In this blog post we’ll show you how to create target account lists for your ABM campaign.
ABM is worth it
If account-based marketing (ABM) were easy, everyone would be doing it. The truth of the matter is that ABM takes a lot more work than a plug and play marketing strategy.
But, if you can get past the initial pain points, account-based marketing has been shown to bring some worthwhile results for B2B marketers. According to a survey by Sirius Decisions, 92% of marketers consider ABM to be extremely or very important to their marketing efforts.
Why ABM is harder in the beginning
The difference between account-based marketing and lead-based marketing is that it takes a lot more work from the marketing team up front. In a lead-based strategy, the marketing team creates content that is helpful and interesting to your audience and collects the reader’s information to hand off to sales. After this, marketing takes a supportive role and sales begins working those leads.
In an account-based strategy, however, sales and marketing need to work together a lot more in the beginning. Rather than gathering a ton of contacts and then handing them off to sales to qualify, marketing now needs to do a lot more to qualify contacts themselves. This is what most people refer to as “sales and marketing alignment.”
“Sales and marketing alignment” is a fancy word for a pretty simple process where sales and marketing sit down to figure out who they want to target with their account-based programs. But, as anyone who has worked in sales or marketing knows, it can be very hard to get these two teams to work together.
Process is the key to a successful ABM program
Since this is an inherently difficult process, it’s important to structure the discussion to make the best use of everyone’s time. Working with Econsultancy, we’ve created a series of checklists to help navigate the messy process of setting up your account-based marketing program.
Below is our checklist for determining your target account list. Using this as a starting point, you can work with your sales and marketing leadership to devise an actionable plan for starting or improving your ABM strategy.
Once you’ve gone through the checklist, we recommend building out a Customer Journey Mapping Canvas to get crystal clear about exactly who you’ll target with your ABM campaigns.
ABM isn’t just about knowing which companies to target, but about which decision makers at those accounts to engage, and how to engage them. – Scott Vaughan, CMO, Integrate
Next Steps
If you’re serious about doing ABM right, but you’re not sure where to start, you can schedule a free demo with an ABM specialist who can answer your questions.
Not ready to talk to sales? Be sure to head over and watch our recent webinar with TOPO discussing how to build and prioritize a target account list
About the Author
More Content by Jesse Miller, Head of Digital
