“Your brain loves storytelling. The human brain is wired to connect more deeply to emotion than to facts and stats.” Don Yaeger, Instructor
“We don’t do business with companies. We do business with people. Business is always human.” Simon Sinek
ABM reduces up to 50% of wasted sales time on unproductive leads (Marketo).
Finally, when it comes to the all-important sales opportunities generated via Account-based Marketing, 20% of accounts targeted via ABM programmes go on to be qualified as sales opportunities (Terminus/TOPO).
“Marketing is no longer a one-way street—you cannot simply shove promotions to your prospects. You need to engage in an active dialogue and ABM lets you do that with unparalleled precision.”- Shari Johnston, SVP of Marketing, Radius
30% of marketers using ABM saw more than 100% increase in engagement with C-level targets.
Why do content and messaging matter?
We only get one opportunity to make a first impression. And with a cold call or digital outreach, recipients are incredibly circumspect about the volume of spam they receive. How can we stand out in a meaningful, connected way?
For starters, offer value and insight into something meaningful and relevant to the recipient. That’s a cue to not start with your business, product or service message. Our customers care about their business first and foremost, not yours. Start where they are, wrestling with the challenges of their own business. Empathize with the problems and challenges they face at work every day. Demonstrate that you understand, can articulate the problem, have relevant expertise and experience and commiserate with them.
Contextually relevant, personalized content is the way to start a conversation with your prospective customer. Focus the discussion on an informed assessment of the business challenges your prospective customer faces, empathy and knowledge of their pain points and potential solutions. Contrast this with the “here’s what I’ve got to sell” opener. Think of it this way, you’re not selling them a pizza oven but the ability to make dinner for thousands of people.
What are some ABM strategy examples? We’ll cover that specifically in this article in the context of effective, strategic ABM content and messaging. (For examples of ABM strategy and tactics related to ABM Step 1 Account Selection, ABM Step 2 Company Insight and ABM Step 3 People Insight: see the earlier articles referenced below in the Resource section.)
Let’s move on to some ABM content examples and ABM content ideas to help make this actionable.
How can we create a contextually relevant personalized message?
Thinking about where we started our ABM process:
ABM 1: Select the Right Accounts for our Business
ABM 2: Develop Account Insight for the Businesses We Have Selected
ABM 3: Develop People Insight for the People to Contact at the Businesses We Have Selected
With Marketing, Sales and Business Development working together, review the work in ABM Steps 1, 2 & 3 to develop deep account insights and people insights. What challenges are they grappling with? What can you glean about what motivates the gatekeepers and purchase decision makers at the selected prospective companies?
Review the content from ABM Step 3 “People Insight” as you draft each outreach message to the prospect. Do you know the 1~2 triggers for this contact that puts your message in the context of their problem that we know we can solve?
The messaging focuses on how your product or service solves a challenge they face. How does it help them eliminate waste, save money, make more money, keep their customers happier or accelerate their business growth? After all, it really is all about the customer. Start with customer empathy – an opening message that shows your knowledge of their problem is the key to an effective opener.
Sell the problem to make the connection, the restaurant customer wants to sell more pizza to customers, more cost effectively with a superior product that better satisfies customers than their competitor. It’s not about the pizza oven you are selling, it’s about how your offering fulfills that restaurant’s needs.
We’ve got a connection, what next? Tell your Story to Better Connect with your Target Accounts.
Getting a prospect’s attention with our subject line is a great start, but that won’t land a sustainable business relationship that results in revenue for our business. Now we need impactful and effective content. Before we start outreach, we have to apply what we’ve learned in ABM Steps, 1, 2 and 3 to create informed content. Do we need to create awareness of the problem our prospects experience that we know we can solve? What does an optimal solution entail? How does our product or service match that ideal solution?
It’s time to create a contextually relevant content cluster. Start with the essential pieces that highlight the problem our prospective customers face. How are the customers gathering their business information? Newsletters? Interest groups? Infographics? Webinars? Video meetings? Understand your target market well enough to tailor the content to the medium that will best reach your customers.
What types of ABM content work best? That’s where trial, measurement and continuous improvement pay off. What worked in the last campaign might not be effective with the next one. That’s why measurement of the conversion rate, open rate and other relevant metrics will help hone your messaging, what lands with prospects with the most effectiveness? Identify that quantitatively and refine the messaging to better align with proven effectiveness. Keep measuring and refining to ever-improve the connection rate and prospects of sales success for our team.
To be effective, this starts with knowing your prospects on a deep level. Make sure we understand our buyers’ personas thoroughly and have a system in place to routinely assess and update our knowledge. Forearmed with that information we can create a template messaging that will resonate with each persona and speak to them in a direct, empathic, contextually relevant manner.
Our account specific ABM Step 4 messaging (highly-personalized to the prospect business, industry and person) focuses on:
- Customer needs in terms of the problem solved
- The criteria we identified in ABM Step 1 account selection that made a specific company relevant to our campaign
- How to best solve that problem
- Competitive advantages, (e.g., how our solution maps to the prospect’s business challenge)
- Positioning strategy
The key to ABM success lies in identifying a small number of high-profile accounts and targeting them with personalized campaigns.
