Sales, Meet Marketing. Marketing, Meet Sales.

Account-based marketing (ABM) isn’t new—or is it? Jumping into the spotlight in the past few years, it shows no signs of disappearing. We talked to ABM experts Sangram Vajre and Bev Burgess to find out what it is, how it’s done, and what your organization needs to do to make it work wonders for you.

For better or worse, it’s rather well accepted that marketing is as statistics based as it’s ever been. We make decisions about what consumers we target and how we target them based on metrics such as reach, engagement, comments, thumbs-up, hearts, and retweets. Do they like us? Do they talk to us? Do they share what we say with their friends and colleagues?

Then, we use these numbers to determine whom we market to as well as when we say it and how. So, if numbers we think we can trust influence and sometimes determine our marketing efforts, it stands to reason that our sales efforts should follow the same. After all, plenty of organizations have forgone the idea of marketing and sales as separate departments, going so far as to hire a single vice president for sales and marketing simply to ensure that the two groups work together more closely. Still, for whatever reason, most sales teams have failed to use new marketing tactics to help their own cause.

That trend is changing, however, and something called account-based marketing (ABM) is at the helm of the shift. ABM is laser-focused B2B marketing. Sangram Vajre, cofounder and CMO of Atlanta-based Terminus: Account-Based Marketing, says that while technology has given B2B marketers thousands of tools to connect with prospects, B2B marketing technology is both a blessing and a curse, because buyers are inundated with thousands of messages every day. “This is why it’s essential for marketers to identify their best-fit customers versus worrying about generating leads,” Vajre says. Based on a Forrester Research statistic that says less than one percent of leads generated ever become customers, Vajre says, “B2B marketers who are blasting emails and ‘spraying and praying’ may be wasting 99 percent of their time, energy, and resources marketing to people who may never pay your company a dime.” But don’t toss all your current marketing plans out the window just yet. The practice of account-based marketing is highly strategic, is very specific to targeted accounts, and takes time to develop. ABM presents a highly collaborative environment for sales and marketing to “flip the funnel” and effectively engage more people—decision-makers, key influencers, and executives.

For ABM to take hold and impact your business, everything starts at the top. Vajre says the executive team must agree that marketing isn’t about lead generation but about engaging accounts and retaining revenue, going beyond the typical B2C purchase decision to a comprehensive account’s journey. That also means the entire organization must agree on an ideal customer profile. “You have to identify the ideal accounts for doing business with your company, and every department in your organization—marketing, sales, customer success, product, engineering, etc.—must be focused on how to service those accounts,” he says.

Modern consumer marketing, of course, features a much more personal approach, in which brands try to forge a relationship with a consumer and can tailor messages to groups of people or even individuals. ABM takes a page from this newer, B2C, personalized-experience strategy, but in B2B there are often many more people involved in the final decision-making process on the account side. These decision-makers, key influencers, and executives may all be different than the end users. “We have to think about the entire group of stakeholders and influencers, then tailor our marketing activities, strategies, and content to different personas and not just the end user,” Vajre says. “It’s a B2C way of personalizing marketing for multiple people in the same organization.”

How to Do It

The first step to becoming an account-based marketing organization is to build your ideal customer profile. Once you have that, your marketing activities, tactics, and programs will be much more focused on accounts that fit that profile best, and you will more easily identify who they are. Rely on your CRM data to help with the process. Next, expand the data you have with contact information that matches with the buyer persona of your ideal customer profile. Vajre recommends having three contacts with the correct information in your CRM. Once you do, it’s time to craft a strategy for how to engage with the people you’ve identified. Some of the potential tactics Vajre recommends:

• Advertising – Sponsor posts on social media.
• Content Marketing – Publish e-books, white papers, infographics, and blog posts; host webinars or virtual events.
• Email – Pull your CRM data into your marketing automation system to segment lists that you’ll use for crafting personalized emails based on the account’s stage in the buyer’s journey.
• Video – Produce personalized videos, using tools such as Vidyard to engage contacts at a one-to-one or one-to-many scale.
• Direct Mail – Use your print and direct mail vendor to trigger a direct mail package to be sent to accounts based on their activity.

Finally, you’re ready to turn your customers into advocates for your brand and products, which Vajre believes to be one of the most underused strategies in today’s marketing. “This is despite the fact that retaining customers is far cheaper than bringing in new ones,” he says. “Most marketing teams have zero budget to spend on existing customers, when these customers represent the greatest way to drive demand and buzz around your products.” Remember, when starting with your efforts to identify your ideal customer profile, be sure to record all your account activities in your CRM or marketing automation system.

You may think you don’t have the tools or resources to operate as an ABM business, but whether your business is large or small, it’s possible to grow revenue by focusing your attention on best-fit prospects and customers. It’s not even crucial to know a ton about digital or direct marketing. Instead, the trick is knowing your target list of companies and having your message ready to make an impact with that ideal audience. Vajre says the challenge occurs when companies attempt to play the volume game, trying to run anything and everything on those accounts. “An ABM approach means you’re going to be strategic, with personalized activities and content, looking at results focused on business outcomes as opposed to vanity metrics, such as marketing-qualified leads,” Vajre says.

At Terminus, for example, Vajre and his team use a very personal approach, creating videos on their laptops and cell phones to send to prospects. The team does things such as invite them to events and ask them for a call to connect. Vajre says it works because it’s a connection on a personal level, rather than a sales rep sending an email blast from his email address. Human-to-human connection, he says, is the key. One of Terminus’s clients, Domo—a company that claims to “connect businesses to the data they need”—launched a campaign called “Wake up with Domo.” The company developed the theme with quotes from their clients, such as “Domo is the first thing I do in the morning,” “It’s like my morning coffee,” and “A perfect way to start the day.”

“They created a comprehensive ABM campaign that included direct mail with a branded coffee mug, coffee, and a newspaper with the headline ‘Wake up with Domo,’” Vajre explains. “They also developed additional digital content and advertising to target a best-fit set of accounts. It’s really clever.”

That all sounds well and good, but if sales is becoming marketing oriented, the question is, on whose shoulders will the ABM work fall? The secret, Vajre says, is for both marketing and sales to work closely together as what he refers to as a “smarketing” team.

“For too long in the B2B world, marketing has been focused on lead generation to provide sales with tons of leads,” Vajre says. “Well, salespeople aren’t called ‘lead executives.’ Salespeople are called ‘account executives,’ because they close accounts. It’s time for marketing to get with the program and stop focusing on marketing-qualified leads and shift to marketing-qualified accounts. Marketing needs to have some skin in the game, and their success metrics should be tied to company goals and revenue, just like salespeople.”