Create an Information Advantage in Your B2B Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is no longer optional. If you haven’t incorporated ABM into your sales process, you’re falling behind.
According to research conducted by Dun & Bradstreet in 2022, 64% of B2B companies already have an ABM strategy. An additional 21% of respondents who weren’t using ABM planned to implement it within 12 months.
Momentum ITSMA found that ABM was “front and center” for B2B marketers, with around one third of the marketing budget dedicated to it.
What those figures hide is the differing levels of maturity across ABM programs. Only 17% of ABM strategies are fully embedded and driving strategic growth. For the majority of marketers, programs are still in their infancy. And, as Forrester reports, ABM maturity corresponds to better results, with personalised content and advanced data insights driving performance.
For newbies whose ABM ambitions outstrip their capabilities, that means the early stages of ABM can be frustrating. Lacking experience and data, many struggle to identify and target accounts strategically. Hitting the promised revenue goals can seem out of reach.
If that’s you, you can learn from one of the hallmarks of leading ABM strategies - they invest in insights. The reason why they excel at orchestrating campaigns that generate leads, pipeline, and revenue is because they can leverage data for both strategy and performance.
Who Is Your Ideal Customer?
The first step to unlocking the potential of account intelligence without overwhelming your ABM team is to have a clear idea of what you’re looking for.
To do this, you need an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Perfect-fit customers are more likely to buy, stay loyal, and advocate for your brand. Your ICP creates a company-wide understanding of exactly who your product or service is made for, and the type of accounts the company wants to attract, retain, and grow.
This shared understanding gives your team a yardstick to measure prospects and opportunities. It helps them identify where to focus their resources and how to approach the most valuable leads. This profile will influence target account lists, segmentation, program execution, messaging, and beyond, so it’s worth getting right.
Your ICP needs to define the attributes of your ideal target accounts and will include factors such as:
Geography: Your ideal customer is in a geographical location where you can sell your product/service. Consider factors such as language, culture, regulations, and logistics.
Industry/Vertical: Which industries or sectors are the most suitable for your product or service? Consider factors such as market trends, competition, and the unique value proposition of your product/service.
Employee/company size: Your product or service likely has a best-fit in terms of company size or employee count. This ensures that the customer is in your target market and that your product/service is a good fit for their organisation.
Maturity: Does the customer’s needs align with the long-term goals of your company? Your ideal customer should align with the capabilities of your product/service.
Ability to purchase: Your ideal customer should have the financial ability to purchase and continue using your product/service. Consider the funding rounds, budget, and revenue of the customer.
Readiness to buy: There should be a clear need for your product/service within the customer's organisation, and they should be aware of this need. This ensures that the customer is in the consideration phase and is willing to make a purchase.
Develop your ICP based on both qualitative and quantitative analyses, and document it with collaboration from key decision makers. Involving all relevant stakeholders in its creation is a shortcut to creating buy-in and early alignment across your teams.
Look at qualitative data on lead quality, deals won, and account profitability. Identify where you have already seen success in order to replicate those successes. Pull the experience of your sales, business development, and service teams by conducting qualitative research. Predictive analytics and external data might also help you see into your blindspots.
In addition to the Ideal Customer Profile, it's important to map out the buyer personas within your target accounts. These represent the different decision-maker roles you will need to influence, and ensures that your strategy covers all the key stakeholder types in your target accounts.
Conduct research to flesh out each persona's responsibilities, challenges, goals, and motivations. Look at both internal data on your customers and wider industry research to develop pen-portraits that provide insights to guide your messaging and outreach.
Personalised engagement demonstrates relevance and increases resonance across the buying committee. Understanding the account is one thing, but understanding the people within it is another. This additional level of understanding will help you to tailor your ABM campaigns and content to align to each persona's specific interests and preferences.
Build A Target Account List
Your ABM team can’t throw their resources into in-depth research for every potential lead. However, with your ideal customer profile defined they can identify companies that closely match this blueprint and build a target account list.
From here, you’re primed to dive into researching specific target accounts. Focus on defining each account's needs, challenges, and goals. The goal is to uncover actionable insights you can use to guide your ABM campaigns.
Tools like LinkedIn, D&B Hoovers, and Bombora can provide a wealth of account insights from public sources. You could also consider conducting supplemental primary research through surveys, interviews and focus groups.
There are three core areas of intelligence to focus your research on:
Market Research: Understand the target account's competitive landscape, market conditions, challenges and trends. Keep up with regulatory changes and other trending topics that matter to people in that field. Note regional developments that could influence the market. Identify common pain points people in their industry are looking to solve.
Company Research: Gather intel on the account's organisational structure, financials, key strategic goals, technologies used, and projects underway.The aim is to understand what they want to achieve and how you can help them. It’s also important to understand their decision-making process and what kinds of approvals and buy-ins are needed to implement a new vendor (legal review, board votes, etc.)
Contact Research: For key roles and decision makers, compile career histories, responsibilities, skills, interests and motivations. Seek to understand the relationships and connections the person has within the company and wider industry. All of this information will become part of your personalisation efforts in due course, and is particularly critical for 1-to-1 ABM programs.
Ongoing research is crucial. Due to constant changes, target account list accuracy declines at a rate of 20% or more each year. Continuously update profiles with new developments, leadership changes, emerging needs, or growth indicators. Keep a pulse on accounts to ensure your outreach stays relevant over time.
Account Planning
The goal of compiling robust account intelligence is to enable more strategic engagement with target accounts. A thorough planning process allows teams to create a comprehensive map of essential information about each account.
