9. THE IMPACT OF ABM ABM LIFT ON SEVERAL METRICS
3.98
4.00
4.02
4.14
4.20
4.31
4.64
1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5
Customer Retention Rate
Initial Contract Value
Close Rate
Return on Sales &
Mktng. Investment
Upsell/Cross-sell
Overall LTV
Alignment Between
Sales & Marketing
ABM OUTPERFORMS
TRADITIONAL METHODS
B2B Marketers Are Realizing
Greater Benefits From ABM
Across Multiple Areas
TOPO: ABM State of the Market
ABM provides much greater
benefit than traditional
approach
ABM and
traditional are
same
Traditional
approach benefit is
much greater
10. 3.89
3.81
4.12
4.15
3.70
4.23
4.44
4.17
4.18
4.30
4.32
4.38
4.39
4.87
1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5
Customer Retention Rate
Initial Contract Value
Close Rate
Return on Sales &
Mktg. Investment
Upsell/Cross-sell
Overall LTV
Alignment Between
Sales & Marketing
1 yr+ <1yr
THE IMPACT OF ABM ABM LIFT INCREASES OVER TIME
TOPO: ABM State of the Market ABM provides much greater
benefit than traditional
approach
ABM and
traditional are
same
Traditional
approach benefit is
much greater
ABM BENEFITS
INCREASE OVER TIME
The Benefits Of ABM vs.
Traditional Marketing are
More Pronounced as you
Scale Your Efforts
11. ABM PILOT ADOPTION PATH
SCALEEXPANDPILOT
Partner with a group of
Sales Reps
Expand target account list
ABM strategy to
target accounts & segments
Partner with one
Sales Rep
Small target account list
ABM strategy to
target accounts
Sales and Marketing
Partnership
Comprehensive target account list
Full ABM rollout across
Sales and Marketing
12. ABM PILOT PLAN 3 STEPS TO A SUCCESSFUL PILOT
STEP 3
Measure impact and
identify
improvements.
• Account goals
• Influenced pipeline
• Campaign lift
• How to expand
STEP 2
Customize touch
points for each
account.
• Digital ads
• LPs, Forms, Emails
• Content assets
• Website content
STEP 1
Engage sales
partner to formulate
plan.
• 90 days
• 1 account exec
• 5-10 accounts
• 2-3 key metrics
13. TIER CUSTOMIZE BY
Account # of Employees
Annual Revenue
Vertical/Industry/SIC
Geography
Buying group Need/Pain/Challenge
Timing
Budget
(Intent)
Individual Buying group role
Department/function
Device
Priority vs. other work
ADOPTING ABM TARGETING & CUSTOMIZATION TIERS
14. ABM PILOT HOW TO CUSTOMIZE
DIGITAL
ADVERTISING
• Targeting parameters
• Ad creative
• Offers
• CTAs
WEBSITE CONTENT
• Headings
• Navigation
• Images
• Conversion points
LANDING PAGES,
FORMS & EMAILS
• Custom copy & Images
• Lookalike customer logos or
testimonials for social proof
• Custom CTA language
CONTENT ASSETS
• Titles
• Cover pages
• Background images
• Jargon
TARGET
ACCOUNT
LIST
28. Launching ABM at
2. Customized touch
points for accounts.
3. Measured and improved1. Engaged sales to
formulate plan.
29. Launching ABM at
2. Customized touch
points for accounts.
3. Measured and improved
Plot twist: Hired the salesperson for
ABM!
1. Engaged sales to
formulate plan.
32. “Leads nurtured with personalized content
tend to lead to 20% more sales
opportunities”
- Demand Gen report
33. Optimizing Content for ABM
Micro
Optimize the
individual piece of
content for your goals
Macro
Optimize overall
experience (where does
your content live?)
35. Audit Existing Content1
• We had 1000s of content assets
• Identified content based on industry, persona,
role, account, stage, and individuals
• Low-hanging fruit: Case studies, customer
stories, eBooks
• We launched an initial ABM campaign using
existing content, and adding customization
36. • Where does your content live?
