Build Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy

Select the right ABM strategy for your organization and create complete alignment between the Sales and Marketing teams.
Clear the clutter and jumpstart your ABM implementation with a solid foundation.
Build a targeted account list with optimized data.
Engage buying account committees and create personalized content that helps buyers educate themselves.
Understand the necessary platforms and tools required to be successful with the selected ABM strategy.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

The success of each level of ABM maturity is closely tied to available resources, business needs, and having foundational elements in place to support your ABM strategy. Marketers should keep their initial ABM strategy simple to deliver a successful program. The goal is not to employ a complex program or include all levels of ABM strategy but rather to select the most feasible for your organization.

Impact and Result

With a strong set of marketing capabilities, tight team alignment with Sales, and a content personalization strategy, you will:

Create a solid foundation for a best-fit ABM strategy for your Marketing and Sales organization.
Target and build relationships with high-opportunity accounts.
Design experiences that will guide the buying committee through their buyer’s journey.
Develop a process for your team to continue to build on their maturity.

Build Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy Research & Tools

1. Build the Foundation for Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy Storyboard – This blueprint will help you to build a strong foundation for your ABM strategy and support future growth.

This blueprint will help marketers understand ABM strategy types and accompanying levels of personalization, how to quickly assess their organization's ABM maturity, and how to implement best practices to build a foundation for their ABM strategy.

2. ABM Maturity Diagnostic Assessment – Use this assessment to gauge your organization’s ABM maturity profile.

Quickly and accurately diagnose your current account-based marketing (ABM) maturity. This diagnostic assessment will help you understand how prepared you are for each ABM strategy you may want to employ.

3. ICP Workbook – Leverage this tool to drive your ABM strategy by creating tiers based on your ICP.

Create a personalized approach to defining your ideal customer profile (ICP), uncover valuable insights to develop a targeted account list (TAL) and measure your marketing performance.

4. ABM Strategy Presentation Template – Use our comprehensive template to communicate your ABM implementation plan.

This presentation template covers all steps of implementation including aligning Sales and Marketing, results of gap assessment, optimizing lead generation performance, and designing a programmatic pilot.

Build Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy

ABM success requires a strong set of marketing capabilities, tight alignment with Sales, and a content personalization strategy targeting high-opportunity buyers.

Analyst Perspective

Our methodology prepares marketers to mature their practice and focus on growing relationships with high-value accounts.

A successful account-based marketing (ABM) strategy begins with aligning Sales and Marketing efforts to create an ideal customer profile (ICP) and develop personalized programs with high-value accounts. ABM is typically used in businesses that are ready to mature their inbound marketing programs, looking to enhance their cross-sell and upsell efforts, and needing to alleviate strain on their Sales team.

Many companies feel that ABM requires a high level of complexity and the use of AI platforms to achieve measurable success; however, this is just one approach. The beauty of ABM is that it is a scalable strategy, and if you have a solid enterprise inbound program in place, you should not encounter significant barriers to employing an ABM strategy. Using our methodology, you will understand the steps to building a sound foundation to launch your ABM strategy and support future growth.

Julie Geller
Marketing Research Director, High Tech Advisory
SoftwareReviews

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Many marketers struggle to build their ABM strategy because they have not yet developed their core capabilities for a successful inbound marketing strategy. Once you can work through 70% or more of the foundational elements of each strategy, you will:

Select the right ABM strategy for your organization and create complete alignment between Sales and Marketing teams.
Clear the clutter and jumpstart your ABM implementation with a solid foundation.
Build a targeted account list with optimized data.
Engage buying account committees and create content that helps buyers educate themselves.
Understand the necessary platforms and tools required to be successful with the selected ABM strategy.

Common Obstacles

Although ABM is considered an advanced strategy, organizations of all sizes struggle with implementation due to:

A lack of clear starting point.
A lack of content to personalize.
A lack of historical data to base programs on.
A lack of tools.

Many marketers unknowingly make implementation of ABM strategies much harder than it should by skipping fundamental steps. Spending time building out capabilities for the foundation of your program will benefit you greatly and ensure overall success.