These insights should allow the account team to pinpoint opportunities to personalise campaigns and execute them efficiently. The goal is to develop and execute a customised strategy to attract and retain the customer.
Start by collaborating across functions to identify each account's key objectives, challenges, and needs based on your research findings. Look for potential problems you can help solve.
Then develop documented account plans detailing how you will address the account's goals through customized campaigns and messaging. Outline the value you will convey and key contacts to engage.
Enhance Planning With Organisational Buying Profiles
While many B2B marketers develop individual buyer personas, few create profiles to categorise accounts. But just as personas reveal insights within roles, account profiles based on organisational traits allow a deeper understanding of the account.
By assessing factors like appetite for innovation, tolerance for risk, and openness to change, you can group accounts into organisation buying profiles.
These profiles create a framework for segmenting and understanding high value accounts. You can use this deeper understanding to internally align your strategy and messaging, and tailor your marketing campaigns accordingly.
For example, in Gartner’s research they identified different company-level profiles based on openness to change, innovation appetite, risk taking, distribution of authority, and flexibility of decision making. These were:
Traditionalists: organisations with fixed structures and systems that avoid risk and change, and have who have relatively long sales cycles.
Fence-Sitters: conformists who are relatively unlikely to make organisational changes or adopt radical innovation.
Adventurers: organisations whose openness to risk and change exceeds their practical readiness and leads them to change too fast.
Transformers: organisations who are change-ready, have firm resource commitments, and relatively short sales cycles.
Your account strategy would vary depending on the personality and preferences of your target organisation, as well as the needs, interests and preferences of your account contacts.
Take the profile for a traditionalist company, for example:
The traditionalist company is open to change and perhaps even eager for innovation but is highly averse to risk and requires review and approval from several stakeholders before it can commit.
Traditionalists are most likely to be high-value accounts of the four company profiles, meaning the deals closed will be of the best quality.
These companies have the longest sales cycle, and they take a relationship-based approach to buying, where communication from a designated rep will be pivotal. Sales reps should be on guard for “looping” conversations where no real progress in terms of conversion ever seems to develop. B2B marketers can create a checklist to signify the completion of tasks and advance the sale.
Think about what that level of insight could unlock for your ABM teams:
It warns them when an account may be stalling out and equips them with tactics to regain momentum.
It diagnoses when a sale may be lost so the team doesn’t waste resources on a conversion that is unlikely to happen.
It emphasises the high deal quality of the profile so marketers don’t abandon the account too early.
Your buying profiles may look entirely different. Instead of buyer-readiness, your profiles may center on technology adoption, industry, business objectives, or pain points. Or build them out for all of the above. The more your teams get used to operating within these frameworks, the more prepared they’ll be to tackle every lead and prospect that comes their way.
How to Leverage Account Intelligence
The comprehensive intelligence gathered on your accounts, contacts, and buying profiles provides the foundation to personalise messaging and engagement at scale. There are three main levels where customisation should occur:
Account: addressing the preferences, needs and priorities at a specific account or set of accounts;
Persona: tailoring content and messaging to the role and responsibilities of stakeholder types across accounts.
Buyer: personalising campaigns and outreach to named contacts based on their unique interests and goals.
With a strategy to customise campaigns at the account, persona, and individual levels, it's crucial to enable marketing, sales, and customer success teams to tailor their approaches accordingly.
Marketing can determine the best content and tone for messaging based on buyer profiles. Sales is equipped to have relevant conversations through customised assets. And customer success has the data to inform expansion opportunities and events.
Marketing: Use profiles to determine messaging tone and content types that will best resonate. Target early stage accounts with short-form content and brand awareness social media and ad campaigns. Equip later stage targets with assets like case studies, white papers, and demos.
You might also choose to impress high-value prospects with personalised physical mail and packages, creating hyper-personalised content, or by hosting tailored events and workshops.
Sales: Craft custom messaging that is focused on the company goals and challenges uncovered through research. The timing and sequencing of your approach will also be informed by your research. Make sure to call on the right contacts at the right time, and tailor presentations and proposals to address each contact’s specific needs.
Customer Success: As the sales team passes clients over to customer success representatives after closing the deal, account based marketing strategies can inform opportunities for account expansion and cross-selling based on emerging needs. Conduct personalised training and workshops aligned to the client’s priorities. Be sure to conduct periodic reviews customised to each account. A check-in with a small, nimble company will look a lot different from one with a lot of regulations and approvals.
The key is to distribute the right intelligence across teams so that every interaction leverages knowledge of what matters most to target accounts and contacts. This results in greater relevance at each step.
Realising the Potential of Account Intelligence
Done right, account intelligence unlocks the full potential of account-based marketing.
Comprehensive profiles and insights empower you to orchestrate highly tailored campaigns that drive relevance, accelerate opportunities, and achieve success with strategic target accounts.
But simply having data is not enough. You must build processes to continuously gather and synthesise intelligence into clear, actionable insights across your teams. Just as your accounts evolve, your understanding must continuously deepen through ongoing research.
Regularly refresh profiles with new developments, challenges, and growth indicators.
More crucially, act on your intelligence. Put insights into practice through personalised messaging, offers, and sales plays coordinated across channels.
You’ve heard the phrase “success breeds success,” and that can be your ABM reality with account intelligence. When account intelligence is not just collected but operationalised across marketing, sales and customer success, the impact on performance can be immense. Your ABM strategy grows more effective with each account you engage.
Struggling to see results from your ABM approach? Unlock the potential with 1827Marketing. Our expertise in strategic campaign planning and tailored content creation turns account intelligence into ABM success. Contact us today to start maximising your impact.