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Published:
April 25, 2016

Account-Based Marketing For Dummies

Overview

Grow your account list with an effective account-based marketing strategy

Buyers have changed the B2B marketing game. Account-Based Marketing For Dummies is here to give you the tools to transform your current approach to find, reach, and engage with your potential customers on their terms to meet their ever-changing demands. Packed with expert tips and step-by-step instructions, this book shows you how to analyze current data to identify the accounts with the biggest ROI opportunities and execute effective, account-specific techniques that get results.

This practical guide takes the intimidation out of account-based marketing in today's highly digitized world. You'll be armed with the knowledge you need to increase your reach in real time, giving you greater exposure to other decision-makers and influencers within an account. You'll discover how, through a combination of marketing technology and online advertising, your messages can be displayed where and when your customers already engage online.

  • Align your sales and marketing teams for greater success in your ABM efforts
  • Analyze data to identify key accounts
  • Target your messages for real-time interaction
  • Integrate your campaign with marketing automation software

If you're a member of a sales or marketing team already using a CRM tool who's looking to increase your reach, Account-Based Marketing For Dummies has you covered!

"Account-Based Marketing For Dummies clears away the confusion surrounding this much-hyped topic. It offers simple, direct explanations of what account-based marketing is, why it's important, and how to do it. Any business marketing professional will benefit from a look at this book."
—David Raab, Founder at Raab Associates

"If you're reading

this book and just getting started with ABM, welcome to the future of what b-to-b marketing can be: insight-led, technology-enabled and, above all, customer focused. Our clients are delighted with the business impact they deliver using account-based marketing, and you will be, too."
—Megan Heuer, Vice President and Group Director, SiriusDecisions

"Like a Hollywood agent, marketing's job is to get sales the 'audition,' not the part. Account-based marketing is the key to maximizing the number of the 'right' auditions for your sales team, and Account-Based Marketing For Dummies explains how."
—Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared

"Ever-advancing marketing technology is enabling a new generation of sales and marketing strategies to thrive, changing the playing field for companies of all sizes. This modern wave of account-based marketing has tremendous potential to improve your business, and Sangram Vajre is an insightful and enthusiastic guide to show you how."
—Scott Brinker, Author of Hacking Marketing

"Account-based marketing is shifting how businesses use customer insights to capture more upmarket revenue. This book teaches a new wave of data-driven marketers how to embrace an enlightened quality-vs-quantity approach and execute a scalable ABM strategy that delivers real results."
—Sean Zinsmeister, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Infer

"The book may be titled '…for dummies', but ABM is proving to be a smart approach for B2B marketers charged with generating sales pipeline and acquiring and delighting customers. Use this book to help you get started and advance your account-based marketing strategies and tactics that will thrill your sales colleagues, executive team and customers alike."
—Scott Vaughan, CMO, Integrate

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About The Author

Sangram Vajre has quickly built a reputation as one of the leading minds in B2B marketing. Before co-founding Terminus, a SaaS platform for account-based marketing, Sangram led the marketing team at Salesforce Pardot. He has spoken on the topic of marketing technology around the world and is the mastermind behind #FlipMyFunnel.

Sample Chapters

account-based marketing for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

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).

