What if you can sell directly to your best-fit, highest-value accounts as a start of your sales process? No need to waste time in marketing and selling to unqualified leads who aren’t fit for your business.
How efficient would that be? Actually, it is possible – with HubSpot’s account-based marketing platform.
Say what? Yes it is, no kidding! It allows you to promote sustainable business growth, delight customers, and increase revenue.
But Wait – What’s ABM?
Account-based marketing (ABM) allows concentration of sales and marketing resources on a precise and clear set of target accounts within a market where you can use personalised campaigns to resonate with each account.
Your team can create personalised buying experiences for a select set of high value companies that meet your ideal customer profile and tiers.
Why ABM?
Efficient Use Of Marketing Resources
ABM allows you to optimise your most valuable resources – staff and money by streamlining the structuring of your efforts and resources directly to your key accounts so you can drive the most revenue.
Enable Cross-team collaboration
Your Marketing and Sales teams can finally share the same tools and data in the same place. This will give both teams the general view of the performance of your target accounts.
Establish Deeper Relationships With Personalised Experiences
HubSpot’s ABM tools allows you to personalise content so you can tailor fit every engagement with your contact person in an account. This is also true for LinkedIn Ads integration, with the new account-level targeting, you’ll be able to target companies by target account status or tiering.
Track And Measure From End To End
Know the ins and outs of what’s happening to your target account’s every journey using reliable data reporting to adapt and iterate your strategy. Data is possible in detail or bird’s eye view. You can even use scoring to identify the highest value accounts and help you prioritise reachout.
How to make ABM work for you
Build A Task Force
If your marketing and sales people are operating independently – you’ll need to rethink that strategy. Executing in separate divisions will make it almost impossible to get the level of collaboration ABM requires.
Organise a task force – a team of at least one marketer and a salesperson that markets and sells to an assigned list of target accounts.
Decide Which Accounts To Target
Different organisations have their own ways of identifying accounts and there are lots of ways but the most important thing is that both marketing and sales agree on which accounts they’re targeting. This allows a clearer, cleaner and more effective collaboration.
Strategizing/ Create Account Plans
At this stage, marketing and sales will work together to create strategies and map out the people they need to engage with. Collaboration is key and will allow a more personalised experience that mirrors the same value propositions that sales are using.
Attract Contacts
Find out where your target accounts are and where they find solutions to their pan points. Make sure you present your company well to them.
Engage The Buying Committee
ABM allows you to treat each buying member of the buying committee differently. A buying committee is a group of people involved in a purchase decision.
According to Gartner, “the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves 6 to 10 decision makers;” and each of these members come with their own backgrounds, goals and pain points that must be addressed in order to arrive at a favourable decision.
As you think about what each committee member needs, both for themselves and in their effort to win over others, you’ll quickly realise that different committee members need different content.
How Do You Start And What Features Can You Take Advantage Of?
- Activate Your ABM tools
This is the part where you switch your ABM functions on if you have a HubSpot account.
- Mark Your Target Companies
An ideal customer profile represents how close a company matches your ideal customer profile in three or more tiers. Tier 1 means a company is a great fit for your products/services and is the highest priority, Tier 2 is a good match and high priority while Tier 3 might be acceptable but low priority and so on.
At a glance, you’ll be able to have a quick pulse on how “healthy” your target accounts are and the dollar value revenue that is associated with them.
Here are some terminologies you should know:
- Target accounts: the number of target accounts (aka good fit companies that have the potential to be your customers) you have in your HubSpot account.
- Accounts with open deals: the number of deals associated with your target accounts that are not not yet won or not yet lost.
- Open deal value: total revenue of the open deals associated with your target accounts.
- Missing any buying role: the number of target accounts where all associated contacts do not have a buying role.
- Missing decision makers: the number of target accounts where none of its associated contacts have the value decision maker in their buying role property.
- Assign Buyer Roles
- The buying role identifies how the contact will play during the sales process. Example roles are decision makers, influencers and blockers. You can create your own roles too.
- Treat them differently especially when sharing leads and moving roles because they care about different aspects, have different pain points and you should be speaking to them differently.
- Conversations Inbox
- Your team’s got a shared inbox so that everyone has a shared knowledge – can be from the website, facebook messenger or emails.
- Anyone can comment to tag team members or leave notes.
- Out Of The Box Reports
- Track and measure key milestones throughout an account’s journey, continuously using data to adapt and iterate on your ABM strategy.
- Meetings Tools
- Meeting scheduling - Make it easy for your prospects to book time on your calendar without an endless volley of emails.
- It’ll be tracked against the contact timeline.
- Gmail/Outlook Email Integration
- The emails can be against the contact/company timeline or deal or as needed.
- Give enough context to the conversations and relationship of the contact and target account.
- Tasks
- Tasks assigned so you never miss a beat. Plus, it’s visible on the record timeline which allows for accountability too.
- Get prompts to automatically create those tasks when you’re logging a call or meeting.
- The tasks show on contact/company/deal level - depending on how you choose to associate the task. On the paid version, you could use company level data and logic to automate task creation.
- Deals
- Consider adding a custom property “likelihood to close” as a 1-5 ranking so you can see which deals are likely to be close based on activities or factors based on what you deem important in the sales process.
- Build reports and cross the data between deals and companies as you wish. -- not part of the free tools but worth knowing so you can examine more efficiently.
- Live Chat
- Live chat - Engage with people and provide solutions easily right there and then when they’re on your website.
- AI-powered Target Account Recommendations
- Leverage of artificial intelligence-powered target accounts recommendation to ensure sales never misses a beat. And do it all within a CRM that holds your existing customers and qualified leads, so you never have to worry about losing important contact details. As HubSpot learns what your target accounts are, you will get suggested companies too.
- Slack Integration
- Allows HubSpot users to:
- Create Slack channels named after the deal/account
- Regularly post important KPIs in Slack
- Write notes to/from Slack to deal/company records in HubSpot.
- If you don’t have workflows, using the Zapier integration between slack and HubSpot is the other way around.
ABM Campaign Effectiveness
Of course, measurement is a must with any campaigns you run. Some free tools you can use are:
- Deal tracking and pipeline management: an up-to-the-minute view of your entire sales pipeline on a clean, visual dashboard.
- Reporting dashboard: built-in real-time analytics where you can see which emails, pages, offers, and traffic sources are driving the most conversions.
This will help you understand what’s working and what’s not so your team can make adjustments and be effective as you go more and more into it.
If you want to know more how ABM can work for your business or if you’re just curious in general, book a meeting with us at a time that’s convenient for you.
