Aligning sales and marketing efforts has never been more crucial.
In our first Level Up webinar, 6sense experts Latané Conant and Kerry Cunningham delved into the transformative power of account-based strategies, emphasizing how they can streamline processes and drive better results for B2B teams.
Here’s a recap of their chat.
The ABM Imperative
According to Conant and Cunningham, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is about focusing on the most winnable accounts and contacts in the market.
ABM involves:
- Understanding which accounts and segments are most likely to lead to success
- Engaging entire buying groups rather than individual leads
- Creating tailored content and offers
- Tracking meaningful metrics
- Ensuring consistent collaboration between marketing and sales
By aligning strategies with the unique needs of different accounts, ABM boosts marketing effectiveness.
Today’s Buyers: Informed, and Playing Defense
Modern buyers are more informed and in control of their purchasing process than ever before. Our 2023 B2B Buyer Experience Report found that:
- Buyers are about 70% through their journey before engaging with sales
- They conduct extensive research and internal meetings before reaching out
- 84% of buyers have chosen a preferred vendor before talking to sales
Cunningham emphasized, “Buyers are going to be getting a lot of information about you and your solutions without talking to you.” This new dynamic requires businesses to adapt their strategies to align with well-informed customers at their point of need.
Why Adopt an ABM Model?
As Conant said, “Whether or not you do ABM, you live in an ABM world because of the way buyers buy. So you can choose to participate and understand the game that’s happening around you or you can just be in the middle of the field, getting hit by the ball.”
Here’s why taking an ABM approach puts you in the action.
Buyer-Centricity
ABM prioritizes account engagement and the dynamics of buying groups over traditional metrics like Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) — moving away from lead-centric approaches that focus on individuals rather than buying teams.
Conant and Cunningham emphasized the importance of moving away from lead-based metrics. As Cunningham stated, “If you’re placing the value of marketing’s contribution to revenue on whether you got a lead that found its way onto the opportunity, you’re going to be in big trouble.”
Instead, ABM focuses on:
- Tracking account and buying group engagement
- Understanding the entire buying journey, including anonymous website visits
- Measuring the number of engaged contacts per opportunity
Multi-Threading
Being buyer-centric becomes more complex when you consider that most buying groups are made up of multiple decision-makers — each with their own challenges, goals, and needs. ABM acknowledges this complexity and provides strategies to address it.
The average enterprise level buying team has between 11 and 15 members, according to Gartner. Each of these individuals are likely to interact with your company in some way during the buying process. Cunningham noted that this “buying team is on your website, they’re consuming content, they’re looking at your videos.”
Multi-threading in ABM involves:
- Identifying and engaging with multiple stakeholders within an account
- Tailoring content and messaging for different roles and personas
- Coordinating outreach across various channels and touchpoints
Conant stressed the importance of early multi-threading: “The longer a deal progresses, the harder it is to multi-thread…Marketing needs to start multi-threading as soon as we want to go after an account and get multiple personas engaged.”
She also suggested creative ways to multi-thread without alienating your primary contact:
- Leveraging different team members for outreach (e.g., having your Chief Revenue Officer reach out to their Chief Revenue Officer)
- Using field marketing tactics like executive dinners based on contact location data
- Involving sales leadership in building relationships with higher-level stakeholders
LinkedIn research found that 86% of sellers say “they have had deals lost or stalled” due to a key stakeholder leaving a customer or prospect company.
Multi-threading helps mitigate the risk of deals falling through due to personnel changes or shifts in internal dynamics and increases the likelihood of success by addressing the needs and concerns of all key decision makers. This approach empowers companies to build stronger, more resilient relationships within target accounts.
5 Steps to Set Up a Strong ABM Program
How can you get started? Conant and Cunningham laid out this five-step process.
1. Select the Best Accounts
Identify and prioritize accounts that offer the highest potential value to your business.
First, collaborate with sales to define ideal customer profiles. As Cunningham said, “An account-based go-to-market strategy is one where, first of all, no matter what, you have come to an agreement with sales about the audience that you’re going after.”
This involves:
- Analyzing historical data to identify characteristics of successful past deals
- Using predictive analytics to score accounts based on their likelihood to convert
- Considering factors like deal size, industry, and potential for upselling/cross-selling
More on marketing and sales alignment in a moment…
2. Know About These Accounts
Once you’ve identified your target accounts, it’s crucial to gather deep insights about them through:
- Using comprehensive data management systems to collect and organize account information
- Using both first-party and third-party intent data to spot accounts that are in-market
- Using predictive analytics to understand buying signals
- Monitoring account activity across various channels (website visits, content engagement, etc.)
- Identifying key stakeholders and their roles within the buying group
Cunningham underscored the need for a holistic approach to data gathering and analysis, saying, “We know that only about 17% of the buying journey happens on vendor websites. So they’re doing most of their shopping somewhere other than on your website.”
Intent data, data management systems, and AI combine to help you spot more opportunities and understand the best way to influence accounts.
3. Engage the Right Way
With deep insights about your target accounts, you can develop customized engagement strategies that include:
- Personalized messages that address specific pain points and challenges
- Targeted content for different stages of the buying journey
- Using multi-channel approaches (email, social media, events, etc.) based on account preferences
- Timed outreach based on observed buying signals and intent data
“You’ve got to know what to say; you’ve got to understand their behavior,” Conant said. “So you can have a relevant message that hits them on the right channel.”
4. Collaborate with Sales
Conant and Cunningham underscored the importance of effective collaboration between marketing and sales in an ABM approach. To support alignment:
- Establish clear communication channels and regular check-ins
- Develop shared definitions and processes for qualifying and pursuing accounts
- Provide sales with visibility into marketing’s account-based activities
- Collaborate on account plans and engagement strategies.
5. Track Real Stuff
While some revenue teams say they are using an account-based strategy, they often fail to track ABM-specific measures.
The success of your efforts requires focusing on metrics that truly reflect progress and ROI, like:
- Account intent
- Buying group level engagement
- Pipeline velocity
- Revenue impact
Looking at the data also helps to prove the impact of your marketing efforts, from website content to webinars.
Cunningham said, “You cannot just say, ‘OK, we’re not going to track MQLs anymore’ without replacing it with something that’s meaningful. And what’s meaningful are engaged buying groups that turn into opportunities that close.”
Conclusion
Adopting an ABM approach isn’t just about aligning teams, but also about promoting accountability for meaningful metrics. This strategy empowers marketers to achieve more significant results.
“We’re not ever saying marketing is going to be not accountable or less accountable. We’re going to be more accountable, but we’re going to be accountable for stuff that matters and what matters is identifying opportunities and getting them into the pipeline and getting them through.”
Watch the full webinar and stay tuned for more webinars in our Level Up series!
