel. With the account-based marketing funnel, you start the sales process by focusing on a single point of contact. You target your best-fit lead and create a contact. This contact potentially is a good fit for your business. You determine whether they’re a good fit by using a set of criteria. This set of criteria aligns with your ideal customer profile. After you have determined that this contact meets your ideal customer profile, you begin the process of turning the contact into a full account.
The second stage of account-based marketing is to expand. This involves expanding your contact into an account. After the account is created, you further expand the account by adding more contacts. Your ideal customer profile is the type of company (the account) you want to work with. Within those accounts, there are contacts (the people who will use your product or service).
The third stage of account-based marketing is to engage. Engagement is where your content and channels come to life. This stage is by far the broadest, because there are so many ways to engage with your prospects. Engagement often is where marketers become scientists. They test different types of content to find which types resonate with specific types of contacts and accounts.
Using personalized marketing, your marketing and sales teams engage all of the contacts within an account. You target your marketing messages to your best-fit customers on the channels where your ads are most likely to be seen, whether that’s social media, display advertising, video, or mobile. This creates more energy to close deals sooner.
Engagement is the broadest stage of account-based marketing, because there are so many ways to engage with your prospects. Think about email, webinars, ebooks, targeted ads, videos, events, and any programmatic or automated ways you use to get in front of your target audience (target audience is the key phrase).
While this is the first step in the traditional funnel, the flipped funnel waits until you’ve identified key accounts before developing the targeted content needed for engagement. This gives sales and marketing the opportunity to dive deeper and understand the motivations, pain points, and demographics of each account.
Here’s an example: A healthcare company is actively targeting enterprise employers in the San Francisco area. With a list of employers in hand, the healthcare company can both target specific leads with which they may have already engaged, and automatically present personalized ads to other decision makers in those accounts on the same channels that they’re already using. This increases the reach within those accounts and makes it more likely that those contacts will already have been exposed to marketing messaging by the time the sales team is actively reaching out. The key here is to present marketing messages on the buyer’s schedule, not on yours. This is a huge differentiator between traditional and account-based marketing. This outreach is called engagement.
The final stage of account-based marketing is advocate. This is when your accounts are customers. Your new goal is to turn your customers into raving fans of your business. This is the creation of customer advocates. Customer word-of-mouth marketing through referrals, reviews, and talking to their peers is the most organic and impactful type of marketing.
Traditional B2B marketing lacks alignment between the marketing, sales, and customer success teams. In this book, I show you how to work with your entire company to continue your account-based marketing efforts beyond the buyer journey and throughout the customer lifecycle.
Chapter 2
IN THIS CHAPTER
Demonstrating a need for account-based marketing
Rethinking your marketing strategies
Turning leads into opportunities
Linking marketing to the overall customer experience
Account-based marketing provides a strategy for B2B companies that want to grow revenue by focusing on the best-fit prospects and customers. The key metric is revenue. For too long, the B2B marketing industry has considered lead generation the primary metric. B2B marketing teams worked hard to pour leads into the top of the funnel for sales. Now that you want to start with account-based marketing, you have to sell the executives at your company on the idea that you aren’t focusing on leads. Enticing the stakeholders in your company to agree to focus on accounts, not leads, can be a very daunting task.
The C-level executives have always used leads to determine whether the B2B marketing team is successful. The job of the marketing team is to create opportunities for sales; this was accomplished by generating leads. But the most important metric for your company is revenue. By focusing on accounts, not leads, your company can both grow revenue from new sales and generate additional revenue from existing customers.
This chapter covers how account-based marketing can transform your B2B marketing and sales organization. I show where your company can gain the most value from account-based marketing by investing your resources in strategic accounts. I show how you can convince your marketing team, executive leadership, and other stakeholders that account-based marketing helps you generate more qualified opportunities, close more new business, and retain your existing customers.
Proving how account-based marketing is transformational to your organization can be done using data. Good data enhances your credibility for making the case for account-based marketing; numbers support your words. Bad data can be detrimental to your marketing efforts.
In a recent survey I conducted with my marketing team, we received responses from more than 200 B2B marketing professionals about their goals for account-based marketing. Almost 50 percent of respondents cited pipeline acceleration and revenue generation as their main goal for implementing ABM. Even more interesting is that this includes marketers from organizations that range from SMB to enterprise. That's an awesome business case for marketers to acquire the right tools and create the right programs to build revenue generating programs.
Instead of trying to get new leads, focus on the best-fit accounts. Leads are ridiculously easy to get these days. Everyone already has a ton of contacts in their database. You can buy a list of leads, go to LinkedIn, or use tons of tools giving you the leads you want. Forget the leads; if they don’t produce revenue, it doesn’t matter how many leads you get.
Marketing is an investment. Your company allocates time, money, and resources to marketing because it’s an essential part of promoting your company’s product or service and building your brand’s presence. The purpose of marketing is to create new revenue opportunities. Account-based marketing takes your marketing efforts to a new level. You can track how much your marketing team invested per account, then report on the ROI associated with those accounts by associating your marketing efforts at the account level.
These strategies can maximize your marketing efforts using revenue as your primary metric: