8 Biggest Mistakes Account-Based Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them

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  Amadou M. Sall , The Cross-cultural Connector - General Manager at Amsall Communications at Amsall Communications

  3 years ago

In reality, there are many more than 8 mistakes that you could be making, but we

And with that let’s get going!

Account-based marketing is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the traditional demand generation approach. Rather than reaching broadly across a large number of organizations, companies that employ an account-based marketing strategy focus their marketing and sales resources on a targeted set of accounts and look to deliver strategic, orchestrated campaigns personalized to those accounts. The accounts that you target with ABM are high-yield, and are often considered a better fit for your products or solutions. These accounts are likely to generate more revenue, and often have other strategic significance, like helping to penetrate new territories or influence a market.

Before we dive in, there really are 3 elements that comprise the ABM essentials.

Manage – initial steps start in account selection
NEW ‘Account’ Object

Account Segmentation

Account Discovery

Account Score

Lead-to-Account Matching


Engage
Cross-Channel Engagement

Account-level Campaigns

New ABM Filters and Triggers

Close Integration with Web Personalization (aka RTP)


Measure
Marketing and Sales must talk the same language i.e. the language of accounts
Supporting new account-centric dashboards for your sales & marketing teams to jointly view & collaborate
3 levels of the insights


Once you have these capabilities in place you can run ABM, based on the following 5 steps…

This mistake encompasses 2 misconceptions:

If you’re a small or mid-sized business, when you think about ABM you may think it is only a strategy that ENT companies can use. You may think it is an insurmountable task, like the kid trying to knock over the sumo wrestler. Or, you may think that you need an army of people in order to successfully execute an ABM strategy. In other words, thinking you can only pull off an ABM strategy if you work for an ENT company with dozens of employees and vast resources.
The second misconception is that you can only apply an ABM strategy to an ENT account. Or said a different way, there is no value in applying an ABM strategy to the SMB space.

Let’s talk about both these misconceptions

If we look at the historic cost of deploying an ABM strategy, we see that 20 years ago it was extremely expensive to run. It’s easy to understand why, for the most part, only ENT companies could afford to run such a targeted strategy. This is part of the reason why the misconception that only ENT companies can run ABM programs exists because in the past it was fairly accurate.

As you can see by this chart, over time the cost of running such targeted programs has gone down significantly. The main driver of this is increases in technology have made running an ABM strategy more scalable and cost efficient.

A good example of this is if you were to incorporate direct mail as part your ABM strategy. If you did that 20 years ago, you’d essentially have to manually build out a list of people to send the direct mail to. It would probably be difficult to ensure all the data around the recipients is accurate (remember the internet was in it’s infancy then and website’s were not very robust) and as a result you’d probably waste a lot of money sending packages to people that never got accurately delivered. Additionally, printing personalized messages at scale was difficult and costly and the act of physically delivering mail was higher. That doesn’t even take into account the fact that it was basically impossible to determine who should receive direct mail based on the their demographics, interest, and behavior.

Flash forward to the present: now if you have the right technology, you can literally print personalized messages on demand at scale with a lower delivery cost. In addition, you can essentially validate someone’s information in real-time to ensure you have the accurate company delivery address and you can pull in demographic and behavior information to ensure that you are only sending direct mail to people that have shown an interest in your product or service thereby not wasting any mailers on people that aren’t interested or will never get it because of bad data.

The second misconception is that ABM only works when applied to ENT companies. In reality, ABM isn’t about the company size, it’s more about the business model your organization has. Effectively, you could make the argument that if a company has more than 1 employee there is a case for ABM. Whether there are multiple decision makers or influencers, there is potential value is leveraging an account-based approach.

We’ll talk about account selection in more detail shortly, but if your company has decided that an effective business model would be to focus resources and time on companies that make strategic sense (either because they will have a higher ASP, are more likely to convert, specific verticals, or any other reason that your company believes to be true), than it is appropriate to consider running an ABM program to target those accounts.

This could mean, obviously, that you are focusing on ENT accounts or a few typically very large key accounts
Or it could mean that you are targeting groups of accounts (regardless of size) that share those similar characteristics

For most B2B companies, both of situations apply and therefore ABM could make sense regardless of whether your potential customers are ENT or SMB accounts.

One of the most important elements of a successful ABM program is the actual selection of which accounts you should include. You could develop incredibly impressive marketing programs that have extremely high engagement and conversion rates and you could have a dynamic sales team that is actively working each account to the fullest, but if you don’t select the correct accounts, all that effort could be wasted.

