When it comes to B2B sales, ABM engagement has been one surefire way to increase revenue thanks to AI for sales prospecting. ABM, in full account-based marketing, is a focused growth strategy that seeks to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually identified set of accounts.
The idea behind ABM is beginning the sales process by selling directly to your best-fit, highest value accounts. There will be no more wasted time trying to market products to unqualified leads who aren’t the right fit for your business.
Eliminating that hustle takes you straight to engaging and quite possibly delighting your target accounts.
How to Go About ABM
To get the best out of an ABM approach, follow this pseudocode:
Create Alignment Between Your Sales and Marketing Teams
Sales and marketing are a crucial partnership. To run any effective ABM implementation, the two must be aligned. The reason for this is to give customers a seamless transition from being identified as a lead to the sale being made.
To improve this sales-marketing partnership, both teams must come together and commit to finding a clear common middle-ground to ensure the marketing team is acquiring leads from trusted referrals or otherwise that the sales team can now sell to.
Conduct Research to Determine Account Personas
After the sales and marketing teams have their interests aligned, the next step is working together to ensure only the correct personas are targeted.
Typically, this begins with a period of research to identify which accounts to further pursue. As a marketer, this is what you should consider in ABM engagement:
- The mission, vision and objectives of the ideal customer.
- The current stage of business maturity in terms of size and growth trajectory.
- Revenue model and spending patterns.
- The tools and platforms the ideal customer is using.
You know what they say about skinning a cat so what’s most important is that the marketing and sales teams agree which accounts to target.
Create Account Plans
After determining which accounts to target, it’s now time to build account plans. This part involves the teams working together to map out potential leads they’ll need to reach their target accounts and what content they’ll need to produce to engage with said accounts.
Here is what you need to keep in mind when creating account plans:
- Each plan should be tailored to the needs of that particular account, although account plans for customers in the same segment can have similarities.
- Each account plan should essentially address two questions: who is included in the buying decision for this sale and what content is needed for each member of this buying committee.
Segmenting can be a great strategy, especially when done right. You can identify common traits among some of your customers and group them. These may include location, budget, niche and so on.
Segmenting is particularly useful if you are dealing with many accounts.
Attract Contacts Associated With Target Accounts
Inbound methodology will help you attract contacts associated with your target accounts. In the event that you need additional contacts, your next step determines where your ideal contacts are currently going to find solutions related to what you offer and make sure your company is visible and represented in these spaces.
Great places to get contacts include trusted referrals, events, publications as well as targeted ad placements. As tempting as using all these channels is, only prioritize the channels that are most relevant to your target accounts and contacts.
Get the Buying Committee Involved
The last step of this AI for sales prospecting application is getting the buying committee involved. As you build relationships with key contacts, make sure both sales and marketing teams actively engage everyone involved in the buying decision.
