For years there has been a tug-of-war between sales and marketing over who owns the relationships with customers. Who should provide the sales information? Who should be the customer contact? Who serves them? What messaging is a priority for customers? Well, get ready for a revelation. It takes both marketing and sales working together on targeted accounts to close deals faster and boost ROI.
Account-based marketing changes B2B prospects into customers because it is an account-focused strategy resulting in the ultimate in customer experience. In its simplest terms, account-based marketing is a movement away from a leads-centric mentality to one that focuses on account relevance, acquisition and retention.
Account-based marketing isn’t a new strategy, but it’s often misunderstood. Among other attributes, account-based marketing is scalable and able to create a lasting and robust ROI with critical clients. Competitive organisations that focus on engaging customers, not just selling them, develop a more intimate approach of meeting their needs and will earn an organisation’s trust.
What else can account-based marketing do? We’ve identified the top 5 benefits of account-based marketing and share them with you here.
1. Let’s start with the big one. Better ROI.
Account-based marketing helps companies zero in on the appropriate contacts within an enterprise so they can nurture them and encourage sales. The thing is, with account-based marketing, the relationship is the thing because it leads to more sales consistently, leading to better ROI. Cultivating those relationships and creating the ultimate in customer experiences is about the best you can do in terms of human relationships in our digital world. The contacts are more personalised and relevant, which leads to more appropriate sales of products and solutions that solve customer pain points. And then the cycle continues. Better relationships, relevant solutions, more sales, better ROI.
2. Personalised customer experiences
Personalisation is the ultimate in prospect and customer engagements because it provides a human touch in a highly digitised world. People appreciate personalisation because it shows that a business is interested in solving problems and delivering solutions specific to their needs. This form of focused communications works much better than generic, blanketed communications meant for everyone and no one in particular. Account-based marketing focuses on specific personas and buying groups within each target account. Personalisation works best when the sales and marketing team to create and deliver relevant content, providing real value for prospects and customers.
3. A faster route to sales
As an extension of personalisation and nurturing, companies will create faster routes to sales to improve quarterly and annual revenue objectives. In a typical lead generation model, multiple people in the enterprise are contacted and it will take a long time for the message to reach the appropriate people, if it does at all. By strategically targeting efforts, companies can minimise the expenditure of resources on less important buyers or market segments. With account-based marketing, companies can zero in and nurture specific decision-makers within the enterprise, dramatically expediting the sales process.
4. Better attribution of revenue
When sales and marketing focus on strategic accounts, it is easier to measure revenue and attribute it correctly. Companies can quickly learn the accounts that matter most by the sales activity as well as understand the impact that various cross-channel activities have on driving sales. Marketing and sales can easily collaborate to understand which activities moved the needle on sales and which channels, campaigns or messages didn’t pull as hard.
5. Better marketing and sales alignment
Contrary to popular belief from the past, sales and marketing can play together nicely and account-based marketing is the proof. Let’s face it, it takes the skill sets from both groups to properly harvest and bring in revenue for the company. Old patterns of exclusivity and ownership of customers has given way to unified efforts to approach and nurture valuable accounts. New ways of collaboration between the two groups creates positive cultural shifts within a business which can be enormously valuable for the company overall. These new working relationships strengthen relationships internally and that strength will extend to customers who realise they are working with a robust and unified organisation deserving of their trust and ongoing loyalty.
In the last few years, marketing has evolved into a new role of serious revenue generation. The reliance on research and creativity to do their jobs is no longer enough. Sales organisations also understand that they are stronger when collaborating with marketing to target the appropriate messages to the right people within a prospect or customer organisation. Sharing the same objectives and teaming on communications sets the bar higher for the sales and marketing partnerships ready to create better revenue and loyalty through vastly improved customer experiences as the foundation.
How to drive profit from Account-Based Marketing
There’s a time for spray and pray marketing: For casting your net wide when sharing news in the expectation that a small percentage of recipients will have that ‘aha’ moment. But let’s face it, when the emphasis is on delivering immediate results (and timely opportunities), then the more targeted your activities the better.
Which is, of course, the central promise behind Account-Based Marketing (ABM). With it comes the ability to deliver more meaningful and relevant messages that are tailored to a precise audience. But then you already knew that. What you possibly don’t know so well are the key factors behind a successful ABM programme or the main pitfalls to avoid.
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