Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy that focuses on building relationships with specific accounts or customers most likely to generate revenue for a business. ABM aims to create a personalized experience for each target account rather than a generalized marketing message.

One of the sales teams I am working with recently decided to add an ABM outreach strategy to promote their portfolio of products. There were several challenges ahead for them (and for me) to identify the real problems and the right solutions.

1. The sales team didn’t have an ABM strategy.
   A successful ABM strategy implementation should have a positive impact on both of the organizations that are at the two ends of a working arrangement, the service provider and the client.
   From the service provider’s perspective, an ABM strategy should include methods and tools to identify the buyers and decision-makers in the organizations they plan to work with and tools to identify the buying intent through intelligence gathered from digital properties.

2. Their CRM wasn’t set up in a way to allow them to manage contacts at the account level.
   CRM is an essential tool for any size business to keep track of their communications with their customers. One of a CRM platform’s main purposes is to enable sales teams to manage their customer relations on the platform, so the natural next step was for us to set up their CRM and associate Accounts with Contacts, and assign each of those contacts a role. In our case, the organization’s CRM was architected for a more B2C approach so we needed to introduce a new architecture to allow teams to capture their client communications and associate contact roles with accounts. The concept is not novel for the Salesforce platform, but we still needed to get the missing pieces in place, document, and train the teams.

3. They had duplicate contact and account records.
   Many organizations have data duplication problems; some make peace with this and manage their data operations, and some include periodic data clean-up tasks in their activities. There is no wrong approach as long as the organization has data governance that allows them to navigate the complexities. In this case, the organization navigates more comfortably when data is deduped, so with the help of tools like Cloudingo, this is a fairly simple yet time-consuming task. With the data cleaned up, the organization had a clearer picture of which accounts generated the most revenue, and as a result of this, their ABM efforts have become more targeted.

4. The organization has two separate teams running ABM outreach.
   This is an added complexity since the organization will likely have multiple account owners, while, Salesforce isn’t set up to accommodate this. This added complexity can conflict with existing rules in an organization’s CRM architecture. So we need to get creative and create our custom object (or fields) in Salesforce to patch this important need—certainly not a big task but an important one to help teams align and manage accounts.

5. They needed help to provide discounts at the account level.
   The team’s website is fully integrated with their CRM. This allowed us to create a custom object to enable the sales team to manage discount events within their CRM. This piece of the puzzle was fairly easy to spec and it was fully tested and deployed in 3 short weeks.

6. They needed to mass enroll executives in their programs.
   This is mainly a UI challenge, and we ran a couple of design sessions with the client to understand the best solution. The main goal was to introduce an intuitive, simple, and effective method allowing internal and external users to mass upload enrollments through a web portal. The portal we built allowed the customer to log in to the website first so we would know which programs to serve them because there are more than 200 programs available on any given day, and the web user might be uploading for more than one. When they logged in to the website, we displayed a portal where they could see which programs and dates they were eligible for, how many enrollments they could send for each date, and their corporate discount. Once they selected programs, they were then asked to upload a CSV file with student information, and they were served a payment page.

7. Account Intelligence
   There are a handful of martech tools that specialize in providing intelligence in the ABM arena. The two main players are 6Sense and Demandbase, delivering buy intent signals collected through digital properties combined with detailed account contact information with a click of a button. Using these tools enabled the sales teams to get more clarity on which accounts are searching for their services and who from those accounts might be searching, thus allowing the sales and marketing team to send out targeted email campaigns with relevant messaging.

To conclude, ABM is a powerful marketing strategy that can help businesses to increase their chances of closing deals with high-value accounts. If you are looking for a way to improve the efficiency of your marketing and sales efforts, then ABM is a strategy that you should consider.

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Please reach out if you want to implement an ABM strategy or would like to share your feedback.