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How To: Efficiently Scale Your ABM Strategy

Explore ways to improve audience targeting and use popular ad platforms.

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A B2B marketer celebrates the success of a personalized campaign

Chapters

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Obstacles to Scaling ABM

Chapter 3

A Roadmap for a Scaling Your ABM Program

Chapter 4

Conclusion

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

Selling and marketing are harder than ever. Old-school tactics are pushing modern buyers away, leaving revenue teams frustrated, inefficient, and unable to compete. In No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls, Latané Conant delivers the recipe for scalable, repeatable, data-driven sales and marketing strategies that work today.

In this How To, we provide a practical, tactical dive into some of the strategies outlined in Chapter 3.

ABM is a winning strategy for any B2B organization. Hyper-focusing your sales and marketing tactics on individual accounts — rather than a widespread approach — provides buyers with a more personalized experience.

And it generates benefits like:

  • Better engagement with target accounts
  • Improved conversion rates
  • Increase win rates
  • Higher lifetime customer value

But, there is a tradeoff that comes with pursuing an ABM strategy. It’s difficult to scale your efforts.

There’s only so much time in the day for marketing to create a piece of content aimed at a single buyer’s areas of interest, or for sales to create a bespoke presentation for an account. Without the ability to scale an ABM strategy, an organization can’t reap the benefits.

But there’s good news: Today’s savvy marketers and sellers have tools at their disposal to deploy effective ABM campaigns at the scale they need to hit their targets.

Let’s find out how.

Chapter 2

Obstacles to Scaling ABM

Lack of Intent Data

The main thrust of ABM is to target the companies and buyers that are a top priority for your business.

But because ABM campaigns are resource intensive, it’s crucial to know that all of your efforts will be worthwhile. If you launch a customized, in-depth campaign but it goes unnoticed, did it actually happen?

This pitfall often occurs because revenue teams don’t have enough intent data. Your ICP reveals good fits for your business, but it doesn’t tell you if those accounts are actually in-market and primed to buy your solution.

Without the answers to questions like these…

  • Does the company have budget for your product?
  • Have they engaged with your brand previously?
  • Do they even know your company exists as a solution for their services?

…you’re basically launching campaigns in the dark and crossing your fingers that you’ve found a buyer at precisely the right time they’re ready to hear from you.

The more likely situation is that you’ll reach out at the wrong time, whether too early or too late. Here’s how these scenarios alienate prospects:

  • Reach a buyer too early and they won’t have interest in engaging with you or have no idea what your product is
  • Reach a buyer too late and you’ll be misaligned with your messaging and behind the 8-ball when it comes to decision time

Without concrete data highlighting which of your buyers are in-market, you risk sinking your ABM strategy before it gets off the ground.

Lack of Account Insight and Inability to Measure Engagement

Even if your company knows which accounts to prioritize for engagement, your strategy will be unfocused if you can’t measure engagement with buyers across the entire account.

Because 70% of the buying journey happens anonymously, you need the right tools to understand how your efforts influence buyers. They aren’t going to click on every email or fill out a form immediately, so you have to be able to measure engagement in multiple ways.

If you rely on traditional marketing metrics instead of the deeper-level of insights provided by the metrics mentioned above, you won’t have a true picture of the impact of your ABM tactics.

Chapter 3

A Roadmap for a Scaling Your ABM Program

Now that we’ve laid out the challenges associated with scaling an ABM function, let’s get to the good stuff and look at how you can overcome those hurdles.

With an unlimited budget and employees who never needed to sleep or eat, you could craft personalized campaigns for every one of your ideal customers. But in the real world, that’s not possible.

Instead, the most effective ABM programs save those resource-intensive, high-intensity campaigns for only the cream of the crop (prioritized accounts), while leveraging technology to aid in the rest of their campaigns.

Here’s what goes into a great ABM campaign:

  • Identifying accounts in-market
  • Personalization
  • Multi-channel engagement
  • Syncing messaging with buyer’s journey stage
  • Engaging with the entire buying team
  • Alignment between marketing and sales
  • Measuring your efforts

The right ABM platform and technology will give your teams access to all of those characteristics — and enable automation for most of the processes.

Automation and AI are key parts of any scalable ABM program. Instead of wasting time on buyers who aren’t interested in hearing from you, or scouring LinkedIn for your next prospect, a platform with AI and automation capabilities makes it easy for your teams to prioritize their next steps.

Here are the capabilities you should look for in a platform to help your ABM program scale.

Capture Hidden Intent Signals

Intent data is the lifeblood of a successful ABM strategy. This information makes it possible to understand:

  • Which buyers are actively researching your company or products like yours
  • Where they are in their buying journey
  • The channels they are using to conduct their research
  • The topics and features that interest them to the most

For instance, 6sense tracks intent data through a number of different sources including: keyword searches, website visits, review sites, and broader internet activities. Because most of these signals happen anonymously, it’s crucial to uncover who’s performing the activity.

6sense’s industry-leading account identification process matches those intent signals to buyers and accounts across their different devices and channels — creating a holistic picture of their activity over time.

Capturing intent data provides the following benefits:

Helps you prioritize hot accounts

Gets your company into deals earlier

Reduces churn among current customers

Scaling your ABM efforts requires the ability to capture and analyze intent data.