Ultimately, there are many different strategies that are completely valid when it comes to account selection. For example, some companies will rely solely on Sales to select accounts. In others, the CEO may select the accounts. Others still may look at multiple different factors.

What you don’t want to do, is select account with no reasoning as to why you are choosing them. Because of the additional cost (both implicit and explicit), it is critical that you spend the appropriate time and resources on selecting the correct accounts.

If you’re objective is to only target a handful of companies, it may make sense to simply have Sales select the accounts as they as closest to the accounts and presumably know them inside and out.

However, If you are trying to target hundreds or even thousands of accounts, you need a process that is repeatable. With that many accounts, it may be difficult to have a sales person know exactly which accounts they should really focus on. Additionally, when you are dealing with that many accounts, part of the benefit of having an account-based strategy is that is provides a way for your sales reps to prioritize which accounts to call on. Within the SMB segment at Marketo, we had this very challenge. We needed a way to select account that removed the subjectivity and potential bias of relying solely on Sales to select the accounts and we needed a way to do this at scale. Essentially we were looking to identify the accounts that had the highest propensity to use Marketo and the highest likelihood to have deal sizes well above our average.

Some of the factors you may want to consider are:

High Yield: Accounts that are likely to result in larger than average deals and generate substantial revenue over the long term.
Product Fit: Accounts that have business needs that clearly match your solutions, which increases the likelihood they will purchase.
Competitors’ Customers: Accounts that are using your competition’s products or services.
Strategic Importance: Accounts that align with your company’s strategy. For example, winning a big logo in a new territory or vertical to help enter those new markets.

Another piece not listed here is territories. If you have multiple sales reps that are working different regions or territories, part of your mandate may be to ensure that all reps have a similar number of target accounts so as to not give advantage to one rep over another.

One way to really help the account selection process, is to build out an account scoring model to help you determine which accounts you should include in your ABM program. Think of this as a predictive score. The benefit of leveraging an account scoring model is that it truly takes out bias when it comes to account selection. It does this by solely relying on data. It also makes account selection a repeatable process and gives you a way to prioritize all of your accounts. Additionally, it should make it so, no matter how many reps you have, they are all working on the same number of high quality accounts.

The downside of relying on an account scoring model is that it neglects individual feedback that your sales teams may have about specific accounts.

At Marketo, on the SMB side, we have built out a very sophisticated account scoring model. Our objective was to use a data driven process to make our account selection a repeatable play and we believed the best way to do this was to create a model that ranked all of our accounts based on numerous data points. Without getting too specific, our model leverage historical data such as win rate and deal size, it looked at firmographic data such as annual revenue and employee size as well as over 4,000 additional signals such as social media activity and funding levels. Each data point had a different weighting on the overall score based on the perceived impact of that data point. For example, if a company is using a specific piece of technology and we know there is a high correlation to using Marketo with that technology, that data point would have a higher weighting to the overall score than something more innocuous.

On the ENT side, we leverage a completely different model as the factors that may up a good ENT account are different from a good SMB account. Additionally, on the ENT side, we can rely more heavily on our sales reps for input as they are working with fewer overall accounts and know those accounts very well.

If you need help, either building out an account scoring model or with a more simple approach to account selection, there are multiple different vendors and tools that you can use.

For example, when it comes to account data, you can buy accounts that exist outside of your database through certain vendors. You can also use many of them to append the data of your existing accounts.

If you don’t want to build out a scoring model on your own, you can leverage specific vendors to help you with that.

And finally, if you need more in depth data about companies, such as which CRM they are using or specific competitors that are using, there are vendors that can help you with that.

The last piece that may help you with your account selection methodology is use a tiered approach. Like many aspects of ABM, there are multiple different ways you can do this. One way, which combines everything we have talked about is to use a combination of a predictive account score and rep knowledge to select accounts. You can take it a step further and even include sales leadership in the process.

However you end up setting up the tiers, you can use the tiers so align accounts to certain high cost marketing programs. For example, if you are using a Top 20 as your best of the best accounts, you may spend a lot more money marketing to them rather than your Tier 1 or Tier 2 accounts.

Bottom line here, is that by using a tiered approach, you can use multiple account selection methodologies and align higher priority accounts to more expensive/more high touch marketing.

This is where you determine who are in the accounts and how you can penetrate the accounts.

Now if you neglect this piece of ABM, you will be stuck with, first off, only people in your accounts that you have already existing in your database. Meaning you may identify a really great account through one of the methodologies we just discussed, but then only have one contact in that account to market to or to call. Secondly, that person may not even be a decision maker or in the right part of the organization.

