5 Ways Industry Leaders Are Perfecting Their ABM Implementation Tactics

It is impossible not to have heard of Marvel’s The Avengers in today’s age – after all, Avengers: Endgame was one of the top-earning movies of all time, collecting $2.8 billion at the box office!

Apart from its game-changing visual effects and intricately related storylines, The Avengers teaches us a key lesson about leadership. You see, Nick Fury, the founder of the Avengers initiative, didn’t just want to assemble a random group of superheroes. He did in-depth research, conducted various assessments and then selectively targeted people with the right skills and high likelihood of integrating into his dream team.

Similarly, your marketing tactic cannot target a bunch of random prospects. Just like Nick Fury, your approach needs to precisely identify the best leads and focus on converting those prospects – rather than casting a wide net. This is exactly what Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is all about!

If you’re thinking of implementing an ABM strategy, or refining your existing ones, you should take a page from Nick Fury’s book. By that, we mean looking at what marketing leaders are doing to get the best results and implementing similar tactics. Makes sense, right?

So, in this blog, we’ll explore five strategies that the top industry leaders are using to master their ABM implementation strategies. Read on!

5 Strategies Industry Leaders Use To Perfect Their ABM Implementation Tactics

Develop The Best ABM Approach For Your Business

While this sounds like rudimentary advice, choosing the wrong ABM style can cause irreparable harm to your marketing plan – like competing in the Formula 1 race with a bicycle. You can essentially choose between three ABM approaches: Strategic ABM, ABM Lite and Programmatic ABM. Depending on your target audience, marketing resources, technology stack and overall budget, one (or a combination) of one of these types will ensure a strategically sound approach to ABM.

Owen Steer, a former Senior Strategist at Digital Radish, explains how you should get started when trying to identify the best ABM approach for your business. “Run a pilot program. Probe the market with the one-to-many method. If you get good results, you can ramp up the pilot into one-to-few or one-to-one. You need to know the science behind your ABM operation to help you make informed decisions."

Industry leaders often spend time developing a tailored ABM strategy that aligns with their specific marketing strengths, allowing them to create hyper-personalized content, compelling messaging and memorable experiences that resonate with their target accounts. Moreover, choosing an apt ABM approach instead of an off-the-shelf one means it will meet your unique needs, challenges and priorities. This leads to deeper account engagement, faster sales cycles and higher ROI on ABM efforts.

Marnie Giuranna Zaccaria, the Global ABM Lead at Finastra shares, “We had 25 strategically-chosen accounts we were working on in our ABM team. The sales team chose three accounts to focus more attention on, and the others we clustered together to do a 1:few approach. Of the three we bet on, only one was worth the time and resources we put into it.” This is to say that you should modify and experiment with your ABM approach till you’re sure it is the best fit for your marketing and sales needs.
Experiment With How You Identify The Top Accounts

A golden rule in Account-Based Marketing is that every target account is unique. Hence, there is no scope for a one-size-fits-all approach. Naturally, to maximize the return on investment of ABM efforts, industry leaders rely on a systematic approach to identify and prioritize prospects with the greatest conversion potential.

To do this, marketing pros put efforts into developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for their target industry, including key account attributes such as company size, growth rate, business model, spending habits, key designations, etc. to guide their process of choosing and prioritizing the accounts to focus on.

Rodney Warner, founder of Connective Web Design, realized that targeting the right stakeholders at key accounts was the key to a successful ABM campaign. He explains, “During my ABM campaign, the number one challenge I faced was identifying and engaging with the right audience in a key account. Finding the right companies and the primary decision-makers, getting their contact information, and sending it to the sales team was not as easy as it might seem.

So, to overcome this problem, I conducted a research-driven lead generation process to get in touch with the right people in a key account. This research-oriented approach meant that I created organizational charts that allowed me to make use of targeted executive profiling.

As a result, I developed top-quality products and compelling pitches, keeping with what the potential clients needed. What’s more, is that I could also identify and interact with multiple stakeholders in each key account to boost their reach.”

In a nutshell, experiment with how you identify, filter and select target accounts till you find an approach that yields the best results!

