Sangram Vajre

Cheat Sheet / Updated 05-09-2022

Account-based marketing flips the marketing funnel on its head. You start with your best-fit prospects and turn them into resources for both long-term business and new prospects.

Article / Updated 09-06-2016

The number of social media channels is endless. Each social media channel serves a different purpose designed for a certain audience. Depending on your audience and purpose, you will find yourself with using some social media channels more than others. It depends on the types of accounts you're trying to connect, and with what message. As of 2016, the biggest social media channels in the world are Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube Reddit Instagram Pinterest It's important to recognize the most popular social media platforms, as they all offer ways for your company to do advertising or promote sponsor content. These media help you reach your contacts in your target accounts. It isn't possible to be on every channel and be effective. Identifying the right channels is important for connecting with your contacts. LinkedIn is the best place to connect with your contacts on a 1-to-1 basis utilizing social media. As the largest professional networking site in the world, every business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales professional should understand the importance of being on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has several ways for you to connect with your contacts, including Liking or commenting on status updates Reading your contacts blog posts and sharing them with your network Joining groups Inviting them to connect Here is when you should invite a prospect to connect on LinkedIn: Business/Sales development representative (BDR/SDR): If you're engaging in conversation with a prospect, after completing an initial discovery call or scheduling an appointment for sales. Sales account executive (AE): If a demo was successful and the account is progressing to a revenue opportunity. You need to connect with all the relevant decision makers in the account. Project manager: If the account has become a Closed/Won deal, and the implementation of your product or service requires a project manager or professional services consultant, this individual should connect with your customer accounts on LinkedIn. Customer success manager (CSM): After the account has been handed off to a CSM via email, the CSM should connect with their customers, (especially the "champion," or biggest user of your product or service). This champion can become your customer advocate, and LinkedIn can help to further engagement. Marketing team member: A member from your marketing team needs to collaborate with your customers to create content. This customer content includes case studies, video testimonials, webinars, and planning for events. When marketing team members are collaborating with customers, they should connect on LinkedIn to build a relationship. Don't ask your contacts to become your Facebook friend. If you get to the point where one of your contacts offers to connect with you on Facebook, consider what message you'll send by accepting his or her friend accounts.

Article / Updated 09-06-2016

Although the hit television series Mad Men began in the 1950s, long before anyone had ever heard of a sales and marketing funnel, the agency shown in this show actually was doing business-to-business (B2B) account-based marketing: Identify target accounts. They targeted companies in such industries as automotive, cosmetics, fashion, travel, and commercial goods, because they had success with those types of companies before. The account executives found the ultimate decision makers. Expand the account with contacts. They determined who else from the account needed to come in for a pitch about creative. For example, when the agency was pitching a big tobacco company, they would need to know all of the executive stakeholders. Engage accounts on their terms. Invite them to the office for a swanky boardroom meeting or to dinner to sip martinis. Find out their hopes and dreams for their product or service, then design creative to help tell the story. The big pitch with storyboards showing messaging that spoke to them and tugged at their heart strings would help win the deal. Create customer advocates. They accounts then tell all their friends about the amazing work the agency did to help increase sales at their business. This word of mouth marketing gave the agency its excellent reputation. Because Mad Men covered the Fifties to the Seventies, the agency didn't have access to the technology you have today. Contacts were kept in a Rolodex on a pretty mahogany desk. When an account man left an agency, all he had was his Rolodex and his reputation. Today, your reputation follows you on social media, but the way you manage accounts is much more sophisticated. Imagine what Don Draper, the creative director of Sterling, Cooper, Draper & Price, would think about all these B2B marketing automation software and sales prospecting tools.