This is where profiling and mapping come into play. There are many different ways for you to gather research about your target accounts such as by looking at: financial health, business initiatives, technologies, org structure, etc.

The overall objective here is to build a plan that will help you focus on the right part of the organization. Obviously, for an ENT, this will look much, much different than for an SMB account.

The second piece to build out the whitespace for that account. As I mentioned before, you may only have 1 person in your database that is associated to a specific target account. Or you may have multiple people, but not all the appropriate influencers or decision makers within that account. In either case, you’ll want to built out the whitespace so that you have all the appropriate people identified for each of your target accounts.

In this case, I’m showing a screen shot of a tool we use from our partner Leadspace which helps us identify new contacts for each of our target accounts. As you can see, this is a plug-in that works directly in our Salesforce instance to help our sales reps actively prospect and add new contacts to Target Accounts in real time. This works really well as a one off and for prospecting.

But, if you need to conduct whitespace for hundred or thousands of accounts in a timely manner, you may have to work directly with vendors to build out the whitespace. Typically you just provide specific perimeters, such as I want 5 people per account, or I want all directors and VPs in Marketing, or any other specific criteria.

The last mistake that I will cover before I hand it over to Vyoma is Misalignment with Sales.

Let’s start with what S&M alignment means … it’s …

The keywords “work together towards a common goal” are really important here.

The benefits of having Sales and Marketing alignment are pretty obvious. Companies that…

And it’s even more important when you are conducting an account-based strategy.

Other benefits of S&M alignment include … higher revenue, shorter sales cycle, better conversion rates and increased forecast accuracy

As we discussed earlier, you don’t make decisions in isolation when it comes to ABM. Be sure to have Sales involved in the account selection process. This is the most important element. It has to be crystal clear which accounts are included in your ABM program.

Work with Sales to help develop your marketing plan or your plan of attack on specific accounts. At the vey least, update sales often on different marketing tactics you are using and how it will impact their target accounts.

Like other broad based marketing programs, you’ll want to make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to definitions like:
What is an Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
Opportunity
ROI

Also, with respect to the revenue funnel, Sales and Marketing teams need to be on the same page with regard to different stages of the cycle and what moves a prospect from one stage to the next and what follow-up needs to happen at each stage.

Set Common Goals around target accounts.

Utilize lead scoring to prioritize leads within target accounts that show a lot of activity

And finally, Communicate often.

To further illustrate the point,

Here are the actual 2016 results from our ABM for SMB initiative. We saw:

Thanks Joe and Hi everyone. Joe did a great job covering what could go wrong in the early stages of ABM, especially if you are just starting out. I’ll be talking about the mistakes you might be making once you have selected the right accounts, profiled and mapped them.
So mistake #5 is not setting a scalable ABM strategy. I know that sounds contradictory, as in how can your strategy be account-based and scalable at the same time? but consider this…



http://customerthink.com/is-account-based-marketing-really-scalable/

If you have only 5 accounts, great- by all means, you can develop and execute a laser focus approach, and successfully penetrate and close them.\
But what happens when you have 1000s of accounts?
The reality is that most of account-based marketers are tasked with executing ABM for a large list of accounts. And so it’s definitely a challenge to set a strategy that is account-based, scalable and meets the budget and resource constraints.
So what do you do?

The first thing to do is to dispel misconceptions.
The biggest misconception I often hear is that ABM is a 1:1 approach. But that’s not true, especially today with so much infrastructure available, it’s possible to execute ABM not only as a 1:1 approach but as a 1: few or 1:many approach as well.
So to achieve scalability, there are 3 things you need to adopt:
A multi-channel strategy
A tiered approach and
The right technology
We will look at how each of these enable and enhance scalability in ABM

At a very high level, when you are developing your ABM strategy, consider all the channels you have at your disposal. You can use many of the same channels you have been using for broad based marketing- whether it’s email, display advertising, events or video.
The key is to take a systematic approach to make sure you can replicate your success over and over again
It’s also important to coordinate your story across channels and make sure your marketing program is integrated
Lastly, don’t forget about Sales. Beyond just enabling and supporting your sales team, look at them as an effective channel as well. Remember that Sales can reach out to leads and contacts in your database that you can’t touch as they are not opted in or subscribed to your communications.

