ABM strategy to attract large accounts

An ABM or Account-Based Marketing & Sales Strategy is a Marketing and Sales Strategy for B2B companies based on accounts, which aims to attract and retain large companies. In this article we offer you the keys and best tools to design and implement your Account-Based Marketing & Sales Strategy.

OBJECTIVES OF AN ABM OR ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING & SALES STRATEGY

1. The acquisition of specific, highly qualified target accounts.  
2. Expert positioning as a supplier of large accounts to capture accounts similar to those you have set as a target.

An example will make it clearer. You are a fiber optic manufacturer in Portugal and your customers are telecom operators in your country. You decide to expand your services to Spain and your goal is to attract Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange and Masmóvil as customers. And at the same time there are hundreds of smaller operators and companies that could also be good customers. Undoubtedly the visibility of the large accounts will help you attract this second segment.

From that moment on, all your Marketing and Sales efforts will be directed to create an expert positioning with valuable content and different techniques and tools to reach those specific customers. 

The best way to do this is to apply an Account-Based Marketing & Sales strategy. Below we offer you the keys and the best tools to carry it out. 

KEYS TO ADOPT AN ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING & SALES STRATEGY:

• Create your team of fully aligned Marketing and Sales people. In an initial stage, the perfect team can be composed of a marketing person and a sales representative. Once you scale the business, one marketer can service up to 10 sales reps or more, depending on the case. 
• Identify your target accounts. For this purpose you can use the ICP matrix or Ideal Customer Profile. This is to identify, in order of priority, which accounts are most suitable for your product/service and provide you with greater profitability and peace of mind.  
• Identify the people involved in the purchase or contracting process. Within large accounts there are multiple people with different roles and personalities. Identify each of these roles: decision maker, influencer, blocker, legal & compliance, end user. The JTBD (Job to be Done) approach is interesting for this research. Each of these people has a different job to do and you should think about how you can help them to do it better. 
• Analyze what content is interesting to capture their attention. Take advantage of all your knowledge about the account and the roles of the people you are targeting to tailor a tailored content: An evaluation about their company, a personalized web page, an event of their interest, a personalized content, a gift...
• Start attracting contacts from your target accounts. By attending conferences, finding and contacting people from your target accounts on specialized social networks, with the help of industry influencers, designing a newsletter specialized in the activity, or with social ads or sponsored ads. 
• Convert those new contacts from target accounts into business opportunities. This does not mean that the sales process has started, you can still make marketing efforts to convert contacts into Deals, with the same techniques you used to attract new contacts, in a personalized way, with the information you are getting. Don't rule out a direct marketing campaign to help you convince your contacts.
• Measure the performance of your key account attraction plan. In each part of the process, both in the initial acquisition and in the conversion and closing process: Some of the most important metrics are:
• number of new target accounts created, 
• page views by users of your target accounts, 
• conversion rates, 
• average cost of conversion, 
• number of new Deals, 
• the conversion rate of Deals and their average cost. 
• number and type of contacts (according to their roles). 
• average opportunity times in the different stages of the sales pipeline, 
• customer closing ratio
• cost of customer acquisition...
• The maintenance and loyalty of these accounts is part of the Core Business. Especially in business models based on ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue or MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue). So remember to maintain quality controls and follow-up meetings, and prepare the renewal as if it were a new sale.

TOOLS TO ADOPT AN ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING & SALES STRATEGY

1. Create custom properties in your CRM to tag accounts, contacts and buying roles. 
2. Create your ideal customer profile (ICP) and design automation workflows in your CRM to automatically identify your ideal customers and identify the right target accounts. 
3. Design a Lead Scoring matrix and create automation workflows in your CRM to score companies based on their revenue, number of employees, or any other criteria of interest to your business and prioritize your target accounts. 
4. Use the Target Accounts tool to identify the companies you want to target so that Marketing and Sales work together towards the same goal. You will have a single view for each target account in your CRM from which you get valuable aggregated information:
1. You can see all contacts made by anyone on your team.
2. All marketing emails sent and how prospects interacted with them.
3. The activity of all contacts in your target account with your website and other digital assets. 
5. You can create a personalized pipeline for each account if needed. 
6. Create smart, personalized content on your website or landing page for either a customer segment or a particular customer.
7. Use snippets, templates or a sales playbook to optimize the conversion process and organize your digital assets.
8. Create reminders of dates and jobs that can't be forgotten, by automating prospecting, sales follow-up and account renewal tasks. 
9. Measure KPI's to help you see the performance of your strategy: new target accounts, conversion rate, average time in each stage of your sales pipeline...

All these tools are available on the HubSpot platform, with a Marketing or Sales PRO or Enterprise license. There are other Account-Based Marketing tools on the market, evaluate which one is more useful for your company based on your current ecosystem of tools, your objectives and the expectations or guarantee they offer you.