Article / Updated 09-06-2016

Targeted advertising is part of your account-based marketing strategy. You're pulling data from your customer relationship management (CRM) system to target contacts in accounts. It's a laser-focused business-to-business (B2B) marketing technique. Another way to connect with your accounts is through CRM retargeting. The retargeting component includes taking the data in your CRM and syncing it with third-party sources for cookie- or IP-based targeting. If you know the name of an account you want to target, and this account is in your CRM, then additional platforms (such as AdRoll and LiveRamp) match your data for CRM retargeting. Account-based marketing platforms add another layer onto CRM retargeting with account-based retargeting. Account-based retargeting proactively targets the entire set of people in the account. CRM retargeting uses the first email or contact who came to your website. Because Bob from ACME came to the website, he is the first contact associated with the account in your CRM. You know Bob isn't the only decision-maker in the account. If Bob is a Marketing Manager, you need to find Bob's Director of Marketing or CMO. Your ABM platform will use Bob's company name, ACME, and find more contact data for the marketing team members at ACME. This way, the entire marketing department at ACME will see your advertisement. This helps to expand your reach in your target account.

Article / Updated 09-06-2016

Account-based marketing is about connecting with the right accounts. This is the business-to-business (B2B) industry, and it's called that because your business sells to other businesses, not to leads. It's about the quality, not the quantity, of your customers. Creating clear metrics The metrics to define success in account-based marketing are different from traditional B2B lead-based marketing. Marketers have to commit to changing to these metrics, as it will help you as a marketer to be more successful. With ABM, marketing teams show how they're driving engagement in the right accounts for more impact. Marketing is ensuring that content and messages are reaching all the decision-makers in the account to help move accounts faster through the sales pipeline. In ABM, the number one metric is revenue. But revenue doesn't happen overnight. Creating velocity helps to grow revenue, and this takes time. Your "smarketing" team creates the list of accounts to target, strategizes campaigns for the accounts based on their stage in the purchase decision, then modifies those activities accordingly based on the success rate. With account-based marketing, it takes time to show that your ABM campaigns are working, especially when you're switching from a traditional lead-gen strategy to demand generation in your best-fit accounts. Your one "smarketing" team marketing shares ownership with sales on your target accounts. Because your target accounts won't immediately start generating revenue, what you can do is pay attention to additional key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs are documented in your CRM and will correlate with revenue growth. These KPIs include Number of qualified accounts generated by marketing Number of opportunities added to pipeline, or marketing-sourced pipeline Time for stage-progression from prospect to opportunity to close Engagement in accounts, showing an uptick in the account's score in your marketing automation system Linking your ABM strategy to revenue One inherent problem with traditional B2B marketing is that marketers were always trying to assign a lead to one source. The lead came in through a webinar, a form completion, a referral, and then the lead was attributed to a source in your CRM. Marketers used to think that worked. But with account-based marketing, you accept that you can't attribute a lead to a single source. Think about it this way: David is a marketing manager who comes to your website and downloads an ebook. Tim is a marketing director who attends one of your webinars. Michael is a CMO who comes to an event you sponsor. David, Michael, and Tim work for the same venture capital firm, DTM & Co. You've identified venture capital firms as the best fit for your product or service. DTM & Co. is an account on your target list to close this quarter. Your "smarketing" team will engage David, Michael, and Tim in many activities to create velocity and close the account. The ABM strategy you employ for the contacts at DTM looks like this: David is emailed a case study that shows how VC marketing managers are successful with your product. This is followed by a video testimonial from another marketing manager in his industry detailing his success with your product. Tim receives an email with a recording of the webinar he attended, and a copy of the slides. The next week, he gets a case study, featuring a marketing director who details the problem, the solution, and why he chose to do business with your company. Michael is sent a handwritten note in direct mail from your team member he met at the tradeshow. He's also emailed a copy of a whitepaper that was developed for C-level executives; it details the value of your solution for his industry. Which of these activities contributed to revenue? It's a waste of time to track it by a single activity. Think of it as a strategy, as multiple activities will create velocity and engagement within an account. Contacting multiple touch points in an account helps you to build a relationship in the account toward the ultimate goal of closing a deal.

