The B2B Marketer's Guide to Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing is a B2B marketing strategy that focuses on specific customers or accounts. Instead of a single, broad-based campaign with a wide audience, ABM uses multiple highly personalized campaigns to engage accounts with an individualized approach. While it has “marketing” in its name, ABM is not just for marketing teams. ABM involves close alignment across marketing, sales, and service. This close alignment across teams helps you target accounts and ensure a seamless experience — all with a unified message.

As a result, a number of revenue teams are expanding the term to be more inclusive of everyone involved in the strategy. You might also hear terms like "Account-Based Engagement" or "Account-Based Experience," all which showcase how Account-Based Marketing is evolving.

There is no “one size fits all” approach to ABM, and strategies vary based on business goals. Typically, ABM programs fall into one of three buckets: 1-to-1, 1-to-few, and 1-to-many programs.

1-to-1 ABM programs target accounts with high revenue potential. These accounts are going to be where you spend a majority of your ABM budget, time, and energy, but it will be well worth the work based on the potential lifetime value of the customer.

1-to-few ABM programs are a bit broader than the one-to-one programs, but still very targeted. With one-to-few campaigns, the focus should be on narrowing down your account list based on specific criteria that lets you connect with a group of accounts that have similar pain points, buying groups, and business goals.

1-to-many ABM programs identify potentially hundreds of accounts that fall into your target market and also share commonalities across segment, industry, or other relevant criteria. These programs rely heavily on a scaled approach to reach these accounts with a personalized message.

The best ABM strategies:

1. Identify key accounts.
2. Engage buyers where they are.
3. Deliver connected engagements.
4. Grow customer relationships.

What do you need to bring an ABM strategy to life? It’ll take a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, combined with a marketing automation platform. Your CRM serves as the single source of truth for data, and powers your account-centric strategy. Your marketing automation platform is critical to engaging target markets at scale and in real time. By unifying this tech stack, all B2B revenue teams can launch and grow an ABM strategy that drives business value and strengthens customer relationships.

Companies that take advantage of ABM’s potential are seeing impressive results.

A successful ABM strategy starts with identifying the right accounts to target. This can include a combination of new and existing accounts. Use your CRM data to identify top accounts that combine potential for high revenue with a strong likelihood of conversion.

Both marketing and sales should be involved in identifying target accounts. They also must maintain open lines of communication for sharing insights and data, such as previous conversion data, account scoring, buying signals from committee members, and look-alike accounts. Once identified, get to know each of these accounts and their buying committees, from understanding the content they prefer and to the channels they use. Your CRM and marketing engagement data will come in handy for this, but you can also search the web and social media to get a nuanced understanding of your target accounts’ particular challenges, priorities, and needs.

However, an intensive study of your accounts can be exhausting and time-consuming. So how can you take the guesswork and analysis out of identifying your top accounts? Try artificial intelligence (AI). Typically, identifying accounts requires marketing, sales, and service teams to sit down and comb through the data. But AI can make this process easier, faster, and efficient — uncovering insights and giving teams a clear rubric as to which accounts are best to engage.

Once you’ve identified the accounts you want to target and developed a 360-degree understanding of their needs and preferences, these accounts can be used as templates to build lookalike audiences for one-to-few or one-to-many ABM programs. This can help you find additional accounts, expand your ideal customer profiles (ICPs), and increase the scope of your ABM plan to include all the best accounts for your business.

Here are some tips to keep in mind as you identify your target accounts:

1. Use account, contact, and lead record data to identify the right accounts to target.
2. Use analytics tools to inform strategic planning and to measure and track results.
3. Use ICPs to keep sales, marketing, and service aligned on audience outreach.
4. Use AI to score and prioritize leads and recommend deal cycle next steps.

According to the State of Marketing report, 89% of B2B marketers are using an ABM platform to deliver a unified end-to-end experience. And for good reason: when you deliver the personalized experiences your top accounts want, you’ll be more likely to land — and keep — their business.

To execute ABM successfully, you’ll need a high level of coordination between your marketing, sales, and service teams.

All teams need to be aligned on:

1. Which accounts to target
2. What determines engagement
3. Which metrics to measure
4. How to build relationships with buyers
5. What success looks like

ABM brings previously siloed marketing, sales, and service teams together around a single view of the customer. In fact, according to B2B Marketing Trends, top B2B marketing teams are 1.6 times more likely than underperforming teams to collaborate with sales teams on ABM programs.

How to Align All Three Teams

The centralized data required by ABM brings your teams together with a single view of the customer. They’ll be able to take full advantage of intent data, predict when and how to engage a buying committee, and clearly understand the goals and metrics they’re responsible for.

At every level, sales, marketing, and service will need to work together to identify the most high-value accounts, set measurable goals, and track progress as each account moves into the sales funnel.