ABM: What it is and how to start implementing it.

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Traditional marketing campaigns are proving to be increasingly ineffective in generating business and growth, and often make it difficult to continuously improve performance. Constant changes in consumer demands create a scenario of uncertainty, and conventional marketing approaches bring more limited returns, a high risk to take in the complex and competitive market of B2B companies. Observing the effects of this context on their results, a growing number of companies are adopting the Account-Based Marketing strategy for their largest and best customers.

After all, what is ABM or Account-Based Marketing?
A practice used by the world's largest companies, such as Microsoft and KMPG, ABM or Account-Based Marketing is a strategic approach that coordinates personalized Marketing and Sales efforts to open doors and deepen relationships with target accounts. In other words, you first select accounts that are important to your business and then focus your sales strategies on attracting and engaging with them, bringing customized proposals and ideas to your customers. Internally, implementing this approach encourages the work of the marketing, customer success and sales teams to come together, since good results can only be achieved with the collaboration of all parties involved with your customers. In a 2016 ITSMA benchmarking survey , 84% of marketing professionals who measure return on investment (ROI) indicated ABM as generating the highest return compared to any other marketing approach. Regarding the importance of this approach in a company's overall strategic marketing vision, 78% of these professionals consider ABM to be very important or important. You can already get an idea of ​​how this strategy can revolutionize your business, right? Now how to start applying it?

The first 5 steps
There’s no point in showing you all this information, getting whatsapp data you interested, and not explaining how to start implementing this strategy, right? So now that you know a little more about Account-Based Marketing and how it can make your business more successful, we’ll explain how to start applying it in practice. By the end of this article, you’ll know how to find out which accounts you want to target and how to start interacting with them through a simple process divided into 5 crucial steps for a successful ABM strategy.

1) Analysis
Take a detailed look at your current customer base and identify who your best customers are, because ultimately what you’re trying to do is find more potential customers who look like your best customers. So get your customer-facing teams together, especially your customer management and finance teams – or even your Business Intelligence teams , which we explained in our last post – and come up with a list of the top 25% of your customers based on specifics like the revenue they generate for your business, their retention rate, their profitability, and more.

With this list in hand, you should analyze what similarities exist in these customers that differentiate them from all the others. Map characteristics such as size, revenue base, region, segment, what technology or tools they use, for example. With this data, you can define the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) for your solution and business.

2) Identification
With all this information mapped out, the trick now is to find other companies that have similar characteristics and attributes. Not only that, you must also identify the contacts that exist within these companies. If your solution is sold to the sales or marketing team, for example, you need to find out who the contacts are within these teams that resemble your best customers. An important point at this stage is that you may discover 3,000 or 10,000 companies – which seems incredible when we think about prospecting, right? However, this may not be the list that you should use to support your ABM strategy. To work in a more in-depth and personalized way to approach these accounts, you can scale your ABM strategy by sub-segmenting this list of companies found. So, we move on to the third stage.

3) Expansion
The expansion stage is about expanding your insights, vision, and understanding of these target accounts and contacts. Work with information such as whether this company has received any financial support recently, would that indicate a priority on this list? You have a sub-segment. They just had a change in the position of sales director (who you sell to, for example), would that indicate a benefit in your approach? You have a sub-segment. When it comes to target contacts, you try to find out things like: what is their position? How do they organize the sales department structure? (in the case of a sales director, as used in the previous example). These alignments will allow you to understand the context in which your potential customers are inserted. Once you have all this information categorized, you have a better view of which accounts and who your target contacts are, being able to work intelligently. Let's move on to step number four.

4) Classification
In this step, you must classify your target accounts and contacts. With all the information collected, you generate a classification where you can see who, today, is most likely to engage with your company or buy your solution. The good old 5-star rating can define this classification, for example, so of all these 3,000 companies found, rate them on a scale of 1 to 5 and within these companies, rate the target contacts from 1 to 5 as well. With everything categorized, know who are the three to six contacts within 500 companies that you want to start applying all your effort, testing the marketing strategies, refining them and finally replicating them. Now you are ready to get involved, moving on to the fifth step.

5) Relationship
The entire process and information collected is important for your sales, marketing and customer success teams to be aligned around these target accounts and which strategies, methods and processes will be used to better develop these accounts. You can opt for email campaigns, telephone outreach, paid advertising... in short, a variety of paths to follow to relate to these accounts, but always drawing the line of personalization and individualization of the strategies with that number of accounts. Remember that one of the main objectives of the ABM approach is to be able to develop personalized contact with those target accounts, demonstrate that you know the type of business your client has, how to reach them and deliver a solution or tool that is suitable for them.