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Articles from
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Jon Miller (@jonmiller) is the CEO and founder of Engagio, an all-in-one account-based marketing platform that works to engage accounts and deepen the alignment between sales and marketing. As a co-founder and former CMO of Marketo, Jon has seen how the B2B industry requires a new, different mindset for how marketing and sales claim victory in ABM.
The blogosphere for account-based marketing is growing exponentially. The business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales blogs that have been around for years recognize the power of the keyword account-based marketing, and feature even more posts dedicated to the idea and best practices of ABM. These blogs typically are easy to digest and offer email subscriptions for free.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is the culmination of many facets of business-to-business (B2B) marketing, sales, and technology. Across the industry, marketers and salespeople look to social media for guidance on initiating ABM and implementing it successfully at their own companies. The best and brightest B2B thought leaders are active on Twitter, LinkedIn, and their own websites.
Despite all the industry buzz about account-based marketing, you'll most likely face roadblocks for implementing ABM strategies and goals. Change is hard, even when it means doing what's best to drive new revenue and find new ways to surprise and delight your internal and external customers.Here are the ten biggest hurdles for your team running as fast as it can with account-based marketing.
Account-based marketing is focused B2B marketing. That's raw truth. If you can focus all of your attention on accounts that matter, people who care about your message, and channels they like to engage on, you are doing account-based marketing. Start with identify Focusing on the right accounts is the first step for any successful marketing campaign.
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).
With account-based marketing, there is an ongoing process of expansion, but it's about quality, not quantity. You targeted your best-fit accounts with your ICP to determine whether they're Tier A, B, or C accounts. Next, you will continue to expand your reach within an account by adding more contacts and their information.
In the modern world of account-based marketing, the digital and display advertising solutions available are evolving faster than ever. Unlike the Mad Men days of the 1950s, the advertising world moves at a lightning pace. Imagine what Don Draper would say when you told him he wouldn't have to wait for six months to receive the research that tells him whether his latest advertising is working.
The central idea of account-based marketing is for B2B marketing and sales teams to focus on their best-fit prospects and opportunities instead of "spraying and praying" like traditional lead-based marketing. Before ABM, the key metric for measuring marketing campaigns was how many leads were created from these activities.
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.
Account-based marketing is possible thanks to innovations in marketing technology (MarTech). Since the rise of marketing automation platforms (MAPs), thousands of new MarTech software vendors have entered the product category. There are dozens of subcategories of MarTech, such as email marketing, interactive content, advertising, video marketing, events, search (SEM and SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, and many more.
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.
Targeted advertising is part of your account-based marketing strategy. You're pulling data from your customer relationship management (CRM) system to target contacts in accounts. It's a laser-focused business-to-business (B2B) marketing technique. Another way to connect with your accounts is through CRM retargeting.
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.
Creating Account-Based Marketing Campaigns This account-based marketing framework will help to put context on all the strategies and tactics you'll use for creating campaigns. With account-based marketing, think about it from going beyond the typical B2B buyer's journey to an account's journey. The account's journey goes beyond the purchase decision (whether to buy or not from your company) to the customer experience.
Your needs for MarTech are unique to your organization. For your sales and marketing ("smarketing") team to execute account-based marketing at scale, you need technology. But before you choose a solution, think about how you will use this technology.The technology and tools you add should fulfill a need. As B2B marketing continues to shift away from traditional media (such as print, radio, and billboard advertising) to digital platforms (including online mobile, social, video, and display ads), marketers need a streamlined process to execute marketing activities at scale.
The bottom line for defining a company's success is revenue. Account-based marketing can help your company focus on revenue as it looks at the amount of money each account has the potential to bring in or currently is paying your company as a customer. Through account-based marketing, you are tracking revenue opportunities at the account level through data in your CRM.
Emails are the easiest account-based marketing technique of all. It's low cost, as it doesn't take much time to prepare and send an email. What does matter is the content of your email. Business-to-business (B2B) marketers use these metrics to determine whether an email was successful: Open rates: The percentage of people who opened your email.
There are two main event categories for business-to-business (B2B) marketers: tradeshows (or conferences hosted by someone else) and events you host yourself. These events also can be used in account-based marketing. Tradeshows and conferences: There are tons of tradeshows and conferences. These industry events are a great way to bring people together.
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.
In theory, targeting the right accounts in account-based marketing is easy. In action, this can present many challenges. Because most marketing teams were created for lead-based marketing, the most popular software solutions also are lead-based.This may surprise you, but your customer relationship management (CRM) system and marketing automation system weren't initially set up for account-based marketing.
Account-based marketing is about connecting with the right accounts. This is the business-to-business (B2B) industry, and it's called that because your business sells to other businesses, not to leads. It's about the quality, not the quantity, of your customers. Creating clear metrics The metrics to define success in account-based marketing are different from traditional B2B lead-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.
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.
A true account-based marketing (ABM) campaign will include the persona criteria you created. You will need data that matches these personas to find all the people involved in the account's purchase decision. Data will help give you the knowledge of how to reach your contacts in your targeted accounts. These are the people you will prospect with marketing activities.
