Championing Account Based Marketing

BROOKE’S PORTFOLIO

Championing Account Based Marketing (ABM)

I’m a huge fan of Demandbase’s Clear & Complete Guide to ABX. I absorbed their first version years ago and share it with anyone that will listen.

Here’s the rub. We have always operated lean on the sales side, so there were many false starts to launch a mature ABX program. In 2021, we achieved the goal of creating 2 sales pods with BDRs and AEs, and began the crawl phase of ABX. We achieved a lot in a year, by established a standard operating process and a cadence to build momentum in our target accounts. Here’s a quick summary.

1. Building Account Data Foundation

Championed investments in ZoomInfo, intent data, LinkedIn Sales Navigator Teams and Outreach.io as well as Drift
Fully integrated all tools with Salesforce Sales Cloud

2. Finding Accounts

Created a 75 page Sales Playbook, and within it established an official Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and designated the 3-tier ABX model and classification of accounts.
Built a database of 3,000 target accounts based on ICP and said model

3. Engagement

Created an engagement model based on what tier the account was in. At its most aggressive, this included invites to VIP events, emails, calls, direct mail, LinkedIn outreach, targeted advertising, personalized content.
Personalized content was designed by marketing in a modular fashion, making sales self-sufficient in creating custom asset packages with ease. Distribution through Smart Links in Sales Navigator ensures real-time tracking.

A sample of how I defined engagement efforts by account priority.

4. Closing Opportunities

Lead a team of BDRs to go after 1:1 target accounts aggressively, with a goal to get a meeting within 6 months.
Guaranteed support from the organization when meetings happened, simply because the target account and buying committee, along with the deal type, is a perfect fit
Goal to have closed 50% of 1:1 target accounts with first deal within 12 months

5. Measuring Account Progress

Monitoring engagement of target accounts, like website visits, ad clicks, etc. was a monthly sales and marketing priority. We were on track to prioritize this in more real-time.
Every 6 months we would look at the target account list, add new ones, remove junk, and promote/demote based on engagement, buying signals, existing relationships and ICP scoring.

A sample of how we scored accounts.

Currently, we lack an internal sales team and have had to adapt to the skills we can lean on with an outside agency. We are still working on personalized, modular content. We also still aggressively use our target account list for targeted advertising and LinkedIn outreach, monitoring their buying signals for immediate action.

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