ABM delivers the highest Return on Investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic. Read how these 3 A’s define why ABM is the way to go.

ACCELERATION

ABM accelerates the sales cycle.

It is rare in a complex B2B sales cycle, that the buyer is one, isolated individual. Purchasing decisions can and normally do involve over a dozen decision makers. So, why risk pursuing one path?

Because ABM actively targets all of the influencers and decision-makers in a company, ABM deals move faster and get stuck less.

ALIGNMENT

ABM tightly aligns your sales and marketing teams, AND aligns your customer experience.

Often times there is a disconnect between sales and marketing teams. Account Based Marketing requires sales and marketing to focus on the same accounts with specific and common criteria. Once all key stakeholders-execs, SDRs and marketers are completely committed to ABM as a long-term strategy, there is nothing but potential for success.

Because sales have accounts they care about the most, ABM can help marketing focus their resources on these accounts specifically. Through creation of account profiles that identify account objectives, decision-makers, buying process/ responsibilities, media/ channel preferences, company initiatives, impactful trends, needs, and high value propositions, marketing and sales teams can work together to create specific content and strategy.

As for customer experience, ABM delivers the consistently relevant experience that customers demand. The highly personalized approach means that all interactions are aligned across channels and highly targeted to maximize relevance. Your company reads as one unified, compelling story.

ACCOUNT PENETRATION AND EXPANSION

ABM guides intelligent account expansion at existing customers.

Demand Metric published in their December 2015 Report, over half of the low maturity segment members have been using ABM for less than a year, while over half of the high maturity segments have been using ABM for two or more years. Employing ABM is a long-term investment but once alignment happens, account penetration and acceleration are just around the corner.

The perception that ABM is just for acquiring new clients is false. The most mature segment of ABM users is becoming equal or greater from cross-selling and/or up-selling to existing clients. For ABM users with substantial customer bases, this cross/ up selling motive could easily eclipse prospecting as the motive driving ABM use.

We all know that it’s easier to retain revenue and sell to existing customers than it is to land new customers; Account Based Marketing aligns more of the marketing department’s efforts onto these kind of high ROI activities. In fact, the High-Performance ABM Capabilities Benchmark Report of December 2015 found that while the primary motive driving less mature ABM programs is prospecting for new customers, as ABM maturity increases, the motive swings dramatically toward cross/up selling to existing customers.

While cross-selling and up-selling is the way to go, bear in mind the most successful ABM strategies normally include a wide range of content formats and channels, such as display ads, website content, emails, phone scripts, etc.

AAA SUMMARY

ABM is a powerful combination of people, processes, and technology that allows marketers to land the big fish by focusing on quality over quantity. ABM is a strategy that targets a full 100% of time, resource and efforts on the named accounts your company decides as having the greatest potential. ABM deal sizes are bigger and research shows that the systematic discipline of ABM significantly out-performs the more ad hoc or unaligned approaches of the past.