On Thursday March 10, we held a #Pipelinemarketing Blab on Accounts Based Marketing, a strategy that has transformed the way many companies operate. To learn more about Accounts Based Marketing, we invited Accounts Based Marketing experts Sangram Vajre, CMO & Co-Founder, Terminus and Jeff Zelaya, Sales Leader, Triblio.
Peter Dean, CEO, RenderTribe, moderated to help build an understanding of what Accounts Based marketing (ABM) is and the many ways it can be applied to business.
How would you explain Accounts Based Marketing in simple terms?
Jeff: Marketing and sales – and, in fact, the entire company – working together to win accounts, not necessarily leads. Think about all of your marketing channels, and everything you are doing now, but with the focus on winning an account, and what you will do to win that account.
Sangram: The idea is not at all complicated, it is actually too simple. It is going after the right accounts. It is about sales and customer success and everyone else doing something towards an account. You need to think holistically, not just about acquisition channel like most marketers are used to thinking about.
How do you take that first step to doing accounts based marketing?
Jeff: It starts with personalization and knowing what you are going after; knowing who you are targeting but asking yourself why you are targeting these accounts is key. To do this, look at who you are selling to now and find more people like that. Essentially ABM starts with, who you have won, why you have won them, and how you can get more people like them.
Sangram: If you don’t know who you are targeting, go back to the drawing board.
Jeff: For larger companies, like enterprise for instance, predictive analytics may be necessary to help you figure out who you need to go after. However the simplest way is for sales to talk to marketing and vice versa. It is not rocket science, people are just not doing it; you have to start by asking the right questions.
Peter: There are a lot of tools out there that can help you find what technologies people are using. Are the people you sell really the people you thought you were going to sell? Find out where you are hitting the market place and then find the people you want to sell.
What are some of the tools that you used?
Sangram: It starts with having the right data. If you do not have the right data, you are going after the wrong people. From there you need to apply the data by using a predictive tool or with your own knowledge. Then the interaction layer leads to maturing leads. This can be done a number of different ways but the most important way to interact is through you website. The final piece of this is measurement. If you have data, you need to be able to measure it.
Jeff: I would narrow it down to three tools. Marketing automation, your website and personalizing it so people see the right message when they come to it from different channels, and accounts based
analytics so you know which accounts are coming to my site and why they convert. Also, probably the most underrated tool of all time is your people.
Can you give me an example of a success story, with your company or another?
Jeff: There is a company that sells sensor analytics that has a wide customer base. Sensor analytics allows for tracking the shipping of products. On one hand the government is interested in it for shipping weapons, on the other retail companies are interested for shipping expensive products. Before Triblio, every customer that came to the website saw the same content. These customers want the same product but are thinking about it in a very different way. To solve this problem, we added messaging on the page that would target certain customers based on the customer’s IP address. The bottom line is showing the right content to the right people when they are on your site, when it matters the most.
Sangram: One of the speakers at the Flip my Funnel Conference talked about how she changed her focus from just lead generation to adding emphasis on pipeline velocity. They created a campaign that was not only advertising to a certain company, it was also personalized to the whole company, not just one person within in that company. By doing this they added hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue in a matter of months.
Do you have any last thoughts or is there another tool you use that you have not shared?
Jeff: Something we have done really well at Triblio is getting to know our customers. When we send an email or call to a client it is for a reason. We only engage a customer when we think it could be beneficial to them, otherwise we are wasting our time and theirs. In turn, this gives our sales team confidence when they are talking to clients. By applying ABM to this I am getting the most ROI for my time because I am working with the accounts that matter.
Sangram: Stop being a one night stand marketer. Accounts marketing is real and need to start personalizing messages and reaching out to people on their terms, because people are smart and we need to respect that.
Join us for our next blab on “Creating Meaningful Dashboards and Reports” on Thursday April 7, at 2:30 pm EST.
