Starting an ABM Pilot Program

In my first post of this series I gave a brief overview of Account-based Marketing, when you might consider using the methodology in your business, and the minimum requirements for getting started without a dedicated ABM platform such as Demandbase.

This post describes the process my team and I went through when we designed and implemented our ABM pilot campaign about 18 months ago, and have improved upon for subsequent campaigns.

As you might expect, developing an account-based approach begins with identifying target accounts, be they retention or acquisition.

A systematic way to go about this is for sales and marketing to develop their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This might seem obvious, but I don’t want to skip over it because companies can have an ICP in their collective heads based on past experience and intuition, but never test it empirically to see if it’s on target.

Developing an ICP involves account segmentation, which is the first critical element for ABM. You have to have a way to narrow your list of target accounts in order to effectively deploy 1:1 or 1:few campaigns.

Selecting target accounts involves segmenting accounts along many potential axes. In the case with the company I work for, we are healthcare-specific so we don’t need to segment by industry. We  started with segmentation of current accounts based on data related to current spend, number of service lines used, and size of the hospital system. From there we further segmented by common pain points and who is in market based on the intent we’re seeing.

Identifying current accounts is a little more straightforward than selecting the right target acquisition accounts, in my experience. The biggest factors are which accounts are up for renewal in the next year or so and which may be at risk. This is where intent data can alert you to any clients who are perusing competitors’ sites or considering solutions you have but have not yet sold in. This type of information can also help you determine if what a client is looking for matches what account management thinks the best cross-sell opportunities are. (Hint: Many times the information doesn’t match up.)

Once target accounts have been identified, the next step is to understand their pain points, makeup of their buying committee and the key personas contained within, and what buying stage they’re at. You can glean target acquisition accounts’ pain points through talking with your sales team, looking at account and opportunity information in Salesforce, or account plans from the account management team. From there, marketing can supply content that answers the prospect’s needs and moves them down the funnel.

Buying Committees and Personas

I look at ABM primarily from a B2B perspective, because that’s the world I’m in. Anyone who sells expensive and/or complex products or services knows that they have to sell to a committee, the size of which can range up to thirteen or more stakeholders.

What does this mean for leads and lead generation for ABM? For one thing, a single lead, while nice, won’t suffice. One person isn’t buying your solution, so you can’t nurture that one lead and expect to get anywhere. You need to start piecing together who makes up the buying committee via account-level intent data, which programs such as ZoomInfo provide. Through a combination of that 3rd party data married to the 1st party data from your site and sales intelligence, you can put together an educated guess as who is researching a topic or looking at your company.

This is where Account-based Marketing is in some ways a misnomer, because you’re not marketing to a company, you’re marketing to a buying group for a specific opportunity. So it really should be called OBM – Opportunity-based Marketing!

OK, so you have a good feel for the buying group for your opportunity. Now it’s time to use or develop buyer personas.

Developing a good buyer persona is a whole topic unto itself. For now, I’ll just say that I’ve found the most actionable personas to be a combination of head and heart; in other words, you need concrete information such as what the person is responsible for, who they interface with, and their motivations for purchasing, or not purchasing, your solution. You also can benefit from knowing a little about what they are personally seeking that purchasing your solution could impact. I’ve never found B2B personas based mostly on psychographics to be particularly useful, you know, like “Betty drives a 2021 Lexus SUV and enjoys painting in her spare time…”

Client interviews can supply you with a wealth of information for persona development. If you can get in front of decision-makers who are not your clients, so much the better. We gleaned some useful insights by having an outside consultant, Adam Turinas, conduct interviews rather than using someone from AMN. Our clients felt a little freer to talk, I think, and provided insights that I don’t know if we would have gotten on our own.

Intent data

Intent data is the second critical element of an ABM approach, in addition to segmentation. Intent data enables you to know which accounts are in market for what solution, and is a way to focus the sales effort. Intent data is driven by keywords your clients and prospects use to search for your types of solutions. You can obtain this data through companies such as ZoomInfo and Bombora. While these platforms aren’t free, they’re a lot less expensive than a full-fledged ABM platform.

Intent data is driven by keywords, so it’s worth the time and effort to identify a good set, based on keyword research or Google Ads data. ZoomInfo has pre-determined categories with keywords you can select from. Your success with this approach depends on what you’re selling. If you have a niche product it can be hard to match up with exactly the right keyword.

You can set up account lists in these types of tools, which is what you’ll want to do with an ABM approach. Intent providers will tell you which accounts are searching for which keyword, and the intensity of that search. Their intensity measure is based, among other things, on how many people from your target account’s IP address searched in a specific time period.

Intent providers usually have a database of contact information, so you can start to glean who key players are and who is likely to be searching.

A way to get started is to develop a matrix of personas and buying stages for each major pain point and associated solution you offer. This way you can identify gaps that need to be filled at the upper, middle, or lower stages of the funnel.

We started by honing in on two pain points that the majority of healthcare systems are experiencing: The need to control labor costs and the need for revenue to recover from the pandemic. We then developed content in various formats: White papers, ebooks, infographics, and videos. We produced a bank of ads for our chosen media channels, again to address pain points.

Media selection

Just as your content needs to address your customers’ needs, you need to show up where your customers are.

My team and I have been experimenting with various types of targeted LinkedIn campaigns and programmatic display advertising. LinkedIn has provided a small number of qualified leads, and programmatic has significantly boosted our page views among our target accounts.

We have also tested sponsored content through healthcare media and professional organizations. We’ve seen good results when we use programs that guarantee a certain number of leads from our specific target accounts.

Tracking results

This is where your CRM is your friend.

If your landing pages are connected to Salesforce, for example, then the leads from form fills should flow directly in with the lead origin designated. You can set up reports to track progression from “raw” lead to MQL to SAL. It’s a good idea to establish a close working relationship with your Business Development Rep (BDR); they can help keep track of where leads are in the system.

We do track leading indicators, which some people call vanity metrics. However, we don’t report those to leadership, they are used by my team as measures of campaign effectiveness while it’s in flight. Among the data we track are:

How much credit should marketing receive for a sale? I can’t say we’ve found the formula yet, but in one instance this year a senior leader of a healthcare system on our TAL downloaded a white paper from our ABM campaign. A few months later we won the business. Even if someone claimed that marketing only contributed 1% to the sale, we have an ROI of many multiples.

The lesson is this: You can stand up an effective account-based program by paying attention to these areas covered above. And without an ABM platform!

In future posts, I’ll cover the different types of ABM campaigns and content marketing for ABM.