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You have these three teams in your organisation: Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales.
They have one purpose in common, to bring revenue.
You are already familiar with ABM (account-based marketing).
- You sell products or services to specific companies in a joint effort between sales and marketing.
- You sell to multiple roles within an organisation instead of selling to a single person.
It’s time for you to step up to the next level in ABM.
This blog covers:
- What Is Account-Based Engagement?
- Know Your Target Accounts Well
- Profile The Buying Committee
- Adopt Real-Time Selling
- Make Customers Stories Your Most Powerful Advertising
- Metrics And Campaigns Remain The Same For Every Team
- Let’s Recap!
In a revenue-centric era, you need marketing and sales alignment to be on steroids.
To increase revenue, you need collaboration amongst all the three teams serving your customers: sales, marketing, and customer success.
So here’s a new approach…Account-Based Engagement (ABE).
#1. What Is Account-Based Engagement?
Through targeted and personalised engagement, account-based engagement enables integration of pre- and post-sales experiences.
In addition, it helps to deliver highly personalised and integrated experiences for your customers.
It also helps in aligning the marketing, sales, and customer service functions to achieve success.
The approach focuses on your most significant customers and how they influence your business.
The benefits of an ABE strategy are:
- Improved sales and marketing alignment
- Rapid pipeline growth
- Increased close rates
- Customer retention boost
Let’s see how you can embrace ABE.
Account-Based Engagement: Integrate and Maximise Revenue
Getting new customers, gaining their trust, and then selling to them, takes a lot of time.
However, getting existing customers to buy more from you remains the cheapest method.
Here’s a quick experiment you can try if you’re not convinced. Analyse the open rates of your emails to customers and new prospects.
As your current customers are already engaged with you, you can expect them to open your emails more frequently.
It means that any email you send them is more valuable.
You’ll see an instant result if you put the same level of effort into renewals, upsells, and retention as you do for acquisition.
What are your first steps in account-based engagement?
You need these three skills:
- Account identification and prioritisation
- Engagement and personalization
- Execution and performance tracking
Pre-and post-sale understanding of these three elements is essential.
#2. Know Your Target Accounts Well
What is marketing’s golden rule? It’s to understand your audience.
Knowing everything about your existing customers is crucial if you want to target them.
Although you may serve thousands of customers, the majority of your revenue comes from a small number of accounts.
These are your golden customers: those who love your product, love your team, and spread the word about your brand.
You must put your customers first in everything you do. You shouldn’t just serve any, or every customer, only the most valuable ones.
It all starts with identifying your ideal customer and what makes them different from everyone else.
Marketers create customer databases based on firmographic and technology.
Moreover, you have to aim for and maintain a dream account list much more personally.
Combining your own data with publicly available data will let you know if a customer is a suitable match for your organisation and interested in what you provide.
This data could be digital fingerprints like employee numbers, industry, buyer intent, etc.
#3. Profile The Buying Committee
What is a buying committee?
It is a group within an organisation or chain that is responsible for purchasing services and products for use.
It involves both primary and secondary decision makers and influencers, as well as detractors.
Engaging the right people with the right message at the right time is crucial to building quality leads and supporting sales.
It’s not just one person you’re selling to. In B2B selling it’s almost always a committee.
In order to make your product/ service successful, you need to know what each committee member needs, and the objections they have.
In light of this, Account-Based Engagement is crucial.
By monitoring your top accounts, you’ll be able to see
- What people do on your site and how often they visit
- What kind of research are they doing on your products?
- Do they consider pricing?
- Do you see multiple people accessing the website from the same account this week?
It’s completely different from having just one person visit your site.
Real-time selling means understanding every aspect of the market.
You can create buying committee profiles by reaching out to those accounts and tailoring your outreach based on the incoming data.
As a result, you can repeat and predict your sales cycle.
#4. Adopt Real-Time Selling
Most companies have seamless handoffs between marketing and sales.
Depending on the customer journey, marketing personalises the visitor experience. With Visitor Identification Systems in place on your website, you can do the following.
We can tell salespeople:
“Hey, one of your customers is visiting that page,” when the right customer arrives on the website.
If they’re available, you can reach out to them immediately.
Even if they are not available, you can still reach out for a delayed response.
That’s what chatbots are all about. You still want to provide them with a positive experience, so direct them to the right places on the website or schedule a follow-up meeting.
There are many things to fall back on when it comes to treating each account individually.
An online chatbot, a human-to-human conversation, or a customised follow-up based on customer website behaviour are all possibilities.
That’s what engagement strategies do.
#5. Make Customer Stories Into Powerful Advertising
All revenue experiences should include recommendations and customer testimonials.
You can create some of the most effective content by telling customer stories.
Marketers delight in them. Salesmen adore them. Consumers love them.
Customers who need assistance shouldn’t be the only ones talking to your customer success team.
These teams should help cultivate deeper relationships with customers.
These are the people who know how your products impact your customers’ lives.
After a sale, Account-Based Engagement means making sure the customer is getting the most out of what you offer.
When you help your customers, everyone wins. This process starts again with the next big account.
#6. Metrics And Campaigns Remain The Same For Every Team
Each team must own pipeline, revenue, and retention for account-based engagement to work.
There is no other metric that counts.
The engagement and conversion metrics can, of course, be explored further.
Marketing will still want to know how many emails are opened and how many social media followers there are.
It is still critical for sales to track meetings set up.
It is still important for customer success to measure response times.
In the end, though, if pipeline, revenue, and retention are not in sync, everyone loses.
Don’t set unique goals for your teams.Don’t compete with one another for credit. Incentive programs help with this.
Having sales and marketing work together toward a common goal will yield better results.
#7. Let’s Recap!
ABE promises to create individualised pre-and post-sales customer interactions. It aligns marketing, sales, and customer service for success.
Account-based marketing begins with identifying ideal clients and what makes them unique.
By monitoring your top accounts, you’ll know what visitors do on your site and how often they visit. Real-time selling requires market knowledge.
Each team must own their pipeline, income, and retention for account-based engagement to work.
ABE needs sales and marketing collaboration to succeed.
Accelerate your leads with Account-Based Marketing today!
Digitalzone puts your B2B leads and sales on steroids.
Using a global B2B database of 71 million companies, we have created and managed 46,872 successful campaigns for companies based in the USA.
We help B2B companies, just like yours, with Account Based Marketing, Content Syndication, Intent Based Marketing, Demand Research and Content Creation
Get in touch with us today, to accelerate your sales.
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