1. Demand Generation: Turning Leads into Qualified Accounts
As time goes on, marketers are becoming more sophisticated in their approaches to finding new leads, but they have more and more trouble acquiring qualified leads. With the vast amount of information available, it’s easy to find someone to speak to about your product, but difficult to find someone to buy your product.
By using ABM, you can take every new lead and expand your reach from the initial contact to all of the decision makers within the account.
2. Pipeline Velocity: Turning Qualified Accounts to Opportunities
Traditionally, you think of marketers as always focusing on the question: “How do we get the sales team more leads?” However, marketers are refining their strategies to ask more sophisticated questions, such as: “How do we increase the velocity of a marketing qualified lead to an opportunity?”
You’re likely to find the most success in this stage of the pipeline because of the ability to reach the accounts on the channel most relevant to them. As a result, you can see an increase in engagement as well as pipeline velocity.
3. Sales Velocity: Turning Opportunities into Customers
Once you’ve turned that marketing qualified lead (MQL) into a viable prospective customer (or opportunity), it’s time to begin the “smarketing” process. This is when the sales and marketing teams come together to identify the opportunities and figure out the best way to get them to purchase your product.
From the information that you gathered on how your ads are performing you can develop personas for each decision maker within an account. Now the sales team has the information they need to properly approach the prospective buyer and make the sales process go as smoothly as possible.
4. Advocate Marketing: Turning Customers into Advocates
You can turn your customers into advocates through training, webinars and customer reviews. By making sure that your customers are experts when it comes to your product, you’ll start to see higher usage rates and customer retention.
Tutorials, how-to guides and special training events are just a few ways to make sure that your customers are always comfortable using your product, which leads to them raving about your product to others. Word of mouth is the most valuable, and often overlooked, marketing tool.
5. Upselling & Cross-Selling: Winning New Business
Just because you made the sale doesn’t mean that the work of account-based marketing is over. ABM can be used at any stage in the sales cycle. Here we explore using ABM as a tool to help upsell and cross sell different products.
You can market upgrades of an existing product as well as other products your firm offers to customers. Send targeted messages to members of the company using various channels and watch revenue from that account increase.
6. Land & Expand: Winning More Business
Once you’ve closed the deal, it’s time to expand your reach from the key decision makers in the account to everyone in the company that can use your product. The “Land & Expand” concept is a way to increase your business by turning your customers into advocates for your product.
You can use targeted advertising ensure that everyone within the company is aware of the features that your product has to offer as well as any additional resources to help them become experts at using it. Marketing and customer success teams work together here to ensure that everyone using the product is familiar with its features and can tell more people about how it helps their business.
7. Air Cover: Remaining Top of Mind
The air cover campaign is a genius way of expanding the reach of your product beyond leads and buyers. Air cover campaigns work by using a very targeted and strategic message to reach partners, analyst, influencers and investors.
While the message is targeted, the medium is very broad, using all available channels to make sure these stakeholders are aware of your product. You always want to be top of their mind so when it’s time to write a review, ebook or case study, your company is the first thing that comes to mind.
These are just 7 of the many ways that you can use ABM to help your business increase its revenue and customer satisfaction.