4 steps to get your account based marketing strategy sorted
One of the big reasons why Marketing Automation has managed to make marketing more measurable and hence successful is its ability to provide the “Digital Footprint” of contacts. This has allowed marketers to go beyond looking at just the profile of the prospects and use their behavior to better target their marketing strategies and activities.
An analogy to make it easier to understand is the way an attendant in a supermarket behaves – a young to middle-aged lady might be her best profile, but it’s their browsing pattern along the aisles that tell them whom to provide their immediate attention to. It’s that distinction which is now available to adopters of Marketing Automation.
The next evolution that’s happening in the B2B marketing horizon is Account-based Marketing (ABM), which is helping improve the go-to-market strategy for marketers. ABM is the latest buzzword in the B2B marketing circles as companies realize that the buying is happening through a decision-making unit, with multiple stakeholders involved.
It is important to differentiate amongst the “universe” of companies available to you. We, at Verticurl, have developed a matrix that we use to help our clients to focus their ABM strategy.
The immediate thought when identifying key accounts is “all enterprise accounts”. However, we at Verticurl think, that in this digital age, it is important to take behavioral patterns or fit into account before deciding the target segments for your ABM practice. It is vital to understand the approach of these companies towards your industry, in general, and your company in particular, that should determine how you treat them. As an example, one of the IT solution provider companies that we are working with decided that they will consider those companies to be their top priority accounts which consider IT to be an enabler or a differentiator, not a support function.
For planning and deploying an ABM targeted at the optimal “Key Accounts”, we have developed a 4-step approach, which is outlined below. This helps to get the GTM ready but at the same time tries to develop alignment and buy-in from sales and marketing as it is critical to ensure that sales and marketing are in lock-step when approaching these key accounts.
If you are evaluating ABM or want help in optimizing your ABM, and the above points seem to be relevant to you, feel free to reach out to us to have a discussion with us on how Verticurl can help you.
