Does your organization use account-based marketing (ABM), or is this a new concept you’d like to learn more about? Regardless of where your company is in regards to marketing efforts, ABM continues to be a beneficial lead generation strategy. It’s relatively common for marketers to be experienced in account-based marketing and understand its benefits. However, this strategy comes with its own challenges, and it’s not always as easy to pull off as some may think. Fortunately, this blog article breaks down the top seven most difficult ABM truths all marketers should understand before diving too deep into the ABM pool.
1. Set and Follow a Clear Vision
To successfully execute an account-based marketing strategy, it’s crucial to have a logical and practical goal in mind before getting started. This includes the removal of silos and uniting all teams with a focus on one concrete vision when it comes time to execute ABM campaigns. At the end of the day, ABM is about focus and precision, and if a company’s teams aren’t focused on the same goals, campaign execution can be quite difficult.
2. Difficult to Scale
Brands cannot scale ABM as easily as if they’re targeting a list of accounts with a specific set of resources. Instead, ABM requires precise planning and a proper amount of time for execution. With a strategy like ABM, it’s vital to understand that scaling is a completely different ballgame compared to other lead generation and marketing strategies.
3. Understand Your Budget
To execute a successful ABM campaign, brands must determine whether a target account might have an available budget or not. Without an actual budget in mind, companies often struggle to understand which prioritized accounts require which allocations.
4. ABM Requires the Alignment of Sales and Marketing
For years, the misalignment of sales and marketing teams has been a headache for countless B2B and B2C organizations. However, by executing an ABM strategy, this mistake cannot be made. ABM offers the best results when more teams within an organization are involved, which includes both marketing and sales. By gaining buyer insights from intent, marketing teams can focus on specific approaches that produce significant results. In turn, sales teams spend less time playing phone tag with uninterested prospects and instead, focus their time and effort on serious buyers.
5. Focus on Account Engagement
Although it’s often a major goal of B2B brands and marketers, they cannot effectively engage with all accounts on their list on a daily basis. Engaging with accounts and prospects occurs in phases. Reports suggest, most successful account-based organizations focus on account prioritization, which gives them a 13 percent higher account win rate. The same report also remarks businesses of all sizes pursue 38 percent of their target list at any given time.
6. Determine Your Specific Target Audience
On a similar note, according to Forrester’s recent B2B buying study, it was reported that over 70 percent of buyers conduct more than half of their research online. Fortunately, ABM helps organizations be a significant part of a buyer’s research phase, which often increases the probability of making a sale. However, brands must also focus on fully understanding their overall target audience.
Furthermore, successful account-based strategies tend to revolve around an ideal customer profile (ICP). These customer profiles become tools that are then used to make important decisions with the goal of ABM being a success. When an organization doesn't have a strong ICP, this often decreases their account win rate (number of accounts acquired versus the ones lost in your ABM approach).
7. Focus on Acquisition and Retention
Overall, no two ABM strategies are the same. For example, enterprises tend to leverage ABM for customer acquisition purposes. Whereas, large businesses usually spend account-based marketing resources to acquire and retain customers. Then, there are SMEs that allocate a part of their budget to customer retention. To many, retention through account-based marketing is an untapped area that may be worth exploring.
How much time, effort, and money is your company willing to put into ABM this year, and for what reasons? Fortunately for you, our ABM articles listed below could be a big help and there’s always something new to learn to stand out against your competitors!
