Sangram Vajre

Account-based marketing flips the marketing funnel on its head. You start with your best-fit prospects and turn them into resources for both long-term business and new prospects.Building your account-based marketing technology stack Account-based marketing is possible thanks to innovations in marketing technology (MarTech).

The point of account-based marketing is to target your best-fit accounts. What are the best companies you can do business with? If you've created your ideal customer profile (ICP) and drafted personas within that ICP, then you know which types of companies and buyers you want to target. These are your target accounts.

Before the internet, the buyer and seller relationship was skewed. Buyers had to trust marketing messages. The internet became the great equalizer. Sellers had to become more transparent about their products than ever. The buying process has rapidly evolved in the last decade because of the internet and the evolution of web-based marketing technology (MarTech).

Knowing who you should be selling to helps immensely in account-based marketing. For your ICP, consider the following features to identify the best-fit customers. Here is an example of an ICP: Industry: The vertical channel you're targeting. Company Size: SMB. In my example, the ideal companies I want to work with have about 50 employees and less than $10 million in ARR.

In 2006, renowned author Seth Godin wrote about flipping the marketing funnel to give your fans a "megaphone." Through the rise of the Internet, your customers can voice their opinions more loudly than ever before, and they will get louder. Your marketing and sales team also can flip the funnel with account-based marketing.

After you've built your ideal customer profile (ICP), you add a layer that defines your personas. The persona details can be very specific, including demographic information. Some companies choose to even include specific television shows, celebrities, or other pop culture information that your persona might care about in order to get more creative with the types of marketing activities for these personas.

In the technology world, the term stack is used to describe the software, systems, and tools that comprise your organization's infrastructure. In the business-to-business (B2B) marketing world, you also have several different software platforms that make up your "stack." This technology is mostly web-based. Almost all MarTech software platforms and applications are web-based.

The number of social media channels is endless. Each social media channel serves a different purpose designed for a certain audience. Depending on your audience and purpose, you will find yourself with using some social media channels more than others. It depends on the types of accounts you're trying to connect, and with what message.

Although the hit television series Mad Men began in the 1950s, long before anyone had ever heard of a sales and marketing funnel, the agency shown in this show actually was doing business-to-business (B2B) account-based marketing: Identify target accounts. They targeted companies in such industries as automotive, cosmetics, fashion, travel, and commercial goods, because they had success with those types of companies before.