Account Based Marketing is a B2B marketing tactic in which sales and marketing teams work together to identify and target the best-fit accounts and convert them into paying customers.
Instead of depending on the traditional approach of focusing on leads, the ABM involves identifying and targeting the right accounts with the biggest revenue potential for your business. Marketers, with the right ABM technology stack, are able to serve personalized messaging to decision makers at target accounts through the channels they prefer and at scale. Considering that most B2B purchase decisions now involve at least 7 stakeholders and sales cycles are getting longer, more and more B2B companies are turning to ABM to place marketing messages in front of all decision-makers, especially within high-value accounts.
Focused Marketing and Sales Effort: The best-fit accounts are identified based on solution fit and biggest revenue potential. Time and resources are narrowly focused on these accounts that are most suitable and likely to convert to paid customers. This frees up resources that would previously have been wasted.
Marketing and Sales Alignment: ABM aligns marketing and sales teams to jointly work on revenue goals which involves identifying target accounts, decision makers, crafting personalized marketing programs for them, and working in tandem to move the needle at each individual account, both before and after lead conversion.
Shorter Sales Cycles: Major B2B purchase decisions now involve 7 to 20 stakeholders which slows down the sales process. The traditional marketing process starts at the lower level at the client organization and moves slowly upwards to the primary decision maker which is a major drag on the sales effectiveness. In account based marketing, the length of the cycle is shortened as all buying committee members are identified and nurtured simultaneously.
Return on Investment: ABM outcomes are precise and measurable, providing the highest ROI of all B2B marketing tactics. 91% of companies using ABM increase their average deal size, with 25% reporting an increase of +50%. As per an ITSMA survey, 87% of B2B marketers reported that their ABM initiatives outperform their other marketing investments in terms of ROI.
As per an ITSMA research, most ABM programs generate greater return on investment (ROI) than other types of marketing. In 2020, three quarters of programs cited higher ROI, and about one fourth cited significantly higher return. Even more encouraging is the fact that organizations which are just getting started on their ABM journeys are seeing desired outcomes.
However, ABM isn’t the marketing recipe for every B2B organization. ABM delivers excellent ROI if you have a targeted addressable market and high value products/solutions to market to potential accounts. If you are a company that offers a low-cost product with no clearly identified market, you might want to use a broad-based marketing approach to cast a wider net over your target market.
Launching and scaling ABM programs is resource intensive. It’s no surprise that companies with successful forays into ABM are eager to scale their programs once they’ve demonstrated the potential and gathered management buyin. Most often, this is when promising ABM programs become victims of their own success. As the program scales, challenges abound in:
While ABM can be very effective, marketers need to find ways to scale the efforts to deliver targeted outcomes. However, scaling should be achieved without compromising the right buyer journey or content experiences or marketing-sales handoff. Getting it right is a combination of making judicious decisions about which accounts to include and why, identifying and engaging the right buying committee members at target accounts, allocating scarce resources carefully, reusing assets, and leveraging the technology tools that can help to make ABM programs more efficient and effective.
Imagine a VIP customer coming to your website:
Conversational ABM enables you to identify and engage with target accounts visiting your website in real time with personalized outreach and conversations. Enabling your sales team to identify and proactively engage with target accounts visiting your website even if they are anonymous enables you to scale ABM programs.
Conversational ABM ensures that visitors from target accounts can get answers to their questions in real-time at their convenience. By combining ABM with AI Assistants aka chatbots can add a personal dimension to your ABM programs. The sales rep, once notified about the VIP prospect, can take over with data driven, intelligence-backed conversations when they are ready to engage.
Leveraging Conversational ABM platforms such as SalesboxAI accelerates traction at your target accounts and improves conversions dramatically. This is due:
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