According to research from SiriusDecisions, over 90% of surveyed business owners believe that account based marketing is a critical ingredient to a sound marketing and sales strategy in the modern B2B buying landscape. The study also reveals that by 2016, approximately 60% of companies will have switched over to an account based marketing model. The personalization that the new technique offers along with the ability to implement cutting edge technologies is just too much to pass up for many companies, especially when dealing with B2B whales.
Will account based marketing become the new default among B2B sellers? Here are just a few of the reasons that seem to point in that direction.
The Advantages of Account Based Marketing
A Higher Return on Investment
According to a study from ITSMA, account based marketing provides the highest ROI of any marketing technique based on the B2B market. Account based marketing allows a firm to take full advantage of Pareto’s Rule, which says that 80% of the sales for a business will come from 20% of that business’ clients. Account based marketing creates an infrastructure that makes it easy to focus on individual clients and give extra attention when needed.
An Optimized and Personalized Customer Experience
As business becomes more digital, clients expect more personalization, believe it or not. Account based marketing almost forces your company to become more personal, because your focus moves away from the “wide net” strategy into a streamlined process where you are laser focused on winning business from a very small number of customers who fit your ideal buyer profile.
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Better Analysis
Account based marketing gives you a smaller amount of data to analyze, an easier task for a business that does not necessarily have enterprise-level resources. Although having more data is typically seen as better, this is not always the appropriate metric to seek. Traditional methods give you data in a generic fashion that does not allow you to drill down into the meat of the problem with the handful of clients that matter.
Aligning Sales and Marketing
The marketing and sales departments within most companies tend to keep each other at arm’s length; however, this does not have to be the case. When marketing and sales are on the same page, your customers speed through the sales funnel. Clients acquired when your marketing and sales strategies are aligned also typically spend more and are more loyal to your brand.
Prioritizing Tech
Investments in tech have the ability to provide outsized returns. Combining the tenants of account based marketing within a consistently improving technical infrastructure will only increase the ability of a company to move clients through the sales funnel and analyze the results more accurately.
How to Implement Account Based Marketing into Your Company
Identifying the Right Accounts
Analyzing the history of your sales and creating buyer profiles will not only help you to organize your data, but you will also be able to identify the clients that are most important to your business. Knowing who these companies are will allow you to better define your ideal buyer persona and determine a prospect’s importance to you before you overspend on their acquisition.
Developing a Personal Touch
Determine who is making the decisions on the other side of the phone and develop a strong relationship with those people. Keep in mind that this may not always be the top C-suite brass. In many large companies, middle-management gatekeepers have plenty of decision making power, so do not try to skip over them as you move up the chain.
Creating an Omnichannel Communications Network
Your clients should have the choice of how to communicate with you. The more that you can emulate a truly omnichannel experience, the better your client experience will be. This helps your account based marketing strategy in many ways, chiefly because you can now offer a communications structure along with other benefits.
The Execution of the Campaign
Account based marketing gives you the ability to provide speed as well as quality to your most important customers. This goes as far as to almost guarantee repeat business. What’s more is that your lower priority accounts will benefit from this change too as you learn how to consistently deliver timely, quality client service.
Better Analysis
In order to improve your services over time, you will definitely need to analyze your ongoing actions and performance. With an account based marketing model, you begin to better understand your prospects, offer them the content that they prefer, and discover exactly what your company has to change to boost your conversion rates.
This post originally appeared on the Tenfold sales acceleration magazine and is republished with permission.
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Danny Wong is the co-founder of Blank Label, an award-winning luxury menswear company. He also leads marketing for Conversio, an all-in-one ecommerce marketing dashboard, and Tenfold, a modern phone intelligence platform. To connect, tweet him @dannywong1190 or message him on LinkedIn. For more of his clips, visit his portfolio.