Dynamically Segment Your Audience

Buyer’s don’t stay static with their activities, nor do they flow through their journey in linear ways. One day they’ll download an ebook, the next they’ll attend a webinar, and then they’ll circle back to just searching for topics broadly related to your services.

Attempting to manually group your accounts and buyers into lists based on those activities or arbitrary characteristics (industry, title, location, etc.) will result in wasted time and misaligned messaging as they quickly become out-of-date.

Building an ABM campaign based on a static account list is like the tail wagging the dog — inaccurate or stale data is deciding who receives your messaging.

However, by consolidating information across multiple sources like your CRM, MAP, and CDP, you can build lists that reflect a buyer’s stage, website activity, previous engagements, technographics, and more. These sources, when updated continually, enable you to create dynamic audience segments which are always up-to-date.

The true power of dynamic segmentation is that the process runs in the background automatically. A prospect in Europe performs a certain activity while your team on the west coast is still asleep? They’re automatically sorted into the right lists — and start receiving appropriate follow-up immediately.

Uncover the Buying Stages of Your Target Accounts

Because 70% of the buying journey is happening anonymously, it’s easy to misalign your outreach efforts and messaging with what a buyer is actually expecting.

In traditional B2B marketing, when a buyer explicitly expresses interest in a solution, they’re immediately dumped into an introductory email stream. There’s just one problem with that strategy: The buyer has probably done a lot of research on their own, already knows the “101” about your solution, and wants to dive deeper into your offerings.

This misalignment leads to:

  • An alienating, asynchronous experience for your buyer
  • High risk of entering into deals way too late, and
  • Confusion around the individuals who make up the buying team

But when you combine intent data with engagement and historical data about your past deals, you’ve suddenly uncovered a very clear framework for determining where a buyer is in their journey with you.

6sense presents this information in an easy-to-digest and accessible format right on the platform’s dashboard.

At a quick glance, your teams will know exactly how many accounts are in each stage of the buying journey, and with one click can discover which accounts make up those stages.

This level of detail reveals which parts of your ABM strategy are driving the most impact. Is your pipeline front-loaded because of successful top-of-funnel activity? Or are your teams most successful at taking middle-of-funnel leads across the finish line?

Instead of wasting time trying to build complicated reports and dashboards to determine this information, 6sense presents it automatically and lets you focus on the more important part of your ABM program: building engaging campaigns.

Measure Engagement with Deeper Insights

Tracking the right metrics makes it easier to scale your ABM strategy by revealing which of your tactics are most effective and giving you the best bang for your money.

Traditional metrics don’t provide enough insight into account- or buyer-level influence, so it’s necessary to leverage the right measurements to truly gauge your effectiveness.

Here are some of the next-level metrics that will help you measure the performance of your ABM strategy:

  • Reach: A measure of the unique people at your target accounts that have seen a campaign
  • View-through Rate: The rate at which people who viewed an ad then visit your website, even if they didn’t click on the ad itself
  • 6sense Qualified Account: A 6QA — which is 6sense’s equivalent of an MQA, though more robust in its measurement and accuracy — is an account that is nearing the purchase stage of their decision, has multiple buying team members engaged, and represents a real opportunity for your business
  • Account Engagement Score: A cumulative measure of overall engagement across an account
The types of reports available in the 6sense platform.

Uncover and Engage the Entire Buying Team

Modern buying teams often range from 14 to 23 people. Engaging as many members as possible greatly increases your chances of closing a deal. But discovering who these people are can be difficult if they’re conducting research anonymously and only attending internal meetings to discuss the purchase.

ABM platforms like 6sense help you scale your efforts to uncover the buying team across all of your accounts by displaying a persona map at all of your target companies. This feature highlights the titles, and level of engagement across an entire organization.

A persona map of an account within 6sense.

At a glance, your team can determine where you’ve made the most progress, and where there’s work to be done.

Once you’ve identified those gaps, it’s easy to create a workflow to acquire the missing contact information and enroll them in your existing campaigns. With that data in-hand, you can efficiently uncover and engage the entire buying team.

Personalize Buyer Experiences

Personalizing for different accounts and individual buyers sounds like an efficiency nightmare. How could it be possible to ensure all of your buyers are receiving an experience that directly speaks to their needs?

It’s simple when you combine the intent data you collect with technology that serves up different content depending on a buyer’s unique profile.

Buyers who are in the awareness stage should be offered top-of-funnel content like blogs and ebooks that speak to their broad pain points. Buyers further along the journey should be exposed to case studies, more in-depth product information, and free trial offers.

The best ABM solutions integrate seamlessly with technology to turn your website into an ever-changing experience for the different individuals that visit. Leveraging the information you have about your buyers — their interests, past behavior, buying stage — makes it easy to serve them content that speaks directly to their needs.

Creating personalized experiences at scale doesn’t require an army of developers, content creators, and designers. It just requires capturing the right information and leveraging technology to serve your buyers what they need.

Chapter 4

Conclusion

ABM is a time-tested strategy that delivers a better experience for both sellers and buyers. But scaling your efforts requires a strategy that can scale to deliver impactful results.

The best way to scale your ABM program is to leverage technology (like 6sense) that makes it easy to automate as much as possible, uncover hidden insights, create and distribute impactful campaigns, measure your efforts in a meaningful way, and deliver personalized experiences to your entire target audience.

Ready to see 6sense in action?

The 6sense Team

The 6sense Team