Lets take a deeper look at the channels and programs available for ABM across the funnel.
At the top funnel a lot of channels and programs are dedicated to generate interest and to opt target accounts into your communications. Some of these are paid advertising programs, running a low cost direct mail or tradeshow sponsorships
At the mid funnel, the purpose is to push the target accounts down the funnel. Tactics like lunch and learns and appointment setting to nurture target accounts and keep them engaged
At the bottom funnel we look at running high-cost and high value direct mail pieces, onsite programs with our value consultants, and programs that focus on executive outreach

There are a couple of ways you can take a tiered approach- one way is to do it by accounts.
Earlier, Joe shared how our target accounts are bucketed into 3 different tiers- theres a Top 20 list of strategic accounts, a Tier 1 list of around 1000 accounts and a Tier 2 list of 2000 accounts. So with all these lists varying in size in importance, how do you scale your strategy?
This exercise has been tremendously helpful for us. List your marketing activities in a column and your tiers in a row. Then, go down and across the list to determine what activities will be run for each tier and place a check mark in each cell. 
The top tier, (e.g. Top 20), would get the highest level of marketing investment. The marketing budget and resources for Tier 2 accounts would be slightly lower, followed by Tier 3.
Not cast in stone, more of a framework for guidance. It can evolve.

You can also practice a tiered approach for programs
If you look at this visual, starting from the middle, these are programs that are dedicated to target accounts. Some examples are high value direct mail, appointment setting or highly targeted paid ads
In the middle circle are programs where target accounts are prioritized. These are not just for Tas but Tas get more love. An example is calling campaigns and inbound follow ups- getting the sales team to prioritize following up with target accounts before they reach out to other accounts
At the outer circle, is programs where target accounts are included and tracked, like regular database sends and nurture programs.

Lastly, you need the right technology to truly realize ABM’s potential.
In the last few years, new technologies like Marketo ABM have come out that enable you to be account-based at a new order of magnitude.
With Marketo ABM, you get a consolidated 360 degree account view instead of your lead and contact view you’re accustomed to with your marketing automation tool.
This is very important as you get to see the total engagement score of all leads and contacts in the account, total pipeline and how it has changed and revenue
In addition, there’s the ability to target both leads and contacts. This automatically scales each program you run, because leads are automatically assigned to accounts instead of it being a manual process.


https://www.marketo.com/software/account-based-marketing/

To recap, ABM doesn’t have to be a 1:1 approach. To scale it, as we showed you, you need to run 1:few and 1:many programs strategically
Firstly, utilize all channels that make sense to really darken the skies of your TAs and reach them where they are
Develop a tiered approach whether it’s for accounts or programs, to scale ABM while meeting your budget and resource constraints
Lastly, get the right technology to truly scale!

Mistake number 6 is running ABM in silos, and I can already sense some of you going- Tell me about it! That’s one of the biggest challenges I have!

Well, you are definitely not an island and neither is your team- even though I’m sure most of us wish we were on that island
It’s not strategic, sustainable or scalable to execute ABM all by yourself

Research has shown that organizations silos can and will hinder ABM success.
An initiative like ABM is high cost, high involvement and if done right can bring high value to your organization. So it makes sense to make it a high profile initiative. As Joe mentioned earlier, you need to get buy in from the main functions.

ABM is going to be only as success as how aligned the various teams are.
It’s not only the sales team that needs to be aligned and bought in to work these accounts, but also Product and segment marketing teams. These teams need to tell a product story and develop content that resonates with the target accounts
The corporate events team as well, needs to be able to drive personalized experiences at events
The value and solutions consulting teams as well need to be bought in esp. at the later stages when you start looking into programs like onsites and lunch and learns
And we’ve talked about the importance of cross-channel strategy so I won’t get into it, but often in larger organizations, different teams manage different channels, so for a multi channel ABM strategy, it’s important that all teams are aligned

So it’s important to make sure this alignment and collaboration is sustainable. I’m sure a lot of us are familiar with this scenario, whether it was a school project or a work project.
An initiative like ABM could look like this, at first everyone is excited and bought in, but slowly your other teams may not pull their weight as much as you expected them to.

Here are some examples of good collaboration:
Your corporate events team is sponsoring a tradeshow in Nashville. Well before the event, you reach out to TAs in the city and invite them to the conference.
During the event your corporate events team flag TAs when they visit the booth or attend the session. They help prioritize them and point them out to the sales people on site.
After the event, there is a special happy hour for TAs in the area
Your content marketing team launches a new whitepaper. You ask them to facilitate an early release to target accounts. After launch, you have the sales team reach out to Tas that downloaded first. You also get them to outbound to unsubscribed contacts
Finally, your field events team is holding a luncheon in NYC for directors and above. But for Tas, you have them invite managers as well. Again, after the event your prioritize follow ups with target accounts

To recap, look at ABM as company-wide initiative that you are spearheading. It shouldn’t only fall on your shoulders
Next, see all programs and channels as ripe opportunities for ABM- put on your ABM lens and get everyone to put it on too. Then you can brainstorm how you can prioritize them
Lastly, foster collaboration in a systematic way with different teams, whether it’s sales, events or product marketing!

