What Should You Keep in Mind BEFORE Kick Starting an ABM Program?

B2B buyers in the SaaS market today are spoilt for choice and some would agree that they have far too many tech solutions to choose from. Moreover, the fact that most buyers prefer spending majority of their buying journey doing their own research and evaluation about a service or product before investing in it or before even reaching out to the brand in concern to have a conversation with a brand representative makes it more challenging to ensure marketing and sales teams follow the right steps to keep engaging these potential buyers from their end.

This is why Account-based Marketing strategies can work better to help fuel ROI from a brand’s most valued potential prospects.

ABM is considered to be one of the most cost efficient marketing strategies, over time, ABM has become a mainstay for several marketing teams.

The global account-based  market is expected to reach 1.6 billion by 2027. This means that more brands and marketers will slowly start choosing to implement this core process/strategy as part of their overall marketing cycle.

For marketers who are looking at either enhancing their existing ABM lifecycle or those who are looking to implement an ABM plan for the first-time, what are some of the fundamentals that they should keep in mind? Here are a few:

Purpose

No marketing team can rely on just one core strategy or concept to drive impact. In a multichannel, digital ecosystem, core marketing processes have to support various kinds of inbound and outbound initiatives.

For brand marketers who already have proven processes in place that help lead to consistent pipelines, identifying whether the introduction of a new ABM strategy is beneficial or how much value it can add to existing processes and output is essential.

ABM has been proven to deliver higher returns in most cases, though for this to happen, the right process teamed with the right hires and technology is important.

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Re-evaluating your Martech Stack

The martech industry is still growing at a rapid pace. Although several experts over the years predicted that there would be more consolidation driving the martech marketplace, the martech segment has expanded by about 20% since 2020, as of 2022, recent landscapes showed a rapidly growing over 9k+ solutions in the market.

With newer solutions being added to the segment continuously and enhancements being made to existing platforms, for any new marketing strategy to be implemented successfully, the basis starts with evaluating whether a marketing team would need a new martech platform or a dedicated ABM platform or whether existing martech that’s already adopted can serve the same features to help drive ABM output.

For marketers looking at dedicated ABM/ABX platforms, a host of sophisticated solutions can be evaluated, from the Terminus ABM platform, the 6sense Revenue AI platform, Rollwork’s Account-based Platform, Triblio, Metadata, Madison Logic, HubSpot Marketing Hub, ZoomInfo’s Marketing OS, Adobe Marketo Engage among others.

For marketers who are new to the concept of ABM, understanding how to evaluate or identify a best-fit platform among these many choices becomes key to the future success of their ABM strategy.

Choosing a Platform

When it comes to evaluating a best-fit ABM platform for use, fortunately for B2B buyers, third-party review platforms can help them identify and weigh options.

Once a team shortlists a few ABM solutions depending on the features they’ve read about, it then becomes crucial to evaluate further on the basis of cost, implementation-integration difficulty levels, amount and extent of customer support available among other platforms.

Another secret here lies is going through a provider’s social media pages and websites to weigh answers to questions like:

• Does the brand often post content that keep self-portraying about how great they are?
• Or do they have a range of valid use cases and neutral customer testimonials and value-add industry content?
• Does their blog often showcase topics and support related to the field or is it akin to too much self-promotional content?
• Does the brand have an authentic presence in the market?

A few tips to remember here: neutral testimonials, third-party reviews that are not paid-for, authentic feedback from existing users as well as assessing who the brands current customer list entail are what marketers should look at when evaluating not just ABM platform but any new martech solution.

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Redefining Internal Processes

For an ABM plan to succeed, certain internal fundamentals have to be put in place at the internal level with a few changes to internal processes as well.

For instance, marketing and sales teams have to unite and use a single source of truth (one CRM/CDP) to be able to lead the ABM cycle and stages with ROI in mind. Internal teams who are given the task of running and executing an ABM plan need to have stronger data management and data cleaning/handoff practices to ensure only the best-fit or highest potential buyers are further targeted through a strong ABM concept.

Hiring Right

For larger businesses, a dedicated ABM team that works under the core marketing team might make more sense. For younger companies, while this might not be possible, understanding how tasks and ABM to-dos can be integrated into existing team structures and processes is crucial.

With ABM growing in popularity, identifying hires who know how to navigate dedicated ABM platforms and customized metrics-analytics measurement and dashboard processes or those who know who to create relevant ABM frameworks based on a brand’s current and near-future need can help make the difference and grab more ROI.

A Few Last Thoughts…

A robust ABM framework can help expand a brand’s customer base a lot faster than other strategies, if done right. Moreover, ABM is meant to drive ROI from key or top-valued target accounts and prospects thereby making it a useful fundamental for highly competitive markets.

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