Account Based Marketing during Covid Times

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has always been a great idea.  It allows your sales and marketing to be aligned.  Your sales organization typically has a target set of accounts (typically 20 to 30 per salesperson) that they are going after.  If your marketing does not have specific programs to target those ‘named accounts’, then there is a clear mis-alignment between go-to-market among your sales and marketing organizations.

ABM does not just mean that your marketing database includes these accounts, as you build your marketing database. Clearly that is important.  But two additional things need to happen:

·       --  A clear focus on developing a list of contacts with multiple target personas (you sell to) across each of the target accounts within your marketing database.  Create a swiss cheese model of each target account, then try to find as many holes and fill them, while respecting local privacy laws.  

·      --  Create content that is very specific to the personas and their industry.  Messages will resonate well if it speaks to their issues/pain in context of their industry.  Many marketers create generic cross-industry content for their ABM campaigns, so they can target many accounts in one campaign, but then end up with very poor response rate.  The need for multiple content pieces to support targeted marketing is what makes ABM challenging, but it delivers great results.  However, you need to do it and do it well, so you can map to how your sales organization is going to market.

In these days of Covid, a third criteria needs to be added.  The messaging in the content needs to articulate ‘why they should evaluate your product category now’ and how your solution can either drive more revenue (preferable) or help reduce costs.  A lot of top-of-the-funnel content that is used in ABM campaigns was developed pre-Covid and does not articulate the urgency with which your prospects would evaluate your solutions.  In the days of tight budgets, if your messaging does not articulate urgency, the initiative containing your product will likely not get funded.

Since developing a new relationship in Covid era of lockdowns and remote work is more challenging, you are likely to have more success with cross sell and upsell into existing accounts.  Shifting your ABM program to grow existing accounts (i.e. ABM based customer marketing) will yield more positive results.

If you have questions or comments, keep the conversation going.