Partner Content
Can we tell you a secret? Revenue growth for marketers has never been about capturing leads, doing a hand-off with your sales team, and then yet another hand-off to a different team when the lead becomes an actual customer.
Today’s agile and resourceful modern, go-to-market (GTM) teams are creating demand with powerful campaigns tailored for their highly specific target segments, harvesting that demand in intelligent ways to accelerate pipeline, and, finally, retain and expand their customer base.
In short? We’re right smack in the middle of the GTM transformation. Here’s how.
The Process
This workflow looks drastically different from the disjointed hot-potato lead game we all once played (and described above). Successful GTM teams start by creating demand by not only knowing their audience, but by obsessing over their highly targeted account segments.
These segments are created from several components including:
- Firmographics - Data on tens of millions of businesses allows you to drill down to the exactly right accounts
- First-party data - Bring in all your existing data, regardless of the platform, to find the best segment
- Psychographics - It’s like Netflix recommendations, only for accounts
- Intent - Target accounts that are already in-market
Once your custom segment is done, you’ll be able to run coordinated campaigns across email, display and social channels. Now that you’ve targeted the right accounts, how do you know which ones are showing the most engagement and which to reach out to? With an account-based marketing approach, you’ll know which accounts might be in the market for your business. All this data means you’ll have unbridled access to each account, and you can tailor your outreach to the stakeholders in each account and deliver a personalized experience through their entire buying journey. Finally, the last step: retain and expand your customer base. Are your customers searching for competitors or other solutions to help them with their needs? Intent will help surface those accounts so you’re never caught off guard. Who’s your biggest fan, and which disengaged customer could use a little more support? None of that is a mystery any longer.
Now, this process varies depending on your team. Let’s take a look at how marketing, outbound, sales, and customer teams engage with the GTM process.
Marketing Team
Remember our little “secret” about leads? You as a marketer already know your biggest metric of success is developing pipeline and revenue, not leads. ABM allows you to focus on revenue growth for every stage of the funnel by:
- Creating precise target account segments
- Running coordinated, multi-channel campaigns with ease
- Helping your sales team understand the work you’re doing
- Measuring every, single, detail of your GTM team
Your sales team will have deep insights into each account and how they’re engaging with each piece of content along the way—making it simple to know which accounts to reach out to, and how.
Once they’re sold, keep your brand top of mind with targeted updates and continue to cross-sell with production promotion or targeting different departments.
Outbound Team
Equip your outbound teams with the right tools to help them lead as your frontline brand ambassadors—because that’s exactly what they are. With the right account insights, intent data, and constant stream of engaged accounts from marketing, your outbound team will be able to reach out at the right exact moment. Not only that, but they’ll be able to craft a thoughtful email or call based on the prospect’s activity.
Sales Team
By now, we hope we’ve made it pretty clear that no one siloed department can be responsible for your ABM program.
Sales is just as responsible as marketing is for ABM revenue generation, and if that sounds like a big change from what you’re used to, don’t worry.
By knowing which accounts are engaging with not only your organization’s target ads, website, chat, and content, but the frequency, recency, and velocity of emails and meetings, sales will be able to measure the strength and potential of each target account.
Every member of your organization will be on the same page as far as outreach to prospects, so finding the strongest relationships on the buying team will never be an issue.
Customer Team
Sure, gaining new customers is always a good thing—and should be one of your major focuses—but retention is just as important.
ABM helps your customer team boost engagement with your existing customer base with custom campaigns, as well as driving awareness of new product enhancements or features, keeping you at the top of your customers’ minds, and maintaining high retention rates.
Not only that, but use intent data to see if your customers are researching competitors or alternatives so you can begin to make the right moves to keep their business and keep your relationship with them healthy.