Account-Based Marketing For Dummies

Sangram Vajre

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119224860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Marketing numérique

Grow your account list with an effective account-based marketing strategy

Buyers have changed the B2B marketing game. Account-Based Marketing For Dummies is here to give you the tools to transform your current approach to find, reach, and engage with your potential customers on their terms to meet their ever-changing demands. Packed with expert tips and step-by-step instructions, this book shows you how to analyze current data to identify the accounts with the biggest ROI opportunities and execute effective, account-specific techniques that get results.

This practical guide takes the intimidation out of account-based marketing in today's highly digitized world. You'll be armed with the knowledge you need to increase your reach in real time, giving you greater exposure to other decision-makers and influencers within an account. You'll discover how, through a combination of marketing technology and online advertising, your messages can be displayed where and when your customers already engage online.

• Align your sales and marketing teams for greater success in your ABM efforts
• Analyze data to identify key accounts
• Target your messages for real-time interaction
• Integrate your campaign with marketing automation software

If you're a member of a sales or marketing team already using a CRM tool who's looking to increase your reach, Account-Based Marketing For Dummies has you covered!

" Account-Based Marketing For Dummies clears away the confusion surrounding this much-hyped topic. It offers simple, direct explanations of what account-based marketing is, why it's important, and how to do it. Any business marketing professional will benefit from a look at this book."
—David Raab, Founder at Raab Associates

"If you're reading this book and just getting started with ABM, welcome to the future of what b-to-b marketing can be: insight-led, technology-enabled and, above all, customer focused. Our clients are delighted with the business impact they deliver using account-based marketing, and you will be, too."
—Megan Heuer, Vice President and Group Director, SiriusDecisions

"Like a Hollywood agent, marketing's job is to get sales the 'audition, ' not the part. Account-based marketing is the key to maximizing the number of the 'right' auditions for your sales team, and Account-Based Marketing For Dummies explains how."
—Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared

"Ever-advancing marketing technology is enabling a new generation of sales and marketing strategies to thrive, changing the playing field for companies of all sizes. This modern wave of account-based marketing has tremendous potential to improve your business, and Sangram Vajre is an insightful and enthusiastic guide to show you how."
—Scott Brinker, Author of Hacking Marketing

"Account-based marketing is shifting how businesses use customer insights to capture more upmarket revenue. This book teaches a new wave of data-driven marketers how to embrace an enlightened quality-vs-quantity approach and execute a scalable ABM strategy that delivers real results."
—Sean Zinsmeister, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Infer

"The book may be titled '…for dummies', but ABM is proving to be a smart approach for B2B marketers charged with generating sales pipeline and acquiring and delighting customers. Use this book to help you get started and advance your account-based marketing strategies and tactics that will thrill your sales colleagues, executive team and customers alike."
—Scott Vaughan, CMO, Integrate

Part 1

Getting Started with Account-Based Marketing

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

Introducing the Basics of Account-Based Marketing

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.

Defining Account-Based 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.

Scale means the ability to reach the right contacts instead of either blasting emails to the thousands of people in your database or manually reaching out to each individual prospect.

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.

Pouring leads into the funnel

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.

FIGURE 1-1: The stages of the traditional B2B 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:

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. 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.
4. 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.

Moving away from lead-based marketing

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.

Not all leads are created equal.

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:

• The funnel isn’t optimized for B2B marketing. Because the traditional funnel comes from a sales process, it isn’t optimized for marketing. Also, the traditional funnel is designed for a single customer, and isn’t optimized for multiple decision makers. This model is better attuned for a B2C process, where the stages are well known, there are quick cycles, and the progression is very linear. If fewer than 1 percent of your leads ever become closed deals, the other 99 percent of leads are a huge waste of your time and resources. B2B marketers have to think differently about what’s generating revenue, and focus on those efforts.
• Marketing is focused on acquiring leads instead of accounts. The VP of Sales or the CEO says, “Our company needs to double revenue!” In the past, that’s when the marketing executive tells the team to crank up demand generation so they can double the amount of leads,...