🕵🏻♂️ Aligning ABM with buyer journey
How to match touchpoints with different buyer journey stages and use personalization to nurture target accounts
Whenever we are chatting with peers about ABM orchestration, we always touch the personalization. For many marketers, personalization is a programmatic ad (display banner with target account's logo and person's title) and landing page.
I'm not against programmatic ads, but they are rather enhancement tactics that can be used as additional nurturing/non-sales touches, but nothing more.
The real personalization comes through running account research and matching the collected insights (goals, needs, challenges) about every target buying committee member with the content, messages, activation playbook and offer.
Today I want to cover how to align ABM with the buyer journey and personalize your program across the buyer journey.
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Matching ABM with the buyer journey
I'd skip essential parts as ICP and account list building and move right away to the topic.
I also want to make it more specific and walk you through example of selling enterprise data solutions to fintech companies.
Let's dive in.
1. Run account and the buying committee research.
Collect and analyze all publicly available information about target accounts' key initiatives and strategy.
Here are the main sources:
press releases
interviews with chief executives
roadmaps
corporate reports
earning calls
Next, research the buying committee and collect insights about how they might be involved in the key initiatives.
Here are several things you need to pay attention to:
What's their role and area of responsibility in the stated key initiative or strategy?
KPIs/OKRs
Challenges
Goals
Example.
Target account runs data workflows in Salesforce and Excel. The company solves it by hiring Salesforce administrators.
Challenges.
Incorrect and insufficient data and reporting
Lots of manual work and coding
Buying committee structure.
CEO - decision-maker
Salesforce administrator - blocker
CTO - influencer
Client managers - champions & influencers
2. Understand where they are in the buying process.
Analyze the collected insights, intent and engagement data on account's level to figure out where they might be in the buying journey.
Our example.
Salesforce administrator (Blocker) mentions on her LinkedIn profile that she works with contractors to do custom coding to solve data issues. Company has 2 more open positions for Salesforce admins.
This means that the company is already aware of Salesforce+ Excel data limitations and trying to solve them by hiring more admins and contractors. Apparently, this creates data security issues.
This company is not actively buying but might be open to learn about different ways of solving their data challenges.
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3. Match your value proposition with individual buyer needs and goals.
Write down short (I recommend one-page docs) personalized solutions for every buying committee member.
Include:
Context
How exactly your product helps to achieve their goals or solve the challenges
Relevant social proof
Here is our example.
4. Start mapping nurturing content with the current buyer journey stage and the next stages.
Here are several content ideas based on the collected insights:
Videoclip with a customer who had the same issue and sharing why it's not sufficient to hire more Salesforce admins, and that it is better to create a custom data solution.
Post showing the real cost of maintaining Salesforce + Excel setup and the mistakes made by incorrect data.
When an account engages with the previous step, start targeting them with the content that moves them down the line in the buying process.
This content might include:
Custom data solution cost vs maintaining the existing setup
Examples of custom data solutions with the ROI companies get
Case studies of switching from existing setup to custom data solutions
5. Develop distribution model to warm-up and activate target accounts.
Create a multichannel warm-up and activation program with sales.
Include:
Content hubs
Last one is extremely important.
ABM success comes when marketing and sales teams split the buying committee and do multithreaded and multichannel engagement.
Marketing -> Insiders and peers.
SDRs -> Champions and influencers.
AEs -> Decision-makers.
Obviously, if you have a small team, focus only on the key roles, but make sure marketing is also involved in engagement.
Here are several reasons why.
Validating account research insights and sharing insider information with sales
Understanding the buying committee structure
Generating intros for sales
This way we maximize chances to:
Create awareness inside target accounts
Collect new insights and validate existing ones to come up with personalized offers
Get introductions to target decision-makers or understand how to approach them.
Get our nurturing content discovered and shared in the inhouse chats
The old playbook where marketing does air cover and sales does automated outreach is over.
To generate a pipeline you need to connect and manually engage with multiple different buying committee members.
Split the roles and responsibilities.
Allocate time to do continuous meaningful engagement and relationship building.
Do regular syncs to share updates and collected insights.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with a full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.
You clearly see that you're already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We'll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.
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