SoftwareReviews’ Approach

With a strong set of marketing capabilities, tight team alignment with Sales, and a content personalization strategy, you will:

Create a solid foundation for a best-fit ABM strategy for your Marketing and Sales organization.
Target and build relationships with high-opportunity accounts.
Design experiences that will guide the buying committee through their buyer’s journey.
Develop a process for your team to continue to build on their maturity.

Organizations that build on their capabilities, as outlined by the ABM Maturity Model, can quickly identify and fix gaps and grow their capabilities – producing maximum insights for their organization.

SoftwareReviews Insight

The success of each level of ABM maturity is closely tied to available resources, business needs, and having foundational elements in place to support your strategy. Marketers should keep their initial ABM strategy simple to deliver a successful program. The goal is not to employ a complex program or include all levels of ABM strategy but rather to select the most feasible for your organization.

Why is an ABM strategy important?

Create an edge in your marketing practice that fortifies relationships

Employing an ABM strategy allows marketers to build on their inbound marketing programs by personalizing the buying experience for high-value prospects and customers. In addition, Sales and Marketing teams work closely within this framework to shorten the sales process.

ABM provides Sales and Marketing teams with the unique opportunity to:

Increase win rates and lifetime customer value (LVT).
Create both simple and tiered programs that speak to specific audience segments.
Mature your marketing practice.
Identify deep insights that will benefit your buyer’s journey.

80% of marketers say ABM improves customer lifetime values, while 86% say it improves win rates. (Source: TOPO, 2019)

The B2B buying committee

An effective ABM strategy can be your greatest weapon in managing complex customer relationships

Working with Sales, Marketing teams need to think about how they can design a strategy to identify intent signals and progress the conversation with buying committees. As marketers, aiding sellers who are dealing with buying committees is our sole focus. We need to help key decision makers do their research and engage with sellers on their company key initiatives when they’re ready to buy.

To have success with your ABM strategy, you need to develop a program that addresses the buying committees’ needs for:

Personalized content at every stage of the buying cycle – think 3, 6, and 9 months out from the actual purchase date.
Materials and media that appeal to specific learning modalities that suit your ICP’s demanding role.
Language, buying preferences, and account details integrated into your account communication, thereby demonstrating the importance of the relationship.

Buying Committees Are Expanding

'2017 Buying Committee' vs '2015 Buying Committee' measured in human icons. 2017 has 8.8 people and 2015 has 5.6 people.

The average number of people involved in B2B solutions purchases climbed from 5.4 to 6.8 in just two years. (Source: HBR, 2017)

Build Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy visualization

ABM success requires a strong set of marketing capabilities, tight alignment with Sales, and a content personalization strategy targeting high-opportunity buyers.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Table of Contents

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Guided Implementation 1: Build the foundation

Call 1: Diagnose organizational capabilities to determine your level of ABM. Review gaps and make a plan to support your inbound growth. Discuss staffing and required roles.
Call 2: Gain insight on right-sized marketing technology platform options.
Call 3: Conduct ICP working session. Discuss areas of opportunity and trends based on data collected.
Call 4: Follow previous working session with review of buyer personas and journey mapping.
Call 5: Develop your target account list and segmentation strategy. Touch on personalization requirements.
Call 6: Review campaign performance and enhance dashboard reporting

Guided Implementation 2: Advance

Call 1: Optimize lead generation engine and customize lead-scoring model.
Call 2: Develop content strategy and accompanying taxonomy. Review tracking strategy.
Call 3: Develop your programmatic pilot strategy.
Call 4: Gauge advanced organizational capabilities to determine your level of readiness. Review potential gaps and support growth.
Call 5: Refine your ICP and discuss digital asset management platform and strategy.
Call 6: Discuss nurture and drip campaign strategy and behavioral tracking and deeper segmentation capabilities.
Call 7: Identify opportunities to implement progressive profiling and A/B testing on website/landing pages. Discuss personalization strategy.

Guided Implementation 3: Transform

Call 1: Develop your ABM Lite pilot strategy.
Call 2: Review organizational transformative capabilities to determine your level of readiness. Review potential gaps and support growth.
Call 3: Strategize attribution model and data point collection (working session).
Call 4: Deepen analysis capabilities by exploring APIs and deeper reporting capabilities.
Call 5: Introduce multi-/ omnichannel strategy and cover advanced personalization strategy best practices.
Call 6: Develop your strategic ABM pilot strategy.