Identify Suitable Metrics To Validate ABM Success

The previous two points should make it clear that crafting a successful ABM strategy takes time, effort and experimentation. In other words, you’re not going to see results overnight. It can take months before your ABM tactics start producing the desired results, making it necessary to choose suitable metrics that help you understand how well you’re faring. You cannot improve without knowing if your ABM strategies are a hit or a miss, right?

Industry leaders demand cold hard numbers to determine the success or failure of any ABM campaign. Even marketing teams are often asked to justify the ROI of Account-Based Marketing strategies in terms of time and expense. The only way this can be done is by choosing and monitoring relevant metrics of your ABM campaign.

Owen Steer, a Senior Marketing Executive at advertising services firm Fifty-Five and Five, says, "You must set the correct lead gen KPIs before launching an ABM campaign. All stakeholders need to be fully aligned on these metrics. Think about the following: what does success look like? Who is responsible for achieving these metrics? Who and how will you be measuring results?"

To replicate successful ABM campaigns, you need to first identify previous ABM tactics that worked well, which is only possible by monitoring suitable metrics for your Account-based Marketing strategies. It is also critical to assign each metric to marketing, sales, operations, etc., to justify the performance and understand which areas need more improvement. That’s you the ABM gurus do it time after time!
Align Your ABM Stakeholders To Create The Dream Team

The ultimate goal of any ABM campaign is not to generate top-of-funnel activity but to ensure that prospects and target accounts are driven down the funnel and converted. This needs teamwork between marketing and sales verticals – just like Iron Man and Captain America joined forces in Avengers: Endgame!

Industry leaders understand that sales and marketing alignment is critical to ABM's success and ensure that both teams work hand-in-hand to engage and convert target accounts using a joint go-to-market strategy. This means sales and marketing teams working together to identify key accounts, determine revenue goals, brainstorm engagement tactics, agree on lead qualification criteria, optimize the handoff process and more.

The team leaders should also collaborate on defining the overall ABM strategies from a shared view to ensure target accounts move through the pipeline quickly, both before and after lead conversion.

Karla Rivershaw, Head of Marketing at Turtl says, “One of the things I'd ask marketers, typically, would be like how often you speak with your sales guys and girls, or ladies, whatever, how often are you speaking with the guys there. And they would say, "Well, every now and then.”

She zeroed in on the point saying, “So, everybody's working in their own silos."

By aligning your sales and marketing efforts, your ABM campaigns will be more effective at converting key accounts. Also, the more aligned your sales and marketing teams, the smoother their collaboration and the more successful your ABM campaign!
Build Personalized Microsites To Target Specific Segments

By now you’re surely aware that personalization is the key pillar of Account-Based Marketing. However, industry leaders realize that traditional personalization approaches often fall short of the mark in the modern B2B marketing landscape. Hence, marketing leaders experiment with a variety of marketing media to hit that sweet spot and creating personalized microsites for key accounts has been a roaring success.

Industry leaders are developing microsites with features, messaging or content that addresses their prospect’s biggest needs. This helps them stand out and shows the prospect that they can be a valuable partner. For instance, when a prospect was struggling to justify a recent acquisition, a marketing leader created a microsite showcasing a case study from a comparable business that could help them turn the acquisition profitable. Nothing says “great fit” like a marketer who has done their homework, right?

Business leaders are also leveraging microsites as a point of contact for engaging with target accounts through suitable channels (ex: a platform like LinkedIn can be very effective). It’s as simple as sharing the link and ensuring the microsite’s content is worth their time. Some marketing veterans are even unifying communications with prospects by continuing to provide a tailored microsite to make them feel valued.

Nadia Milani, the Vice President of Marketing at Proposify, speaking in a podcast talked about individual websites per account and changing the main navigation on their page “to include that vertical so they can go to a personalized landing page where they have custom use cases and that particular vertical with messaging that resonates with that particular vertical.”

Conclusion

In the world of Account-Based Marketing (ABM), you need the best strategies to create a successful campaign. Just as Nick Fury assembled the Avengers with a precise, focused approach, so too must marketers in today’s marketing landscape. By implementing these 5 strategies that industry experts leverage, you can elevate your ABM strategies and create experiences that resonate deeply with your target accounts. Nick Fury would be proud of you!

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Account-based Marketing ABM B2B Marketing ABM Implementation ABM Tactics

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