Account Based Marketing (“ABM”) Step 2: Account Insight How well do we know each prospective customer?

The focus ABM brings to the marketing and sales process enhances the likelihood of success with prospective customers.  Marketo reports that ABM reduces up to 50% of wasted sales time on unproductive leads.  Given the time spent in ABM identifying the right customers (see earlier LinkedIn article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/account-based-marketing-abm-step-1-select-accounts-murray-vince) and then gathering insight on each prospective customer enhances the prospects of success.

The insight improves our ability to distill the value proposition for each specific customer based on their needs, growth, market position and a number of other critical business factors.  Deep customer knowledge increases our ability to personalize communications that will resonate with the prospect customer’s business conditions.

Effect of ABM

Fifty percent (50%) of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting (The B2B lead, reference below). How can we hone the practices and effectiveness of our marketing and sales teams to better reach the customers we want to land? Depth of knowledge about the prospective customers helps with focus and messaging that is pertinent to the people at the prospective customer. This is the key element of the ABM principle of “fishing with a spear and not a net”.

By applying ABM principles of personalized contact with contextually relevant content to specific prospective customers, our sales teams engage prospects with personalized outreach and messaging tailored to appeal to that customer’s needs via the right channels to reach those prospects.  Not surprisingly, this ABM approach produces a greater success rate in making contact, creating awareness of the problem you solve (relevant to the prospect’s needs).

ABM Step 2: Account Insight, Deep Prospect Research

In ABM Step 2 “Account Insight” this is the time to dig into what is happening with the top prospects identified in ABM Step 1: Identify the Top Prospect Customers. Account Insight is a 360-degree insight solution to give deep insight at an account level, and to help marketing and sales better understand how to acquire new clients with the product and service being offered. This is time for research that can then be applied to tailor the value proposition and communications for the prospective customer.  We start the sales messaging and openers from a position of how we solve a problem for the customer and create value. The starting point is not what we have to sell and our perceived value. Start with why the customer needs what we have to sell. The sale is not about us as the seller but about getting the customer to understand why our product or service will help them.

Account Insight is an essential, industry-specific and highly targeted research effort to generate account insight. This knowledge helps ramp the sales team on the business challenges and opportunities with each specific prospective customer. It pays off in customer communications by demonstrating a depth of knowledge and caring about that customer’s business and how to help them make improvements to save time, effort and/or money.

ABM Step 2 Account Insight enables alignment through a combined sales and marketing effort to tackle specific customer prospects that you want to develop into loyal, committed customers. The marketing team, through analysis of the account insight can consolidate certain key themes across industries that are common to several customers. This helps identify and then create content clusters that are contextually relevant to customer groups in similar markets or industries. Step 2 ABM Account Insight means that marketing and sales teams together tightly coordinate targeted prospecting with the same data and information about the potential customers they want to develop into customers. Specifically, the customers that matter most to your business.

If you are not investing the time and effort into gathering this deep account insight, and your competitors are committed to this ABM practice, you are at a competitive disadvantage. Your sales team will not have the requisite familiarity with the customer’s business and the marketing team’s content and messaging miss the critical messages or nuance of opportunities that matter to potential buyers and will open doors for your sales team.  This is a vital step in unlocking the revenue pipeline with prospects and consequently revenue growth.

ABM Cross-Team Alignment: Marketing, Sales, BizDev, Ops & Finance

Getting your marketing, sales, business development, operations and finance teams aligned with clear customer focus and depth of knowledge improves your chances of success. Forrester Research reports that aligned sales and marketing teams (as prescribed by ABM) experience an average of 32% yearly revenue growth whereas companies with unaligned sales and marketing teams see a 7% negative growth. This highlights the importance of cross-functional revenue team alignment. Step 2 ABM Account Insight enables this and empowers the virtual team with strong, deep knowledge of their prospective customers.

Cost-Effective & Efficient ABM Research

Account Insight from committed research on the industry and your prospects provides an overview of the challenges, trends and drivers that your prospective customers are experiencing. The knowledge fuels thoughtful, value added and educational communications. Through a deep, demonstrable understanding of accounts, companies can achieve high levels of personalization at every touch point.  Customers on the receiving end experience a contextually relevant, insightful communication that demonstrates an appreciation for their business. Their customer journey is a much more relevant, thoughtful experience that draws them closer to your business as you project the depth of thinking, knowledge and expertise relevant to their business challenges. This enhances the likelihood of establishing a connection and opening a conversation.

Does your sales team have the bandwidth to do this level of research? And even if they do, do you want to turn highly skilled sales professionals into business researchers? Are the sales development reps (SDRs) effective at the deep customer research required to compete with optimized ABM? Would it be better to free up the sales professionals’ time for customer outreach and engagement? There are cost-effective alternatives to having your sales team do the digging required to generate deep Account Insight.

Consider a pool of skilled business analysts, trained in ABM, to build the Account Insight and also supplement it with the identity, titles and contact information of the people within these companies that make and influence purchase decisions. Who (at the prospective customer) are the main people involved in the buying process? But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, let’s set the People Insight aside for next month’s article “ABM Step 3: People Insight”.

A skilled business analyst tasked with building Account Insight on a prospective customer knows where to find the best, current data on your prospects. The ABM business analyst (as compared to diverting your sales staff to hours and days of research) uses:

• Trade website, business news, LinkedIn company pages, business profiles, business and news articles, company websites (and in some cases the websites of their key competitors),
• Numerous social media sites for information, and
• the prospect company’s websites and online business resources to get a feel for each of your target accounts and their events, goals and key people in the buying process.

Skilled business analysts, with depth of experience in compiling company insight, can produce better research, faster and in a more cost-effective manner than asking highly skilled salespeople to work as researchers. The ABM analysts work as business detectives to gather as much insight as possible for you on the selected accounts, so you have the benefit of a deep understanding of the prospect company before you initiate contact. This enables your sales team to better understand the opportunity, fit with your product or service and then deeply personalize the message so it is relevant to the prospect company.

Sample Comprehensive Step 2 ABM Account Insight Checklist

For example, if you want to start to build account insight, the BetterProspectingTM ABM Account Insight Checklist is a useful starting point. The range of information that a highly skilled ABM analyst will research includes:

The Market

• Industry dynamics
• Key trends; business models, technologies, disruptors
• Trade shows
• Industry thought leaders
• Competitors
• Growth drivers and inhibitors
• Favored social media channels in the specific industry

The Company

• Financial health
• Executive leadership
• Financial year end to understand the customer’s budget cycles
• Corporate address and phone number
• Growth areas vs ‘cash cows’
• Renewal risk
• SWOT
• Initiatives and organizational priorities
• Triggers (funding, acquisitions, personnel moves, etc.)

The Buying Centers

• Org chart, particularly the buying committee
• Key buying centers
• Whitespace within buying centers
• Relationships and connections
• Key contact profiles
• Relationships to each other
• Relationships to your company (relationship map)
• Attitudes, preferences, biases

Our next ABM article will focus on Step 3: Account Insight. That will be published in early February.  Please drop us an email here at support@betterprospecting.biz if you want a notice about when each of the 7 blogs in the series is released.

Thanks to Betty Ledgerwood, Simran Preet, Harshdeep Singh and Rocco Chappie for their suggestions and edits. Any errors or omissions are solely mine.

BetterProspecting.biz offers templates to guide the account selection process for B2B sales. And BetterProspecting.biz also offers ABM business analyst research and support, training and coaching for the sales team to help better focus resources, time, effort and staff on developing the customers that matter most to the business.

References

https://www.demandbase.com/resources/account-based-marketing-101/