When we often talk about account-based marketing (ABM), we look at its effect on your net new pipeline – it is a go-to-market strategy, after all. But what is often overlooked is the value a well-run ABM strategy can add to your team and clients.
ABM & the Go-to-Market Mindset
An account-based marketing approach is a perfect way for companies to grow within their market in a sustainable and replicable way. Built on the premise of using data and market insights to identify your ideal customer profile – ABM works to build a strategy across sales and marketing teams to allocate your resources where they’ll be most effective.
This efficient model ensures that you are putting your efforts behind opportunities more likely to close with a high contract value. ABM campaigns continue to improve pipeline metrics, but this alignment and allocation of resources have a ripple effect throughout the organization. According to a LinkedIn Survey, 82% of B2B marketers attributed improved alignment between sales and marketing as a direct result of ABM strategy.
When implemented effectively, those ripples can even be felt outside the organization.
So, who benefits from an ABM strategy? If you ask us, everyone! But let’s break it down.
The Benefits of a Successful ABM Strategy
The nature of an ABM strategy is to align internal teams and messaging to improve the sales process for your best-fit customers. This alignment is not easy to obtain, but everyone benefits when it starts to play out.
Beneficiary #1: Your Most-Valuable Customers
With all the noise in today’s digital world, ABM allows you to segment and personalize efforts against your target accounts in a way that traditional marketing can’t. That means you are only reaching out to accounts with product fit – dramatically reducing the probability of wasting the time of the prospect you’re reaching out to. If you can successfully prove your value through coordinated sales and marketing efforts, you can save your potential customer time and money during their discovery process.
ABM not only benefits the prospects you are courting, but the consistent analysis of customer data to iterate and grow campaigns positively impacts your current customers. As your team looks to expand efforts into new markets or identify opportunities to improve your product offering, ABM’s constant learning cycle ensures that your team consistently reviews current customer data. This allows your team to identify and foster expansion opportunities with the current customers that are true champions – creating a loyal base of clients.
Beneficiary #2: Your Sales & Marketing Teams
Marketing targeted to your company’s ICP makes for superior quality touches, leading to quality accounts with a higher probability of closing. That’s a win-win for sales and marketing teams.
Why waste your sales team’s time (and patience) chasing down poor-quality “leads” that regularly lead to nowhere? Similarly, why send marketing efforts down a rabbit hole of wasting ad dollars (and their reputation) on accounts that aren’t a good fit with messaging that doesn’t resonate?
Through alignment, ABM campaigns not only raise closed/won percentages but also raise morale by giving your sales and marketing teams a greater chance of reaching (or exceeding!) their goals.
Beneficiary #3 Your Customer Success Team
Remember those customer benefits we discussed above? That happy customer makes for a happy CS team.
Customer Success Managers love managing accounts originating from account-based campaigns because those clients truly need your product. Champion customers who are an ideal fit make them far more likely to remain clients in the future, helping to sustain solid retention numbers for your CSMs and providing them better opportunities for future account expansions.
Beneficiary #4: Your Executive Team
Did you know that ABM has a greater impact on your bottom line than traditional lead-gen tactics? I bet your executive team would.
Getting a client to sign on the dotted line is great, but it’s not everything. Implementing an ABM strategy has been proven to increase deal sizes because it’s laser-focused on those potential clients who have the problem your product solves perfectly. One report from TOPO found that companies that have successfully implemented an ABM strategy experienced a lift in average annual contract value by 171%.
Companies executing a go-to-market strategy don’t have unlimited sales and marketing budgets, so getting the most from every dollar spent is paramount – especially to those approving the budgets. By targeting high-quality accounts over generating a large volume of leads that require more time and more people (read more $$$) to qualify them.
ABM removes emphasis on individual channel reporting and focuses on pipeline movement, giving your executive team or board a better understanding of what is truly driving value for your company.
Beneficiary #5: Your Company Culture
The alignment mindset of account-based marketing strategy not only drives pipeline success but builds the foundation of a well-built organization.
Companies looking for a go-to-market strategy often operate in a fragile state – attempting to accelerate pipeline growth while building a new team to support that growth. This sudden acceleration often leads to tense moments and mistrust across teams as new stakeholders are added, and new strategies are implemented. It’s a culture killer.
A fully-formed ABM strategy can act as a unifying across business units to rally the team behind the shared goal of selling to the RIGHT customers – something that benefits everyone. This alignment creates clarity in strategy, responsibility and expectations as the team works together (not against) to reach their best-fit accounts.
By removing the traditional silos between business units, you can create a sustainable company culture based on teamwork. It may sound like a utopian dream but companies who have successfully removed silos within the workplace benefit from improved efficiency overall.
Conclusion
Inspired to make a change for the better? RenderTribe has been helping B2B SaaS companies improve their go-to-market strategy (and culture) for over 12 years. Our team prides itself on being experts not only in strategy and execution but in fostering a relationship with our clients that allows for successful organizational change.
Ready to start with ABM but need an experienced team to help you define your ICP and implement your strategy? Let’s talk!
