Laser-focused prospect targeting with ABM

We do love our acronyms in marketing. 

Let’s elaborate. 

If your ideal customer profile (ICP), leads you to relatively few customers who have high contract value (HCV), then account-based marketing (ABM) is the approach you should consider. 

When a tight ICP can identify quality prospect accounts, then account-based marketing helps create a hyper-personalised approach, aligning sales and marketing and building value across a segment of stakeholders that make up a buying committee. 

According to Gartner, more than 70% of B2B marketers at midsize to large organisations will either pilot or launch full-scale account-based marketing (ABM) programs to target and engage buyers. 

And even more exciting are the results of the recent Gartner Technology Marketing Benchmarks Survey, where respondents observed increases in key marketing and sales area after implementing ABM.

• Marketing observed:
  • Improved conversion rates throughout the funnel
  • Increase web traffic 
  • Improved advertising and email performance

• Sales saw:
  • Higher win rates 
  • Faster sales cycles
  • Increased deal sizes

Wow, sounds awesome! Something you want to try out? Let’s take a closer look at getting started…

Phase 1 – Who do you want to target? 

Perfect alignment between sales and marketing is essential when constructing an audience and account selection strategy. Vast amounts of time can be wasted trying to convince prospects that simply aren’t suited to your solutions and are extremely unlikely to buy from you. A well-constructed feedback loop from sales (who speak directly with the prospects) to marketing (who introduce sales to the prospects) mitigates this and helps build an ideal client profile that is receptive to your solution. 

ABM targets companies, so building a target company persona is as important as the buyer persona’s you may already have within your marketing mix. Not only do they include typical demographic values, but they should have structural, behavioural and situational factors that help draw companies into your funnel and produce tightly targeted prospects. We love this Ideal Customer guide from Inflexion-Point; perfectly crafted to help you create a practical, empirical profile of companies who are going to love you! 

Phase 2 – Create your nurturing roadmap 

Until the increasing adoption of ABM, marketing teams would hand over a lead to sales, almost forget about that prospect and return their attention to finding more new leads. ABM requires a more aligned approach, with marketing providing air-cover of relevant and personalised content to support sales during their sales engagement. 

This prolonged and consistent communication allows marketing to fine-tune content to suit prospect needs that are being uncovered throughout the sales process, making the prospect feel valued and understood. 

Phase 3 – Recruit marketing tech support 

The complexities of ABM can be simplified by choosing the right marketing tech. Plugging together several specialist apps can create a stack that can capture, monitor and manage prospects, but it is only as good as the weakest link. 

Introducing an end-to-end ABM solution using a full-service platform such as HubSpot helps maintain data integrity, eliminates context switching common to the use of multiple tools and produces a seamless experience for the customer. 

So, what does this all mean? How do ABM campaigns work in practice? We have laid out how HubSpot can be leveraged to create a knock-out ABM campaign.

Executing ABM campaigns in HubSpot 

1. Create a target account list by adding AI-suggested target accounts, viewing prospects in the prospect tool, or importing target accounts using an integration with a third-party tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, Bombora, Terminus, or RollWorks.

2. Track and view account activity in the account overview panel to view all touches and interactions across the entire buying committee in one place, ensuring both sales and marketing have a clear understanding of the state of each target account.

3. Use workflows to label your ICP tiers and buying roles, and use company lists to group your target accounts and buying committee to leverage with company targeting in your campaigns.

4. Use the campaigns tool to plan and deploy all the touches and asset iterations for your ABM plays. Social media, ads, landing pages, forms, emails, and much more can be added to a campaign to roll up reporting and results into one view across multiple assets. 

5. Use smart content and A/B testing on your landing pages to give a personalized experience, and leverage chat bots to ensure your prospects can find what they need. 

6. Use workflows to continuously segment your lists and to update an account’s ad and other targeting based on engagement, intent, scoring, etc. 

7. Update lifecycle stage and lead status based on behaviour or custom events and sync your lifecycle stages with external ad platforms for better AI optimization for your ad campaigns.

8. Automatically update marketing plays based on buying role, ICP tier, buying stage, and more, using workflows.

9. Use workflows and company scoring to surface accounts to sales at the right time and keep sales in the know, moment by moment. 

10. Use HubSpot Operations Hub data quality features to ensure that all data syncing between tools is clean and consistent.  

11. Automate the work of your sales team by leveraging workflows to assign tasks and send notifications.

12. Research active prospects and accounts with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration right inside of HubSpot and make your outreach timely and relevant.

13. Enroll buying committee members into sequences automatically based on any of 1000+  trigger options. Essentially, any information about the account can be utilized to determine the right time to enrol an account into a sequence.

14. Suggest content for sales to use in the buying process based on prospect’s consumption history using workflows and user behaviour data to personalize the journey. 

15. Use HubSpot videos in your sales outreach for personalization.

Use workflows and offline marketing integrations like postal.io to automatically send gifts to your buying committee based on deal size, ICP tier, lifecycle stage, deal stage, and more.

Analyse data across the entire buyer’s journey in one place with reports and dashboards, collaborate on changes with the campaign tool, and implement iterations and optimizations into your campaigns all from HubSpot. 

 Phew…. It might seem a bit daunting but that’s why we are here to help. We create ABM plays for customer’s across a variety of sectors, using HubSpot and other platforms.  

So get in touch, we’d love to have a chat with you about using ABM to turbo charge your marketing power-plays.