Your Questions About ABM — Answered!

by / Jun 10, 2019

REPUBLISHED DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND!
We’ve brought this blog back due to the many inquiries we receive from marketers about this topic. For more insights about ABM, be sure to watch our webinar: ABM — How to Advance From Pilot to Program!

Do you have questions about ABM? We’ve got answers. During our webinar on how to operationalize account-based marketing, we had a very engaged audience, and many excellent questions about ABM came up. We wanted to share them with you, with the goal of helping you realistically plan or adapt your own ABM strategies!

Webinar
Ready to put an ABM plan into action to help fill your pipeline?

buyer personas
We are new to ABM; what types of companies are using ABM successfully?

It’s less about the type of company you are and more about whether ABM makes sense for your business — and is something that you can actually do. If you’d benefit from aligning your sales and marketing against a list of specific companies rather than a profile of companies, then it could be an effective tactic for you.

For example, if your products / solutions are “considered purchase” (complex, longer cycle, multi-constituent, more expensive) rather than transactional, you’ll likely do better with ABM.

buyer personas
Which team is typically responsible for prioritizing accounts: Sales or Marketing?

This will depend on your approach and your organization. If you are using a process or technology to dynamically prioritize accounts, this will typically fall to Marketing. However, Sales must be aligned on the methodology. If you are using a static prioritization, it could be either or both.

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Check out our proven tactics for getting your marketing and sales teams aligned to create a profitable demand generation machine.

buyer personas
Can you elaborate more on what a “buying center” is? How can Sales identify and tag appropriately in a CRM?

When we say “buying center,” we are talking about a group of people within an organization who typically make purchase decisions together, regardless of whether they are in the same physical location. Most CRMs allow you to track these people as a group within an “Opportunity”; however, that record is lost once the Opportunity is closed. This is why we sometimes add a custom object into CRM systems to store this information, as it is an important element in understanding how an account makes purchases.

buyer personas
Can you provide an example of an “account engagement score”?

An account engagement score is a number on a relative scale that represents the collective engagement of contacts within an account. Most CRMs and marketing automation tools are not created to present this view of activity across an account. Different ABM tools have different ways of calculating their version of an engagement score at the account level. For example, Engagio’s score is based on the concept of “engagement minutes,” which assigns the amount of time people might engage with different assets, then rolls up all that time by contacts within an organization into a total engagement score for the account. If you want the account engagement score to be part of your metrics mix, it is important to understand how the different tools calculate it and pick the tool that is the most meaningful to your business.

buyer personas
Do you have any economical suggestions for managing offline data and IP targeting?

If you are already using and paying for a marketing automation platform (MAP), it’s worth it to speak to your rep about what type of IP targeting tools they offer. Marketo, for example, offers reverse IP identification at a fraction of the cost of many of the tools out there right now.

 

buyer personas
How do you assign revenue opportunities that are unique to ABM-generated accounts? Can you show an ABM strategy drives real revenue compared to non-ABM?

The short answer is to “wire up” an Accounts view of your pipeline (leads through close) in your CRM so you can monitor activities at the account level. This is not how CRMs natively report, so it will require someone who knows what they are doing.

buyer personas
We are using Salesforce.com as our CRM — how well will it work to support our efforts?

The short answer is that it works well, but you’ll have to make some adjustments. One tip is to start adjusting your data structure so that Accounts = Locations and Master Accounts = Accounts. This restructuring connects multiple locations to the Master Accounts and will allow you to have an accounts-based view of the data.

You’ll also need to do some work to produce reports that provide an accounts-based pipeline view instead of a leads / opportunities view. You’ll need to use a third-party tool or find someone to assist you with making these adjustments, as this is not an “out of the box” feature.

Blog Post
Demand creation is a process that fuels the revenue pipeline so the sales team can meet or exceed their quotas. In other words, it takes your big idea — the creative appeal of your brand — and turns it into sales.

buyer personas
We have a lot of opinions about what accounts should be on our ABM list. How do we decide which ones to target?

The answer is really simple — it all should stem from your data and account insights! At the very minimum, internal opinions should be validated against a few years of sales information to create a firmographic profile of your most profitable accounts. The profile should then line up with the companies on your named accounts list. You should also look for external sources to verify, such as predictive profiling, to ensure your teams’ intuition is on track. Taking these steps should not add a lot of time to your process; it’s really just a matter of weeks, or a month at the most.

buyer personas
We’re going after a short list of accounts with very big opportunities. What should we do differently?

A small list of named accounts — say, 10 accounts that are representative of multi-million dollar contracts — provides a great opportunity for one-to-one ABM strategies. Consider targeting each account’s corporate headquarters with surround marketing, using out-of-home buys, geo-targeted direct marketing, and a dedicated pursuit budget to create really specific sales materials and videos. In this case, automation and scale matter a lot less. Targeted, insight-driven, custom care and feeding to these key accounts matter a lot more!

buyer personas
How should we holistically plan for ABM from the get-go, including third-party technology recommendations?

A great starting point is to download our ABM Roadmap and share it with your team. It’s a tool built to provide you with a thorough overview of the seven areas you need to focus on to execute ABM successfully from the “crawl,” “walk” and “run” perspectives. It also provides information on the types of tools you may want to invest in at different stages.

We hope this helped answer many of your questions about ABM. For a deeper dive, please check out our on-demand webinar or visit our Resources page, which contains a planning workbook, research and many more insights on ABM!

Workbook
ABM is a big endeavor for any organization. Drive it successfully with our seven-step roadmap.

The Mx Group

B2B Insights, Staff Writer

The Mx Group is the second-largest independent, integrated B2B marketing agency in the U.S., with a mission to impact the marketplace for companies that impact the world. For over 30 years, we’ve created meaningful end-to-end buying experiences for B2B brands. Our clients are leaders and innovators in automotive, financial services, food, health care, legal services, oil and gas, industrial, packaging, trade associations, technology and SaaS who rely on our expertise to influence and grow their businesses. Our relationships with our clients and people are why B2B Marketing recognized us as Agency of the Year. Our headquarters are in Chicago, but our reach is global. Whether a client is an established or startup B2B brand, we have the people and perspective to be a strong partner that makes a difference.