the ultimate guide: what is abm?

16 Pages·2016·3.15 MB·English

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE: WHAT IS ABM?
How to Flip the Sales Funnel by Working Smarter
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is ABM? ...................................................................3
A buzzword-free explanation .......................................3
Is ABM for me? ................................................................4
Why aren’t all companies doing this? ..........................4
Why is there a disconnect? ..........................................4
What are digital thought-leaders
saying about ABM? .....................................................5
ABM adoption alters approach, not infrastructure .........6
What is wrong with the traditional sales funnel? .........6
High labor cost of digital lead generation ..................7
The sales and marketing divide is the
king saboteur for growing revenue .................................8
Defeating the sales and marketing saboteurs .............8
Flipping the sales funnel
to make marketing more precise ...................................10
Uniting sales and marketing with a common toolset ....11
How to identify target customers with ABM.................12
Engage real people instead
of hypothetical personas ...............................................13
Measure and manage: rewarding
sales behavior that closes deals ....................................14

Summary ........................................................................15
How can RainKing help? ................................................16
What is ABM? How to Flip the Sales Funnel by Working Smarter 2
WHAT IS ABM?
The ABM-as-a-buzzword phase is settling down, so let’s be forthright
about account-based marketing. It’s a new approach to solving
the oldest problem in business. How do you get in touch with the
individuals who purchase your products and services, and justify the
cost of doing so? This is the core definition of marketing.

The accounts-based element makes onboarding more efficient by
focusing on targets with a high likelihood of closing. You are not
WHAT IS ABM?
marketing to imaginary personas drawn from hypothetical customers,
Concept:
but real, actual people.
Identify and target real

people likeliest to buy your
How is this possible? Data. Petabytes upon petabytes of raw
products and services.
customer information and transactional records. To make sense of it
Means: all, marketers harness proprietary applications to search and sort this
Databases and analytics data, which gives them a clear picture of the most lucrative accounts
tools to target before strategies and tactics are drawn up.
Process:
With ABM, marketing starts with a clear picture of the end goal.
Prioritize, engage, close.
This streamlines the path to closing more deals, and landing more
Result:
lucrative accounts.
Close more accounts,
larger accounts.
Beginning with the end in mind? Close more deals? That sounds
familiar.

As one of Dr. Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people
from his 1989 masterwork, habit #2 bears repeating verbatim:
Begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of your
desired direction and destination, and then continue by flexing
your proactive muscles to make things happen.”

We hear work smarter, not harder all the time.

But imagine: What if you had the exact name and contact
information for decision makers at the companies that buy in your
vertical? What if you knew who to pitch, what to pitch, and when to
pitch them? What if you knew the likelihood, size, and potential of
the deal before you spent time pitching it?

