How to Maximise B2B Sales with Account-Based Marketing
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More and more organisations are focusing on high-value accounts to grow their customer base and create long-term, reliable sources of revenue.
As a result, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is now an essential growth strategy, not just for marketing leaders, but also for senior sales and revenue-based roles.
The most successful sales and marketing teams are implementing ABM tactics on individual prospect businesses in order to draw in higher value accounts, subsequently creating greater levels of returns on investment (ROI).
If you’re looking to implement your own ABM strategy, first check out our recommended process.
Using ABM to drive sales
You may already be familiar with steps 1-3, but it’s 4 & 5 that often catch marketers out. ABM requires a rigorous, intelligent and persistent sales-based engagement strategy to deliver pipeline.
We’ve all seen the figures around how much of the buyer journey is done digitally, and heard the voices advocating that ‘cold calling is dead’.
The thing is, a well-timed and researched sales call to prospects in your target accounts, that seeks to earn the right to ask intelligent questions – to qualify, not pressure – can often be the catalyst for turning a target account into a customer account.
Marketing and sales should work in tandem to nurture and convert your leads into qualified sales opportunities, with joint goals and KPIs aligning the two functions.
The commercial benefits of ABM
1. Higher ROI
“97% of marketers agree that ABM produces a ‘much’ higher ROI compared to other marketing initiatives.” – Marketo
ABM aims to create a zero-waste sales and marketing system.
This is achieved by focusing purely on high-value prospects with a genuine need for your products and/or services.
As well as winning net-new opportunities for your business, the ABM approach can also be used to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities within existing accounts.
2. Better customer relations
“Companies utilising an ABM strategy have reported an 84% improvement in reputation and 74% improvement in customer relationships.” – ITSMA
ABM creates high-valued business-wide perceptions.
Personalisation is the name of the game when it comes to ABM, and when done in the right way it focuses on the specific needs and interests of individual prospects, making them feel more highly valued than one-to-many marketing generated wins.
3. Higher lead-to-close rates
“Businesses implementing ABM tactics have found lead-to-close rates improve by an average of 75%.” – Demandbase
In-depth research achieves rewards of higher lead-to-close rates.
With the density of research that goes into ABM, you can be relatively certain your target accounts have a genuine need for your services before your first engagement with a prospect, reducing the risk of contact with leads who don’t yet need what you are trying to sell them.
4. Aligned Sales & Marketing
“ABM directly addresses sales/marketing alignment, challenging the 50% of sales time wasted on unproductive prospecting.” – MarketingProfs
Aligned sales and marketing strategies achieve stronger internal communications.
Bringing together sophisticated prospecting tools and content marketing with follow-up sales tactics, helps to streamline and optimise your sales and marketing efforts in order to generate the best possible results.
5. Increased revenue
“Companies using ABM generate, on average, 208% higher revenue for their marketing efforts compared to other organisations.” – MarketingProfs
Combining these commercial benefits of ABM means you can achieve higher win rates, larger deal sizes, and a focus on quality over quantity maximises sales results for our customers.
What do we know about ABM?
durhamlane’s Sales-Based Engagement (SBE) strategies are proven to increase the ROI of ABM campaigns.
By reinforcing your ABM campaigns with our outsourced sales function, we can help you achieve the commercial benefits mentioned in this article.
To learn more, download our guide to driving high-value deals using ABM & SBE below.