Article / Updated 09-06-2016

Pipeline acceleration is also known as sales velocity. Using the formula for velocity (distance / time), your company wants to generate as much velocity as possible to see a revenue opportunity move through the sales pipeline to becoming a Closed/Won customer. An acceleration campaign is used in collaboration with marketing to help generate velocity and move a deal through the pipeline. Before technology, salespeople had to do a lot of manual work to accelerate deals through the pipeline. This involved taking clients to fancy dinners, sending gifts, and wooing executives to buy from their companies. Marketing supported these activities by sending direct mail or hosting events. With account-based marketing, there are several ways to launch a pipeline acceleration campaign. Because you have aligned your sales and marketing teams as one cohesive "smarketing" team, you have more resources to create effective campaigns. The goal is to develop a multi-touch strategy to engage with the right contacts in your opportunity accounts. Your goal should have associated success metrics. The success metrics for a pipeline acceleration campaign are time and engagement. With your pipeline acceleration campaign, did you see the following? Decrease in sales cycle: The amount of time it takes from the first touch ("click") to the account becoming a customer ("close"). When your typical sales cycle takes 90 days, your goal for a pipeline acceleration campaign should be to shorten the number of days to close an account. Increase in engagement: The amount of activity with contacts in your account. The activities are recorded with your marketing automation system. Using marketing automation, you can see an increase in the score for your contacts. The score increases when contacts are engaged in more activities, such as downloading content or attending webinars. The goal for pipeline acceleration campaigns is to decrease the amount of time it takes to close the deal, and increase the amount of engagement with all the contacts in the account. Your "smarketing" team, working together, can make these goals a reality. Ask your "smarketing" team these questions before launching a pipeline acceleration campaign: Who are the influencers, decision-makers, and "champions" in the account? When you're selling a product to an IT department, this is the IT manager, his supervisor, the department head, and any additional contacts you have connected. Your "champion" is your primary point of contact who will be a "power-user" of your product or service. This is why it's important to capture an organizational hierarchy, noting which of your contacts in an account can influence the purchase decision. When do you want the deal to close? In your CRM, the sales account executive should have assigned an anticipated date for the deal to be closed. Based on this date, how many days, weeks, or months do you have? This is the timeline for your acceleration campaign, and also helps you track your goal of decreasing the time to make a sale. What needs to happen? Working with the sales account executive, determine what questions need to be answered. Are contacts in the account concerned about training, or implementation? Are there objections that need to be overcome, such as pricing or contract terms? How can you engage the contacts in the account? Which channels are appropriate to connect with contacts? In your marketing automation system, you can see a record of activity. Strategize how you will connect with each contact who has a stake in the purchase decision. Consider the following items for the context of your relationship with the account: What's worked so far to engage contacts. Have they attended webinars or downloaded content? Did you send direct mail? How was it received? The job titles of the contacts. When you know your "champion" is a marketing manager who read all of your content, what else can you send him or her? What's been done to engage the decision-maker. When the marketing manager's director or CMO hasn't been engaged (from your marketing automation system, you know they haven't read much content), how do you engage your champion's boss?