Build a contextually relevant content cluster for your campaign. Armed with the ABM Step 2 Company Insight and ABM Step 3 People Insight, you should now have a sense of the challenges your prospects face and their personal motivation for overcoming them.
Open a conversation with your prospect about what they care about. Don’t send them a generic message; ask for their time or harp about the features and benefits of our product. Make sure the body of our opening message focuses on what’s important to them. From the outside looking inside, extrapolate from the information we have gathered to consider “what keeps them up at night?” and “what would make their life better?”. Ask, listen and improve our messaging as we learn.
We must personalize your messaging to prospects. Now that we have the research on their company and some insight into their career and background: what have they been doing recently? What achievement have they posted? Are they talking in the context of personal goals and results or do they share their achievement with team recognition? It’s more likely that the team-oriented prospects are open to working with a partner to try new products or services at work. Why? Because they are generally open to working with others to make things happen.
Watch for “us” and “team” over the “me” and “I” prospects.
What articles, blogs, commentary, etc. have they announced publicly? What else are they focused on in social and professional/business media? What interest groups have they joined for information? Follow their content and business online and include in our opening message a reference to something relevant to the prospect. This demonstrates that we aren’t just spamming them with a generic message but we have a thoughtful, contextually relevant message for them. The prospect will note that you took the time to understand them and their problems: it increases the likelihood of a positive response. We don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.
This thoughtful background allows us to build a short and effective piece of messaging that addresses our prospects’ fears and dreams, shows them how our product helps a challenge they face, and gives them insight into you as someone that truly puts the customers wants and needs first. For example, if you are using the LinkedIn connection request, we have to communicate this in just 300 characters. (<-Note there’s 331 characters in this paragraph, brevity is a challenge.)
The BetterProspecting™ ABM Stage 4 focuses on using personalized messages, campaigns and outreach programs to attract and maintain the attention of specific, high-value accounts. The more personal we can be, the more likely it is we will get results.
By customizing content based on our audiences’ interests and challenges, we more accurately target your specific market segments and increase the chances of them converting. Ultimately, the goal of personalization is to provide your target prospects with a clear understanding of how your products can benefit their business.
ABM step 4 on Content & Messaging employs content valuable to the recipient that addresses clear and significant business challenges that our prospect faces in their role, or should be thinking about. We have to align with marketing, sales and business development to develop messaging and content that effectively addresses our prospects’ specific pain points. Clarity about the problem we solve, why it matters and how it creates value is essential. But our product is not the starting point for the conversation with the person on the other side: it starts with empathy about their problem.
The progression of this conversation is like the volleyball sequence of bump, set and spike. In the “bump” phase we highlight and identify the problem so we are on common ground with the prospect. As that becomes settled and accepted we move the content and discussion to the “set” phase where we discuss an optimal or ideal solution with the prospect. Let’s be sure that what we’re discussing truly aligns with their needs and desire for an improved outcome. The “spike” phase is the education step when we reveal that our product solves the bump phase problem with the set phase ideal outcome, in a product from our company.
How do we reinforce the education process for our prospect?
We need a content cluster for the sales people that highlights their depth of knowledge of the problem, involvement in discussions about how to effectively resolve it and ultimately how our product delivers that solution. That content needs to map to where our prospects get their information and we need to trial different media to measure effectiveness.
We’ve got to consider campaigns that highlight our expertise and deliver valuable, insightful content for our prospects through LinkedIn articles, company blogs, Tweets that highlight new content and company news, direct mail, case studies, social media, email, video, podcasts , the company website, display ads, webinars, in-person events (as COVID restrictions lift), search ads, e-books, virtual events, white papers and visually compelling infographics. Build out a content map in a coordinated plan with Marketing, Sales, Business Development, Finance and Operations; ABM content mapping is a key function to effectively executing ABM Step 4 Content and Messaging.
The interval of contact has to fit that frequency of not being intrusive but not letting the contact intervals lag and moving the education of the problem, ideal solution and our product to culmination in revenue as the prospect ultimately makes a purchase decision in favor of our product.
Next steps for content and messaging?
Outline the plan in terms of duration, themes, succinct statement of the problem solved, budget, and resources allocated. We want the content in place before outreach begins, as the content reinforces the value of the connection and conversation. It establishes common ground, relevance and trust. And further, it provides value to the recipient. We move our opening with the prospect from asking for time to talk, to giving information and insight to our prospect.
We’ve addressed “what is an ABM strategy” in this article on ABM Step 4 Content and Messaging in the context of preparing the content and related messaging for marketing and sales to deliver to the prospects to reinforce the campaign. This positions your business and your people as experts in the area with a depth of knowledge about the problem your prospects face, confidence in solving that problem and being a valued resource to our customers in overcoming business challenges. That puts us effectively in the role of being a trusted business partner and vendor.
Our next ABM article will focus on Step 5: Focused Outreach that will be published in mid-May 2022. Sign up here https://bit.ly/3w1Klp9 to get the article sent directly to your inbox.
Written by Betty Ledgerwood and Murray Vince
Thanks to Simran Preet, Harshdeep Singh, and Rocco Chappie for their suggestions and edits. Any errors or omissions are solely mine.
BetterProspecting™ offers templates to guide the account selection process for B2B sales. BetterProspecting™ 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.