Ok, mistake #7! Use generic messaging without personalizaton

Part of being engaging with your target account is to communicate with them on their terms – which means being relevant to their needs, interest and behavior

So how do you determine what to say and how to message?
Well this should come from info from the account profiling and research phase.
You should have a wealth of information at your disposal on your accounts, contacts and leads- so its your job to determine the best attributes to slice and dice your list
One thing is important, when you select the attributes you want to personalize by, make sure there is some critical mass. If only one or two accounts meet those attributes, it may not make sense to develop content and messaging for those, unless it’s a late stage program or a very strategic account.

Okay, here’s a laundry list of segmentation variables that you can select from. And this certainly isn’t an exhaustive list
Some of these are more commonly used than others- esp industry. At Marketo, we segment and message by verticals most of the time.
Geo segmentation is great when you have an event in a city
Another interesting one that we leverage is Tech stack. As you know, Marketo integrates with a bunch of technologies, like the SFDC CRM system. So we are able to target companies using Salesforce and talk about our integrations.
Engagement level and behavior are also great attributes to segment leads and contacts by.

Here’s an example of web personalization. These banners were taken from our homepage sliders

As you can see in the top example, we are calling our manufacturing firms as many target accounts were in this vertical.
At the bottom, we wanted to target some car companies, so we launched these personalization campaigns
We saw increased engagement from these segments compared to default.

Here’s an example of a customized email using dynamic content.
Here we went beyond just personalizing first name and last name of the contact, but actually personalizing the company name. We also featured some unique challenges, solutions and a relevant case study. This one had a 30% open rate and more importantly, a meeting was set with an executive in this company

To summarize, it is very important to provide a personalized experience to your target accounts
Start by identifying the best attributes thru segmentation variables for the accounts on your list.

Okay, so let’s look at the last mistake. If you thought it was about metrics, you were right. Measuring the wrong metrics is quite common as it is challenging to isolate and track performance of your target accounts

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnellett/2017/01/10/account-based-marketing-abm-hype-or-hope-for-b2b-marketers-in-2017/#45fab8591e34

In broad-based marketing, conventional metrics such as leads, conversions, and MQLs are used to determine program, channel, and campaign performance. Because ABM is a very targeted approach, only tracking these metrics will not give you a complete and accurate picture.

ABM flips the traditional B2B marketing funnel and starts with identifying key accounts, penetrating them, and then landing and expanding them. Accordingly, the metrics that matter look very different. It's not about how many leads you generated; it’s are you engaging and building relationships with the right people at the right accounts? That's a different mindset for how marketing should think about things.”

Here are some key metrics, which can be found in your engagement platform or CRM system, that are instrumental in determining the success of ABM. The key is to know what to measure when.
At the early stage, it’s important to track the new names, target and leads from target accounts who opt in to your communications
Mid stage- track call connects, number of meetings and MQLs generated from target accounts. Make sure your sales team is inputting data in a timely manner into your CRM system so you can track the touches made.
Late stage- this is when your ABM program has been running for a while so you can track opps, pipeline as well as revenue won depending how long your sales cycle is.
In each of these stages, don’t forget to gather sales feedback on programs, content, challenges etc.

Ultimately what you want from your ABM program is to show that a focused approach on the right accounts is going to yield greater success. To break it down, you want
The deal sizes of target accounts to be higher than non target accounts. Not just ASPs, but the opp size before they have closed
Win rates also should be higher. So there should be a greater proportion of opps that are won for TAs than non target accounts
Essentially you also want greater pipeline to come from TAs- and if the first 2 are taken care of, then this follows naturally.

Here is a picture of what success looks like. At Marketo, this is what we saw at the end of 2016. For our Corp segment, which is SMB, the win rate from TAs was 43% higher than the non TAs
For ENT that lift was 24%.
In addition, as Joe showed us earlier, we saw similar deltas in the deal sizes too
So all in all, ABM has been successful for us.

So to recap, even though a lot of metrics can be similar, the success of ABM is measured differently from broad based marketing.
Essentially, you want to engage the right people at the right accounts based on the stage they are in
Some pointers of success are- higher deal sizes, higher win rate and higher pipeline

 
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