Article / Updated 09-06-2016

Every person has different strengths. This is especially true for marketing and salespeople. Marketing's strengths are in creating content, campaigns, and generating awareness for a business-to-business (B2B) company's brand. Marketing supplies the creative content to drive interest, creating leads for sales to pursue (opportunities). Sales' strengths are in the tactical know-how and training to turn those opportunities into Closed/Won deals. If you ask a marketing operations or content manager to get on the phone and close a deal, he or she probably can't do it. At the same time, you wouldn't ask a salesperson to write a 10-page whitepaper or produce a webinar. This is why it's important for your "smarketing" team to bank on each other's strengths and collaborate on campaigns for all stages of the account's journey. Creating a sustainable process Working together, your "smarketing" team should create a process that is repeatable for each stage of the account's journey. This helps execute account-based marketing at scale. A sustainable process for your "smarketing" team should be both repeatable and scalable. The stages of the account's journey from New, Prospect, and Opportunity to Customer should align with the flipped funnel when creating a sustainable process. Your company's account-based marketing activities should be a scalable, repeatable set of strategies. The goal of aligning all these activities is to have a model for growing revenue. Here are the steps "smarketing" should undertake for creating a sustainable ABM process. Identify The goal is to get the accounts you identified on a discovery call and/or to agree to a sales demo. Accounts are identified with either inbound or outbound marketing. When inbound, the new prospect is identified when they download content or complete a form, thus being added to your CRM and synched with your marketing automation system. An alert is sent to the BDR/SDR. They follow up with a cadence of calls and emails, sending supporting content created by marketing (such as recent blog posts, infographics, and whitepapers). The accounts are added to an email nurture or drip. When the account was identified in your CRM, and the BDR/SDR is working to connect with them, it's outbound marketing. Expand The goal is to connect with as many contacts as possible in your target accounts. By expanding your reach within an account to connect with more people, you better identify the influencers and decision-makers in the account. At this stage, the BDR/SDR or sales administrator should be adding more contact data to the account to build a full profile in your CRM. Marketing should assist by adding these contacts to segmented lists in marketing automation, adding them to email nurture programs, and confirming that they're receiving invitations to applicable online and offline events. Engage This goal is to connect with the contacts in your accounts who influence the purchase decision. This activity creates energy and velocity to advance accounts into the next stage of the journey. Here are the next stages of progression and associated activities: New account to qualified prospect: BDR/SDR is calling and emailing, and marketing is sending content to get the prospect on a discovery call and demo with a sales account executive. Marketing supplies high-level content (such as blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, and infographics) to increase awareness and appointments for sales. Prospect to opportunity: The sales account executive has a successful demo and engages with the opportunity. The sales AE is working with the contacts in the account to answer any questions about pricing or handle objections, while marketing supplies educational content (such as case studies, customer video testimonials and webinars to increase engagement and create velocity to close more deals, faster). Opportunity to customer: The sales account executive is engaging the account in negotiations to close the deal. Here, marketing supplies "how to" content, demonstrating a return on investment (ROI) and competitive analysis. The value is in increasing engagement with contacts in the opportunity accounts to turn them into customers. Advocate The goal is to get the accounts you closed to become advocates for your company. Accounts become advocates through the successful adoption of your product or service. When they can use your product to fulfill a business need, they continue paying your company. Seeing customers successfully adopt and use your product increases retention and reduces customer churn. Marketing supports customer success in the creation of advocates by supplying content, such as implementation guides, video tutorials, "how to" resources, free training webinars, and hosting customer events. This may or may not fall under the responsibility of a marketing team. Larger organizations may have entire departments dedicated to creating training and onboarding resources, especially if the product or service is more technical. Serving and selling With "smarketing," marketing and sales work together to serve accounts with solutions that answer a business need. The idea of serving instead of selling comes down to the fact that you should service an account instead of always asking them for more: more of their time or more of their money. Selling comes down to brass tacks: The salesperson asks an account for money. Account-based marketing is about building relationships with accounts to make it easier for sales. This is where a combined "smarketing" team can leverage its strengths. Marketing activities help engage accounts to determine whether there are additional needs to fulfill for an account. A "smarketing" team can serve an account by Hosting free webinars Inviting them to relevant events Sending case studies Including them in industry research Interviewing for video testimonials Greasing the wheel to revenue All of the "smarketing" team's efforts are to drive revenue. It's an organic effort that starts by identifying the best-fit accounts you need to work with, then determining how to reach all the contacts in the account to engage them through activities and programs. By serving up relevant content, inviting them to events, and thinking of them as future partners and advocates, you're on track to building long-term relationships and a sustainable revenue model.