• Can you organize it to be more easily found
by industry, persona, role, account, stage,
and individual?
• Low-hanging fruit: Re-organize existing
content to be more relevant & engaging to
account segments
2 Audit Content Experience
37. Your Content
Top of the Funnel
Middle of the
Funnel
Bottom of the
Funnel
By Topic By Type By Vertical By Persona By Account
41. Based on Tier
• Used different account segments (&
stage) to determine investment level of
time, money, and resources
• E.g. at Uberflip:
o Tier 1: By account, individual
o Tier 2: By industry, persona, tech
o Tier 3: Regular inbound strategy, +
industry/persona related content
Account Value ($)
Effortinvested
Tier: 3 2 1
42. STAGE Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3
Cold - Direct mail offers, to 1-5
people 2x per quarter for
each account
- Targeted ads per account
- Custom digital assets
- Account plans
- Regular inbound
- Additional marketing targeting, ads
for accounts with MAP
- Regular inbound
strategy only
Engaged - Targeted ads per account
- Direct mail plays
- Limited direct mail plays (dependant
on persona & situation)
- Sales-lead
Opportunity - Targeted ads per account
- Creative direct mail if
prospects are “going cold”
- Custom digital assets
- Targeted ads per account (only if at
validation stage or higher & opp
value)
- Notes & cards
- Limited direct
mail
Post-Sale - Thank you package & note - Thank you package & note - Thank you
package
Example: ABM Strategy Based on Tier + Stage
43. CAMPAIGN 1DCAMPAIGN 1A CAMPAIGN 1B CAMPAIGN 1C
Outcome: CTR of 6-13% with target accounts!
47. A technology sales
professional spends…
17h a week
or
106 sales days a year
developing
client presentations
looking for
marketing collateral
searching for customer
information outside the
organization
8h
5h
4h
… wasting almost
Source: EMI Industry Intelligence Report
48. Enable Sales with Content
• Get in sync
o Content & sales meetings
o Sales contributions + ideas
• Create collections of content that are
easy to access + distribute for sales
• Collect feedback from sales regularly on
what’s working for all stages of buyer’s
journey
49. Key Takeaways
• Beginning a pilot
• Engage sales to formulate plan
• Customize touchpoints for each account
• Measure impact & optimize for improvements
• Scaling your ABM strategy
• Identify scope, goals, metrics, & target accounts
• Create marketing mix: Use tech to help
• Review, iterate, and scale
• Personalizing at scale
• Audit existing content (micro) and its experience
(macro).
• Optimize demand generation with personalization
• Provide sales the right content @ the right time
50. The recording will be sent out soon.
info@brainrider.com inquiries@demandbase.com contact@uberflip.com
Notes de l'éditeur
No to both of those….it’s because ABM is having a big impact on results for the companies who are practicing it.
What you’re looking at here is the results of a recent TOPO research study that surveyed companies who have employed ABM and shows for several key indicators the impact of ABM vs traditional marketing methods.
With a “1” showing traditional methods as best and a “5” showing ABM methods as best, the results are really high for ABM on all measures.
But the story gets even better. Let’s take a look…
The other compelling finding is that the benefits associated with ABM increase over time. For those practicing ABM more than 1 year are seeing even more pronounced impact than companies who have just started ABM.
So looking at those same attributes, we see across the board, that companies that have executed ABM for more than 1 year and seeing greater benefit vs. companies who have just started with ABM. It’s clear that as companies get more sophisticated, the impact of ABM on their business goes even higher.
And speaking of sophistication….let’s look at a roadmap for ABM maturity and you can ask yourselves where you sit on this continuum.
It may seem daunting to do all of this. But remember that you can find ways to start that will help you prove the success of the model and, from there, you can then expand. Depending on the buy-in from leadership—whether you’re looking to align your work with a sales colleague, sales leadership, or go all the way with full organizational alignment—your efforts could sometimes feel like an uphill battle to drive change. The good news is that you can find ways to make change that can show real results even without full-company alignment.
