Answering B2B Tech Companies’ most frequently askedABM Questions

A while ago, Brightvision held a webinar dedicated to answering some of the most commonly asked questions about Account Based Marketing (ABM). The webinar session, presented by our digital strategist Jacob Hammar and Brightvision’s CEO Jakob Löwenbrand, went through the ABM questions we hear most frequently from B2B marketers in the tech industry, and provided tips and tricks for succeeding with ABM in 2022. Are you a B2B tech sales or marketing manager that wants to succeed with ABM? Then keep reading for some useful ABM tips! The on-demand version of the webinar can also be seen here.

What is Account Based Marketing (ABM)?

ABM is a customer-centric approach to marketing through personalization and targeted marketing activities and sales activities. In short, it’s a way to make your potential customers or existing customers feel important and recognized. The approach includes identifying your target accounts, then creating tailored marketing and sales activities targeted to these accounts across channels. Activities can include telephone calls, digital ads, direct marketing, and much more: whatever suits your overall purpose and interests the people in these target accounts.  
 
ABM is about understanding your target accounts’ needs, current situation, and what they're looking for in a solution provider. So, of course, a crucial part of ABM is measuring and analyzing all your efforts to gain those important account insights. Rather than traditional or more broad inbound marketing, for ABM the marketing funnel is flipped and instead starts with selecting the accounts and then going after them in in various targeted and personalized efforts. 

How does ABM bring business value?

• Increased efficiency – energy, time and budget. You don’t want to spend time and energy on things that don’t really bring value to you as a company. On a granular level, ABM helps you increase efficiency by making sure, for example, that the advertising budget is spent much more wisely because you know for a fact that you're targeting the right people at the right accounts. 
• Becoming a customer-centric organization. Showing to your target audience that you care about them, that you know their situation, and that you can help them brings an overall business value as well. 
• Marketing and sales aligned around the same goals. Aligning sales and marketing is probably the most common organizational obstacle. For companies that have started working with ABM, there are conflicting interests and sometimes a lack of knowledge about what ABM brings to either marketing or sales. But ABM, when done properly, you align marketing and sales around the same goals. 
• Faster deals and a shorter sales cycle. You can also shorten the sales cycle, because you can tailor your communication more efficiently and accurately.
• Expand business through account relationships. You can also expand your business much easier when targeting, for example, existing clients.
• Greater opportunity to be the expert. Since you are targeting or talking to a more niche segment on the market, there's much greater opportunity to become an expert within that area. 

Which target accounts should you choose for an ABM campaign?

This question pops up every so often and is followed by other questions:  

• How many accounts should we target? 
• Why should we target those accounts?  
• How should we think about clustering accounts together?  

The first thing to think of is how you should treat these accounts that you're going after and what level of ABM you should work with? ABM can be divided into three levels: 

• One-to-one. One-to-one ABM is a strategic approach that treats your most valuable target accounts as their own individual markets. On this level you craft all your campaign or activity elements towards one specific buyer persona at one specific company. You should treat that account like its own individual market, which allows for very personalized approach. 
• One-to-few. One-to-few is about creating and executing lightly customized programs for clusters of accounts with similar issues and needs. A big advantage with this approach is that it allows you to target a bigger audience, but it will still be personalized if you find the common denominators when you cluster the target accounts. Some examples of common denominators to consider include company size, industry, and buying processes.  
• One-to-many. One-to-many ABM takes the ABM approach and scales it so the principles can be applied to a larger number of target accounts. The average number of accounts for a one-to-many campaign is about 100 and above. One to many is a bit less personalized, but on the plus side, you're targeting more accounts and more people. If done correctly, you know that the people that you're targeting are a lot more likely to engage with a campaign activity. 

How do you align sales and marketing around ABM?

So, how do you align sales and marketing efficiently? 

• Include sales early in the activity planning. Include sale as early as possible. You might even create an Account Based Marketing team that consists of both sales and marketing representatives. These representatives should focus on mapping out buyer personas, target accounts, potential ROI on activities, average deal size, and so on. 
• Understand that the sales team has knowledge marketing just doesn’t possess. Marketing representatives in general, should be perceptive of the sales team’s unique market knowledge about the products, target accounts and about the buyer persona. 
• Educate sales on why they should care about ABM. Sometimes you need to educate sales on why they should care about ABM. Explain to them that it’s an opportunity to more qualified leads by cross-selling, upselling to accounts and so on. ABM helps sales to do a better job, basically. 

• Recurring meetings with sales reps. One way to educate sales when you run ABM activities is to have recurring meetings with sales reps.  
• Ask for feedback from sales (and their accounts!) on marketing activities. Also ask sales for their feedback as well as feedback that they get from their accounts or marketing activities: whether target account X liked our webinar, whether they mentioned it, etc.  

To sum up: marketing needs sales and sales needs marketing, and it is important for both sides to understand why it is crucial.

How do you get started with ABM?

1. Set up an ABM team. The team can be as small as two people: one from marketing and one ABM ambassador from sales that understands the value of ABM.
2. Define your ABM goals & strategy. What do you want to achieve with your Account Based Marketing?
3. Consider your ABM tech stack. Usually, marketing automation systems have some functionality that can be used for ABM that you already have in your tech stack. So, leverage that. 
4. Identify and prioritize target accounts. Will you focus on one-to-one, one-to-few, or one-to-many? 
5. Select channels and messaging for first campaign. Where do your target accounts/personas spend time? Can you reach them on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google — or in other ways? 
6. Execute campaign in marketing and sales channels. Create content that speaks to the target’s needs and pain points, then distribute that content to the right people using the best channels. 
7. Evaluate, learn, and improve. Take time to review results and optimize your campaign. As more data comes in, you will learn more about your target accounts and be able to adjust the campaign accordingly.  

 Remember: 

• The first ABM project doesn’t have to be big, but it must be planned and well thought through. 
• Practice aligning with sales – maybe through campaign workshops and weekly meetings? 
• Successful ABM takes time.  
• ABM isn’t easy. Set reasonable expectations in the beginning and learn along the way. 

Want to learn more about ABM? Watch our ABM webinar on demand.

Would you like to learn more about Brightvision and how we work as an agency? If you are a B2B tech company and need support with ABM, marketing, lead generation and sales, book a meeting and we can chat!