An average of seven to ten stakeholders participate in a business-to-business (B2B) purchase decision. While there can be multiple stakeholders, there is only one ultimate decision-maker who will give the green light whether to purchase or not.A stakeholder can be any person in the company you are trying to sell.
Commonly referred to as a value prop, a value proposition calls attention to the features and capabilities of a product, service, or feature. In business-to-business (B2B) marketing, providing your prospect a value proposition demonstrates the benefit of doing business with your company. Differentiating value based on roles Because you've taken the time to identify personas with whom you want to do business, you can address a value proposition to their individual responsibilities.
The organic way your prospects find you is called inbound marketing. According to Demand Gen Report, 90 percent of buyers say that when they're ready to buy, they will find you. Your buyers are looking for a solution to a problem. It's the marketing team's job to make sure your company's solution is easy to find.
The platforms in your MarTech stack need to "talk" to each other. All of your applications are selected to build a comprehensive experience for marketing to your accounts. This integration is accomplished through the application programming interface (API). The API allows your applications to connect and to prevent data silos.
Pipeline acceleration is also known as sales velocity. Using the formula for velocity (distance / time), your company wants to generate as much velocity as possible to see a revenue opportunity move through the sales pipeline to becoming a Closed/Won customer. An acceleration campaign is used in collaboration with marketing to help generate velocity and move a deal through the pipeline.
Contact information about your accounts is the main type of data stored in your customer relationship management (CRM) system. Unless you're a brand new company, the existing data in your CRM will help serve as a baseline for starting account-based marketing (ABM). Your data shouldn't live in spreadsheets. If you are currently managing your data in Microsoft Access or Excel, or just a notebook on your salesperson's desk, stop reading this book now.
The data you need in your customer relationship management (CRM) system for account-based marketing rightfully focuses first on accounts. There are tons of sources to find data on companies for your target accounts. These are a few vendors you can try to obtain company data for account-based marketing: Dun & Bradstreet: Dun & Bradstreet maintains information on more than 250 million companies worldwide.
You need know where your prospects are most active, and whether this is on inbound or outbound marketing channels. Sending prospects content and engaging them helps to create activity, ultimately bringing them closer to revenue, but you need to specifically know what's working. Using your marketing automation system, you can monitor the activities that try to connect with your contacts.
Outbound marketing means proactively reaching out to potential prospects within your target accounts to tell them about your company's solution. Not all prospects will come to you, so you need to create an outbound marketing strategy to get in front of them. If you have your list of target accounts, your outbound activities are meant to reach out and engage the contacts in those accounts.
Predictive analytics software shows you which customers in your customer relationship management (CRM) system to target, based on intent data. Intent data can show you which companies are researching particular topics of interest. Predictive analytics works to examine companies that are your current customers to find similar companies you currently have in your CRM that would also be a good fit.
There's no gray area with account-based marketing. Either an account is interested in purchasing from your company, or it isn't. This is the phase to find whether there is an opportunity to generate revenue for your company. To qualify an opportunity, you need a set of rules. There is a list for qualifying, called BANT: Budget: The contact said there is money approved to make a purchase decision.
The beautiful thing about account-based marketing is being able to do it at scale. By scaling your marketing efforts, you can reach hundreds or thousands of contacts in your target accounts. Marketing technology (MarTech) and marketing automation platforms (MAP) have made it possible to do account-based marketing at scale.
The use of social media is an important part of account-based marketing. Social media got its name because the platforms are designed to connect with other people. It's an easy way of engaging with the thought leaders who are posting about what you're interested in. You can either promote your own content, or insert yourself in conversations with hashtags.
When you compare how much it costs for a lead to become closed revenue for your organization, you can make a compelling case for why your company should switch from traditional lead generation to account-based marketing: Only 0.75 percent of leads generated become closed revenue (Forrester). Generating high-quality leads is the number-one challenge for B2B marketers (IDG Enterprises).
Every person has different strengths. This is especially true for marketing and salespeople. Marketing's strengths are in creating content, campaigns, and generating awareness for a business-to-business (B2B) company's brand.Marketing supplies the creative content to drive interest, creating leads for sales to pursue (opportunities).
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).
The forecasting model that is used by B2B marketing and sales professionals to monitor potential new revenue is the sales pipeline. The pipeline is commonly referred to as the funnel.The traditional B2B marketing and sales funnel tracks the various stages of a revenue opportunity as it moves through the sales process.
A webinar is an online web broadcast produced by your company or a partner. There are many different platforms for hosting your webinar, such as GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar, Join.Me, WebEx, BrightTalk, and Google Hangout. The price depends on the number of "seats" for attendees.There are two categories of webinars: thought leadership and product.
The essential definition of account-based marketing is focused business-to-business (B2B) marketing. The term account-based marketing isn't new. Identifying and targeting key accounts has always been a best practice for B2B marketing and sales teams. What's different today about account-based marketing is that improved technology gives marketing teams the tools for account-based marketing at scale.
Marketing technology (MarTech) is the software that helps you execute your marketing activities. MarTech is the business-to-business (B2B) marketing industry's term for applications that help you succeed with modern marketing activities.These marketing activities aren't just about sending emails to contacts in a database.
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.
Proving how account-based marketing is transformational to your organization can be done using data. Good data enhances your credibility for making the case for account-based marketing; numbers support your words. Bad data can be detrimental to your marketing efforts. The right data to support your company's revenue goals is essential for account-based marketing.
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Frequently Asked Questions

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