Think about building upward through the tiers of the ABM maturity model. At the first stage, you can partner with a sales person and use his or her named account list to target the ABM strategy. As you know, some organizations exist in which the marketing and sales personnel have never met their counterparts; in other organizations, Marketers may not have visibility within their departments or access to stakeholders who can help drive change. If either of these scenarios describes your situation, start at this initial stage.
Set up a pilot to test an ABM strategy. Even implementing a small pilot can show the value of ABM. This data then can be used to gain buy in from leadership to implement ABM broader.
Moving up the maturity model, you can partner with a specific sales leader and then focus the target account list on a segment that is managed by that sales leader. In some situations or organizations, you will find sales leadership buy in for ABM implementation without full buy in from the entire sales group. In this instance, develop an ABM strategy for specific industry segments. Focus on the industries that make up the sales leader’s key accounts. Measure success with ABM industries as compared to general marketing efforts. Here, too, it is important to measure before and after to provide a clear picture of the change for all leadership to see.
Finally, at the top of the maturity spectrum is the full-company alignment that we have been describing. In this situation, a comprehensive target-account list is built, and there is full ABM rollout across the entire organization. While we will be talking about this top level state throughout today, all the same principles apply even if you are implementing at a smaller scale.
If no positive, go back and re-evaluate process to date?
•Better List?
•Better marketing programs?
•Better sales enablement?
•Better Metrics?
Match Business Objectives: New logos, Advocacy
Match Revenue Goals: 80/20 rule; Upsell/Renewal
Match Strategic Initiatives: New territory, New Product
Match Business Model: Volume part of business vs Strategic Accounts
ICP: 10 characteristics focused on website volume, tech stack, etc.
“Philosophical Alignment” starts with the leadership around implementing ABM. Getting senior leaders on board not only helps with the rollout and building to higher tiers of ABM maturity but also provides you with a clear set of higher-level business objectives to drive toward with your target accounts. You’ll want to look at senior leaders in three areas: Sales, Marketing, and Operations.
Leaders in each of these areas bring different elements to helping lay the foundation of an ABM strategy. The Sales department provides insight into the sales cycle and prospects that can help define the target accounts where marketing programs can target. The Marketing department provides insight into ways that the marketing programs can help in hitting the sales goals. And finally, the operations department will put up your guardrails by implementing and integrating the technology so you can derive insight through data that can help measure and fine tune the ABM strategy.
Some potential leaders to consider include:
Sales
SVP of Sales/Chief Revenue Officer
Heads of Field Sales
Sales Development/Lead Development
Sales Operations
Marketing
Demand Gen
Field Marketing
Marketing Ops
Standardized reports for sales enablement:
Each program owner needs to have reports to help drive sales enablement. The format of these reports should be consistent across all marketing programs so that the sales team doesn’t get confused and miss key opportunities to engage in a sales conversation. If a report for one campaign has different parameters than a report for another campaign, it compromises the integrity of the strategy since the sales team won’t be following up on responses using the same guidelines. It may also undermine the trust you’ve built as they see delta’s in performance for different cmapaigns and start to focus on what they think is the best (but is only better b/c the reporting is better focused on priorities).
Creating to dashboards for performance
This gives everyone easy access to performance data with a single click. Update these dashboards based upon how you classify your strategy: by team, by campaign, by vertical, by product, by quarter, etc. The key is that marketers who will now be adopting a new way to evaluate their performance have clear guidelines and reports to do so – and there is no ambiguity for them. Like sales, keep them focused on reaching your target accounts, not on debating how to evaluate if ABM is right for them.
Incentivizing on funnel metrics (MBO’s)
We’ve said it before, and this goes back to the Dashboards, but marketers must be tied to the same funnel metrics that are being used to evaluate the effectiveness of the ABM strategy. Knowing how they will be compensated in an ABM world will eliminate any of the confusion and keep them focused on the performance metrics that will drive the right results.