Article / Updated 09-06-2016

In theory, targeting the right accounts in account-based marketing is easy. In action, this can present many challenges. Because most marketing teams were created for lead-based marketing, the most popular software solutions also are lead-based. This may surprise you, but your customer relationship management (CRM) system and marketing automation system weren't initially set up for account-based marketing. By default, these software platforms were designed for lead-based marketing. Your CRM was built to manage contacts, then marketing automation is used to engage the contacts in activities and track the metrics. Activity was measured at the contact level. Marketers and salespeople haven't been able to report at the account level. The reports would include lists of leads, or opportunities, and engagement on those contacts. To get to the account-level engagement, you have to manually design the necessary reports. Today, CRM systems don't directly report on opportunities at the account level. Your CEO may ask you, "How many accounts that came to a marketing event have closed as a direct result?" There's no way to run a report for this data. You can import your lists of contacts who attended this event into your CRM under a campaign. If you were asked to pull a report in your CRM of accounts in the opportunity stage, you couldn't automatically run this report. You can run a report to find the list of contacts associated with an opportunity. Integrating your platforms Integration is accomplished by the application programming interface (API). Your marketing automation system pings or calls the API to transfer information back into the CRM. Depending on your marketing automation provider, the number of API calls may be limited. If your API calls are limited, you won't have real-time insights into your campaigns from the CRM. If you sent out a list email, you could see the open rates, but not who is opening them. You need to view this as an account. Did the account come to the event? Who from the account? That's the conversation you need to have with your marketing team, and the type of reporting your sales team should care about. Unfortunately, none of the software available in the market generates this type of report today. It's all at the contact level. This is a huge opportunity. Multiple marketing technology (MarTech) platforms, when combined with your CRM and marketing automation system, allow you to execute account-based marketing. You need tools that can measure account-based performance. Your CRM doesn't produce account reports. You can run reports on contacts and open opportunities, but you can't get a holistic view of what is happening within your Tier A, B, or C accounts. Assigning tasks and follow-up If you have set up a rule correctly, you will automatically create new contacts and accounts in the CRM when they engage with content in your marketing automation system. You will need to execute the qualification process again to determine whether the account meets your ICP criteria and undergo the same vetting process. If someone downloads a piece of content after completing a form, you've triggered this in marketing automation to also create a new contact/account in your CRM. Alerting your sales account executives and BDR/SDRs through email that says a new person has been assigned to them: CRM tasks: If you run your sales development process through your CRM, use tasks to indicate a new contact has been assigned. Email notification: If you use a sales development platform, such as SalesLoft's Cadence, you can import the notification, view in CRM, and import into Cadence. Now they're on your list of follow-ups. Determining the next steps The concept of using MarTech for ABM is simple but it's a huge change in the status quo. The whole team must be on board with this plan for connecting with contacts in accounts who have achieved a minimum score. Management must have bought in to be on the same page with next steps. Internally, your "smarketing" team should sit down together to review the process for using marketing automation. Because you're using the MA for various activities and sending content, each team member needs to know the next steps, based on certain activities. To determine the next steps, ask these questions: If a form is completed, who from the sales development team should respond? Which ICP and persona criteria should be used to qualify inbound form completions? Who from marketing owns drip emails? Which content is included in the drips? How often should this be refreshed? Which rules are created for adding contacts automatically to your CRM? Who owns creating these rules? When should marketing and sales review account scores together to determine whether there's an uptick in engagement among targeted accounts?

