“Identify, Attract, Engage, Convert, Close, and Measure.”
Anthony & Adel breakdown key aspects of Account-Based Marketing and how companies can see results from this effective strategy moving forward.
ABM Overview
Anthony: “When you look into ABM, there’s a lot of vendors out there that make ABM sound like it’s brand new. Then there’s other people on the side of the table in the sales and marketing world that say ABM is nothing new. It’s existed forever. It’s just gaining more traction.”
Adel: “I think the important thing here with ABM and the conversation that’s grown around it over the last five years, is the technology that comes with it in order to be able to execute on it. That’s what makes it so powerful for businesses between that 4 to $10,000 a month range. You already know when you’re selling deals that are that big, that you’re going to invest a lot more on the front end in order to bring people on as new clients. You can really leverage technology in order to be able to do that very efficiently across many different platforms and channels.”
Adel: “It’s also really following a process that you should be doing no matter what with your marketing. Identify, Attract, Engage, Convert, Close, and Measure. The purpose is for you to be aligned across sales and marketing with those things. If you’re doing any sales and marketing in your organization, you should be doing that. You should be identifying your audience. You can identify exactly who you want to target and target them. This very wide, funnel approach is just not needed because of the channels and the technology that we have available to us.”
Identify and Engage
Adel: “You want to find out who your successful accounts are and who your sales folks have the most success with closing, because those are the people that you want to be attracting. So in order to identify them, marketing needs to be on the same page as sales, and even on the same page as operations. Ultimately, if we’re really going to focus on these accounts, we need to know that these are the accounts that we want.“
Adel: “This is where the whole process starts. The mind switch happens here with identifying, when you can truly walk away from your insecurity of, ‘I just want anybody to be a customer. That’s a really hard flip for people to make in today’s world, because that’s not the conversation that’s been had before. That’s where the ABM is really changing the conversation across the board.”
Adel: “So obviously once they’ve seen you on social media, they need to go to your site. They need to see who you are and they need to be able to connect with you via your website. This is really the front door of your business. This is now people’s first impression of your business. That means it needs to be personalized for those accounts that you’ve identified. What it comes down to is the messaging. Is it speaking to them? Is it going to answer the questions that they’re going to have in order to convert?”
Convert and Close
Adel: “That hits the convert and close, and those two pieces can be the easiest pieces in this. By that point, once they’ve converted, once you’ve captured the form, filling out the form, or responding to an email or clicking on those links, you already know that you have them. They’ve already raised their hand. Then it’s just up to you. At that point, if you’ve done the first three steps well, it’s your deal to lose.”
Adel: “If you don’t follow up as a sales person, if you don’t respond in a timely fashion, or you can’t continue to speak the same language that has been spoken the whole way through the process, then that’s where it’s going to fall through. Keep doing exactly what’s been happening in the entire process. They’re more willing to sign up for more services because you’ve already invested in that relationship in those first three steps.”
