Top Account Based Marketing Tactics

by David Jones Digital Marketor

Tactics

As organizations grow, investments will increasingly shift to creating the right customer experience to drive usage, retention, and growth. This change will cause a significant expansion in the field of customer marketing executives in particular, and will make them a key stakeholder in the development and execution of account-based strategies.

Major account-based organizations use account-based orchestration that plays a major role in all stages of the pipeline. The four main areas that have a positive impact from orchestrated accounts are - leadership engagement, resulting in new meetings, increasing the speed of the deal, and expanding the trail on one account.

TOPO research noted that a sales development representative or external SDR has been the most critical tactic used by account-based organizations, with 88% rating it as important. Communication strategies such as direct mail, execution to executor and events are considered extremely important.

Personalized content development is seen as important by 63% of account-based organizations, but used by only 47% of them. Companies that have been found to close larger deals target more contacts per account on average. Organizations that are piloting their first account-based program should develop clear messages for at least two contact roles. A recommended tactic is to split the messages and offers for contact at the starting point and the contact of a decision maker or stakeholder. Organizations will be able to develop a wider range of offers and messages for different people and buyer scenarios when their account base matures.

Metric

An ideal account-based measurement model should prioritize tracking engagement across the account rather than engaging individual directions. This process should include a comprehensive list of target accounts, which represent the addressable market for account-based efforts. These are the funnel conversion points:

Engaged Accounts - The number of target accounts that have achieved a meaningful level of engagement. (Engaged Account Rate)

Opportunity Accounts - The number of accounts with one or more new opportunities. (Degree of Opportunity)

Closed Profit Account - The number of target accounts with a new closed profit opportunity. (Account profit rate)

When compared to a traditional funnel, which often involves a high volume of unskilled prospects, an account-based funnel is extremely efficient. This efficiency allows organizations to concentrate resources on only a fraction of their marketable address, and ultimately provide a significant pipeline and revenue impact.

Effective account-based execution is based on a strategic organizational decision and requires dedicated leadership. An ABM leader will not only oversee planning and execution, but will also drive the organizational change required to adopt an account-based approach and shift the way companies measure their results. Larger companies are more likely to hire an account-based leader, while companies with more than $ 500 million in revenue are 38% more likely to hire a dedicated account manager than companies with less than $ 50 million income dollars.

Companies that are starting their account based marketing today are learning from the mistakes of their predecessors. This is seen in 67% of companies that already have an account-based leader in their first year of doing account-based marketing. However, most organizations implement a successful account-based marketing strategy without the need for reinforcements or additional dedicated resources. In some cases where organizations add a dedicated resource, they are more likely to add SDRs based on accounts and marketing program managers.

Account-based marketing standards are more than a marketing initiative as sales and sales development are essential in the account-based execution phase. In fact, organizational alignment is essential for cross-functional implementation, adoption, execution, and scaling of account-based strategy. While marketing, sales development, and sales participation are universally high, top performers are 3 times more likely to involve customer success and 96% more likely to include account management than sub-performers. This inequality reveals the broader adoption of account-based marketing throughout the customer life cycle within the best performing organizations.

Given the limited resource, it is important for organizations to establish a process to identify which accounts should actively target, and switch accounts from active to inactive and vice versa. Account selection allows organizations to be able to concentrate resources where they are most likely to deliver the greatest results, grouping accounts for more efficient execution or identifying accounts that are most likely to be converted over a specific period of time. An account selection process usually involves a combination of sales inputs, company data, and purpose data. For lists with more than 5,000 accounts, the most important inputs are enterprise data and enterprise information such as industry and technology.

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Be sure to invest the time and resources needed to build a strong ICP as it is one of the key foundations for developing your target account list and all account based strategy. Establish relevant account-based marketing services for the account. Develop coordinated performances that combine multiple tactics and groups, including SDRs, in order to create a highly impactful experience. Identify a leader responsible for creating the account-based strategy and see it through to success. Finally, have a focused approach to metrics and stay focused on providing opportunities, piping, and revenue results for 2020. Setting and tracking a set of market-based market indicators guarantees continued success.