Forecasting by funnel metrics
Using the results of your pilot or test, show the marketers how the ABM strategy has impacted performance and how they can approach forecasting the expected performance of their efforts. If you’ve seen dramatic performance increases in metrics like close rates, ACV & opportunity generation, share those numbers as benchmarks which can be used to model out how their performance will change after implementing an ABM strategy.
New Marketing Mix
(show how marketing mix will change based upon ABM focus and previous performance – what does it look like?) Show them how you’ve adjusted your marketing mix using an ABM strategy so they can think about how it may impact their current model, allowing them to plan ahead to monitor if their seeing the same indicators of change and to make educated decisions faster to help reach success faster.
NEW MARKETING MIX?
Oppty: what impacts close rates
What programs influence each of these buckets the most?
Are they different by bucket
What are the conversion metrics of each bucket?
CP: 10 characteristics focused on website volume, tech stack, etc.
Planning an expansion of ABM, use playbook:
Playbook:
Step 1: Enabling ABM Leadership Team
List
Metrics
Performance Increasing
Step 2: Enabling marketing
Shift in marketing tactics
Shift in budgets
Shift in team mix
Step 3: Enabling Sales
reporting
Communications
Cheer leading
SDR hand-off
Prioritization
SDR team composition
What if your B2B content was binge-worthy?You will learn:
- How to organize and present your content to engage your prospects and customers
- How to get your sales team to use your content
- How to recycle your existing content to scale your ABM campaigns
But in all seriousness – not all of us are selling products that fit in vending machines – we need to sell our product or service through thought leadership / content / education
we need our prospects to engage
and irrelevance is killing our chances at success
Agile – terminus + uberflip allows us to launch targeted campaigns quickly and easily – this helps us scale our ABM efforts
What if your B2B content was binge-worthy?You will learn:
- How to organize and present your content to engage your prospects and customers
- How to get your sales team to use your content
- How to recycle your existing content to scale your ABM campaigns
How can you optimize/organize the content you alreadyhave? Macro = house/shelf your content lives in Micro = content assets Both apply across the buyers journey
People are reading your content, yay! But let’s get them to take the next step… CTAs are one of the main conversion steps for content. step 1: you need to actually have one !
People are reading your content, yay! But let’s get them to take the next step… CTAs are one of the main conversion steps for content. step 1: you need to actually have one !
People are reading your content, yay! But let’s get them to take the next step… CTAs are one of the main conversion steps for content. step 1: you need to actually have one !
A few ways we typically see marketers organize content.. By personas, funnel stages, industry.. It doesn’t have to be so complicated to get started with content for ABM! One way to look at it is like this.. You might not need content at each stage for each account.. Work with the sales team to prioritize/grade your accounts and customize content as needed
People are reading your content, yay! But let’s get them to take the next step… CTAs are one of the main conversion steps for content. step 1: you need to actually have one !
Example of a campaign we tested out to target our IAP 1 accounts – all using existing content! All from those MA streams I showed you before, just repackaged
Who do you think this content stream is targeting? Didn’t need to make this content from scratch – ALL existing content with new ‘house’ + CTA
Who do you think this content stream is targeting? Didn’t need to make this content from scratch – ALL existing content with new ‘house’ + CTA
A 2011 EMI Industry Intelligence Report revealed that in an average week, a technology sales professional spends eight hours developing client presentations, five hours looking for marketing collateral, and four hours searching for customer information outside the organization. The sales professional wastes 17 hours a week or 106 sales days a year — the problem is that this dramatically reduces the effectiveness of the sales team. Working with sales is crucial to gaining traction with your key accounts. I’d recommend starting here if you don’t have a great foundation for bottom of funnel content/sales enablement
People are reading your content, yay! But let’s get them to take the next step… CTAs are one of the main conversion steps for content. step 1: you need to actually have one !