Article / Updated 09-06-2016

Before the internet, the buyer and seller relationship was skewed. Buyers had to trust marketing messages. The internet became the great equalizer. Sellers had to become more transparent about their products than ever. The buying process has rapidly evolved in the last decade because of the internet and the evolution of web-based marketing technology (MarTech). There is so much information available for buyers. Marketing automation comes into play as it gives you, the seller, insights into what your buyer is looking at. It levels the playing field. Marketing automation removes the manual process of trying to determine whether your accounts are ready to move to the next phase of the purchase decision. Using data from their activities, you know whether your accounts are ready to buy. You know this through scoring and grading. Scoring based on activities Marketing automation has a tool to gauge the level of engagement for each of your contacts. This is called giving the contact a score. Scoring is done by assigning points to each of your marketing activities. Each marketing activity is worth a certain amount of points. You set scores to see how interested your contact is in certain content. This tracks buyer behavior with your marketing activities. Examples of marketing activities to score include Time viewing your site Pages viewed Email opens Clicks to content Content downloads (completing a form to download a whitepaper, ebook, or case study) There's a scoring system in your marketing automation system. Your "smarketing" team should agree on how many points are associated with each marketing activity. With scoring, you can track levels of engagement for all the contacts and accounts in your CRM, because it is integrated with your marketing automation platform. This figure shows scoring rules. Negative points are associated with some activities. This is called scoring degradation. Score degradation is the process of lowering someone's score to make sure it's correctly portraying whether the account is ready to move forward. If the contact isn't ready to buy, you can downgrade their score in your marketing automation system to give them a negative score. If they're inactive for a certain period of time, you can also reduce their score in the MA system so you are only nurturing the most active contacts in your target accounts. Using a negative score helps to ensure these accounts don't get forwarded as sales qualified accounts (SQA). If, for example, your SDR has just completed an initial discovery score with a marketing qualified account (MQA), and the contact wasn't ready to move forward, the SDR can downgrade the contact's score to remove them from future marketing activities. Combining scores for a single account With traditional lead-based marketing, you would look at the score of a single contact to see whether he or she was ready to move forward in the purchase decision. In account-based marketing, you're recognizing that more than one contact is involved in the purchase, so you need to look at scores for all the contacts in your target account. You take these individual contacts' scores and aggregate them into a comprehensive score. If you were selling to other business-to-business (B2B) marketers, you would look for scores in marketing job roles in the account. By adding up the scores for all the contacts in the marketing team, you can see engagement within the whole account. The following figure shows the scores of multiple contacts in an account. Grading based on best fit Scoring and grading are easily confused. A score lets you know whether the contact is ready for sales but the grade is used to determine how well the contact fits within your ICP and persona criteria. Grading criteria include Company size (employees and revenue) Industry (outside your vertical) Job title (role and responsibilities) Technology used Giving a contact the grade of A means they're a perfect fit. Giving them a grade of D or below means you won't want them. You have a list of Tier A, B, or C accounts. While the Tier B or C accounts technically aren't a perfect fit with your ICP criteria, if the score is high and they're demonstrating interest in your product or service, you can still attempt to do business with them. Set up grading rules for specific personas. You created personas to identify the qualities of your best-fit users. You can match your persona criteria to determine what would qualify as a contact within a Tier A account. These contacts automatically would be added to a drip email program when they come to your site. If you're using an account-based marketing platform for targeted advertising to your contacts, you can draw these personas into a specific landing page. Set your rule from there to add them to the email nurture program. You can set up these rules so your competition can't access your content. "Block anyone from ACME Corporation from downloading the whitepaper." After you identify these competing companies, you should create a list and give all the contacts in these companies a grade of an F, because you know they will never purchase from your company.

Article / Updated 09-06-2016

You need know where your prospects are most active, and whether this is on inbound or outbound marketing channels. Sending prospects content and engaging them helps to create activity, ultimately bringing them closer to revenue, but you need to specifically know what's working. Using your marketing automation system, you can monitor the activities that try to connect with your contacts. You monitor the engagement level of your contacts in accounts through reports. By using reports, you can see which reports are generating the most interest. This figure shows an example of the reports available in your marketing automation system. You can drill down in these reports to see which campaigns are most effective for your contacts in accounts. The next figure shows a snapshot of activity at the contact-level with applicable scores. You can set up rules in your marketing automation system. Rules are if/then statements predicated on specific activities. Here is an example of a rule: If an opportunity is created, then those people are removed from an inbound nurture program, such as a drip email. Because your contact in the account is progressing to an opportunity, the contact needs different types of marketing. Your messaging, advertising, and content need to be specific to each stage. You can get advanced with a nurture track for each stage of the account's journey: prospect, opportunity, and customer. When the contacts get transferred will depend on which stage they are in the purchase decision. The first person who came in through inbound marketing will become the primary contact in the account associated with the opportunity. As you expand your marketing efforts to other contacts in the account, you need to make sure they're all tied to the same revenue opportunity. If not, those contacts would continue to receive nurture email drips because they're still listed in the prospect stage. There are two ways to set this up correctly to ensure all contacts tied to the account receive the same stage-based content: The sales account executive who owns the account should update the stage of contacts associated in the account in your CRM to change the messaging for the entire account. If the contact has been investigating your website, and is not yet associated with a revenue opportunity, leave the other contacts in the account in the prospect stage so they continue to receive introductory content. These nurturing activities help to "warm up" all the contacts in the account.