Your account-based marketing (ABM) efforts in 2020 might have already shown average, excellent, or mixed results depending on your strategy and level of adoption. But before you chart a future course of action with ABM, it’s important to locate where your organization currently stands on the ABM evolution spectrum. This can vary from being at the early stages of ABM such as a point of concept (POC) or pilot, to a stage where ABM is an established practice that will be scaled up. As a benchmark, almost 30% acknowledge themselves as ‘expanding’, while 17% say they’re at an ‘embedded’ stage with their organization’s ABM strategy.
To chart your own journey to ABM maturity, start with an honest assessment of where you stand on these core areas that determine ABM success:
- Relationship Between Sales and Marketing: does your marketing team simply hand over a list of ‘leads’ to sales and consider their job done? Both of the teams must work together to identify prospects, develop a messaging strategy, and create a seamless handoff plan from marketing to sales as the buying journey advances.
Creating a list of target accounts, classifying them based on their stage in the buying journey, and personalizing content for each account requires active cooperation of both sales and marketing teams. If sales and marketing are not planning and executing in tandem, you’re not in a place of ABM maturity and will not see the magical performance outcomes ABM is capable of.
- Insight Available About Target Accounts: to scale your ABM efforts, it’s important to gain deeper insights about your target accounts in terms of their challenges, pain points, frustrations, etc. A successful personalization strategy can be created for each segment with this context, allowing you to connect with each of them based on their needs. Scaling up your ABM efforts should begin with collecting relevant information about your target accounts at the account level and contact level to reach additional members of the buying collective.
Account insights must include identification of accounts that are in-market, ability to access changes in account behavior and a thorough understanding of the buyer’s journey for the most important accounts. Be sure to partner with ABM vendors that have the best B2B intent data with quality, scale, and diversity to help identify, expand, and/or prioritize your TAL, as well as integrate with other providers in your Martech stack for increased visibility into insights and workflow efficiency.
- Ability to Run Omnichannel Marketing Campaigns: buyer behavior today demands an ability to connect on new and emerging channels. These emerging channels offer powerful opportunities to connect with buyers who are increasingly spending time learning and engaging with peers, brands, and subject matter experts on these platforms. When deciding to expand your ABM strategy, it’s critical to leverage these new channels that are gaining popularity with B2B buyers.
Video content, virtual events, online meetups, and communities such as Spiceworks, LinkedIn, and Slack are defining new standards of marketing through engagement. Synchronizing your marketing messages across multiple channels can pave the way for mature ABM execution and delivery of seamless customer experiences.
- Ability to Measure ABM Outcomes: one of the most searched ABM trends and greatest challenges for B2B businesses is the ability to measure your ABM outcomes qualitatively and quantitatively. Use of KPIs and metrics to measure your ABM success at various stages of the funnel can gather insights on click-through-rates, engagement rates, account conversion rates, and churn rates.
However, since ABM involves both sales and marketing, each of these metrics can be used to evaluate different aspects. Measuring the actual performance of ABM can be difficult since the lifetime value of accounts often cannot be clearly measured. In most scenarios it’s easy to measure ABM success by the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales accepted leads (SALs) generated from the campaign.
Whether you’re an enterprise organization or a growth-stage business, scaling ABM is one of the top challenges of B2B marketers. It requires a substantial amount of alignment and resources between sales and marketing, especially when defining your ideal customer profile (ICP) and target account list (TAL), or measuring the ROI of an ABM campaign.
Learn more about how to elevate your ABM outcomes and reach ABM maturity in our Top 10 FAQs for ABM Practitioners eBook.