With account-based marketing, everything imagined above is
possible.
What is ABM? How to Flip the Sales Funnel by Working Smarter 3
IS ABM FOR ME?
Does this sound familiar? You have invested marketing spend in
content creation and social media presence designed to engage
prospects and land accounts, but are failing to see a proportional
return on investment. The marketing team is having difficulty
generating qualified leads, and when they are successful, the
leads fall through. It is a common scenario in B2B marketing
communications. ABM is designed specifically to you.
Initial hesitation for widespread ABM adoption stems from the fact
that ABM is simultaneously simple and complex, and this can be
confusing.
20%
A 2015 study shows over 90
report full
percent of B2B marketers implementation
recognize ABM as a must-have, of ABM
yet only 20 percent report
a full implementation of the
practice. Proven ROI for early
90%
adopters is backed by ABM
case studies across the board,
B2B marketers
but many organizations are not
recognize ABM
closing the deal on ABM.
as a must-have
4 What is ABM? How to Flip the Sales Funnel by Working Smarter
IS ABM FOR ME?
Why is there a disconnect? The concept of working smarter
requires businesses to change the way they work. This is hard at an
organizational level—where the default is to “go with what we did last
year.” If, for example, say last year’s content marketing spend did not
produce ROI as expected, should you double down, add another tool
and raise the overhead of the marketing investment? Most companies
are unwilling to do so; the inherent risk explains some of the inertia
about ABM.
What are digital thought-leaders saying about ABM? Companies
began implementing mainstream ABM at scale about two years ago.
In that time thought leaders in B2B marketing cast it one of two ways:
• “If you’re a B2B marketer it’s essentially a no-brainer” (Neil Patel)
• “ABM is resurfacing bad habits for B2B marketers” (Scott
Vaughan, Marketing Land)
Takeaway: ABM improves, not replaces, digital marketing. The
data and narratives bear a truth about ABM that companies need to
understand. Data helps you target specific customers and that makes
your digital marketing more effective. Some businesses go about
ABM the wrong way by forgetting digital marketing efforts. Engaging
with content and ABM are inseparable; one feeds the other.
Next, we’ll discuss ways to put ABM and digital marketing on the
same page.
TYPES OF DIGITAL MARKETING THAT GO HAND-IN-HAND WITH ABM
• Identify companies that buy your products and services
You: Create industry specific guides to address pain points
• ID cyclical purchasing behavior
You: Prioritize editorial calendar to optimize creative workflow and strike while
the iron is hot
• Gain insight about who influences or makes the purchasing decisions
You: Distribute personalized content and engage with social media outreach
5 What is ABM? How to Flip the Sales Funnel by Working Smarter
ABM ADOPTION ALTERS APPROACH
FOR EXISTING TEAMS, NOT INFRASTRUCTURE
An ABM solution fits into your existing digital marketing infrastructure.
The toolset already in use for content marketing and CRM sales teams
stays in place. ABM solutions integrate into popular digital content
and tracking applications. The result is added efficiency to what is
already in place for most companies.
If you are reading this, you are likely trying to address how to lower
the cost of acquiring accounts and grow your business.
Like nearly all B2B decision makers in any vertical, you are online in a
work-related capacity trying to solve a problem related to running the
organization. You and your customers are online looking for answers
about services, products, and tools to work better.
Internet ubiquity drives the “content is king” approach that reigns
supreme in digital marketing. Publishing blogs, podcasts, eBooks,
and videos attracts customers by answering questions related to the
solutions that you want to sell.
What is wrong with the traditional sales funnel?
The ultimate goal of content marketing is exposure. Address
customers at a time of need and drive them through to a sale. This
sales funnel should look familiar to all digital marketers.
Content Exposure
Site Page views
Content Subscription
Leads
Conversions / Sales
What is ABM? How to Flip the Sales Funnel by Working Smarter 6
ABM ADOPTION ALTERS APPROACH
FOR EXISTING TEAMS, NOT INFRASTRUCTURE
Sales funnel content marketing has shown widespread adoption and
promise. Its implementation is already popular, and still growing. But
something is not quite right with the numbers.
• 88% of B2B marketers in North America use content marketing
(Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)
• 51% of B2B marketers planned to increase content marketing
spending for 2016 (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)
• 30% of marketers say their organization is effective at content
marketing (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)
Content marketing managers have an ROI problem. “In most cases,
the problem is that managers do not know which data points to
collect, or how to make sense of the information. So, they collect
simple stuff that might not translate to results,” writes Forbes analyst
Ian Altman.
With metrics like site traffic, email open rate, and pages per session
there is no exact science that ties them to a sales member winning an
account.
High labor cost of digital lead generation
When a prospect gives their contact information in exchange for
content, it is the supreme metric for B2B digital marketers: a lead.
Leads provide an actionable takeaway for sales; the number of leads
generated is a rare tangible metric that content marketing is able to
talley.
Generating leads with content is difficult and resource intensive.
More than two-thirds of content marketers say they have trouble
producing quality content for lead generation (Hubspot), a telling
statistic about the objective. With nearly every company producing
content, the content marketing field is more crowded than ever.
Even if digital content is generating leads, those leads have a hard
time converting into sales.
What is ABM? How to Flip the Sales Funnel by Working Smarter 7
THE SALES AND MARKETING DIVIDE
IS THE KING SABOTEUR FOR GROWING REVENUE
Explaining why digital content is off the mark, and why the sales team
drops leads often traces back to the divide between offline (sales) and
online (marketing). It manifests like this:
• Marketing lives on the web and uses its own
separate toolset. It creates content to engage
customers without input from sales.
• Sales lives on the phone and inbox with its own
separate CRM. It is unaware of what marketing is
producing for customers.
• Companies are unable to track meaningful
marketing metrics in a traditional sales context.
Marketing tries to answer customer questions without knowing what
the sales team is hearing from customers. Sales attempts to nurture a
marketing lead without understanding what drives customer behavior
that brought them to the brand. That’s bad news.
Budget resources are allocated to SEO/SEM tools for chasing
keywords and personnel for producing content, that, in the vast
majority of cases, managers cannot tie to revenue. Meanwhile, sales is
still struggling to find quality leads that convert.
The SVP wants to know about the cost of acquisition and ROI on the
content marketing investment, so the marketing department is forced
to report vanity metrics to justify its existence. This is the story quarter
after quarter.
8 What is ABM? How to Flip the Sales Funnel by Working Smarter
THE SALES AND MARKETING DIVIDE
IS THE KING SABOTEUR FOR GROWING REVENUE
Content marketing may or may not be generating ROI. Companies do
not actually know. What is worse? No ROI or not knowing?
Curious about fixing the sales and marketing divide? Take me to
the bridge!
Marketing departments absolutely should engage in brand publishing
and distributing content over social and other digital channels that fit
their business. The disconnect does not discredit storytelling in B2B
marketing communications.
The pain is twofold: Creating leads, and moving clients through
the traditional sales funnel. Perhaps leads are entered into a CRM
database; you might email them more content; various sales
personnel follow up with cold-to-warm calls. This the best case
scenario. Sometimes they convert.
Too often engagements result in nothing. Why?
1.incorrect or nonexistent messaging in follow-up communications
or
2.the lead was never serious about buying in the first place
Both are a result of lack of knowledge about the customer.
9 What is ABM? How to Flip the Sales Funnel by Working Smarter
FLIPPING THE SALES FUNNEL
TO MAKE MARKETING MORE PRECISE
Instead of publishing content and corralling leads into the sales realm,
ABM tools identify accounts that are the likeliest targets. Marketers
probe a database the same as a customer would use Google for
informative subject matter. Instead of published content, marketers
query massive stores of raw data about buyers in the verticals they
service.
Using ABM providers’ analytics tools to query and sort information
to find the best-fit type of customer, identify decision makers and
patterns in purchasing behavior. This allows marketing creatives to
generate a more focused approach for prospecting new business.
With ABM, the sales funnel gets rearranged.
Buyer Intelligence Database
Apps for search
and analytics
Targeting
Content Creation
Engagement
Conversion
When marketing has a clear picture of who to engage, sales wastes
less time on cold leads and closes more deals.
What is ABM? How to Flip the Sales Funnel by Working Smarter 10