5-step Guide To Building an MVP version of Account-Based Marketing
I am sure you have heard of this new kid on the marketing block that goes by the name of Account-Based Marketing a.k.a. ABM. If you haven’t, here’s a skinny on it.
ABM is essentially an alternate strategy that suggests that sales and marketing teams need to work together on clearly defining the accounts (businesses) and the respective personalized campaigns for those accounts; instead of working in silos. So everything starts with identifying the key business accounts and then expanding further.
There’s a lot of different ways to implement it and we chose to prove it out first via an MVP version and it transformed our sales and marketing process. It’s called account-based marketing but it really is an account-based GTM approach.
At LimeLight we’ve been blessed with a good industry reputation and strong connections that have enabled us to close deals and grow accounts. But personal relationships and reputation don’t scale — especially when you want to expand to new verticals.
It’s a classic growth problem — how do you build a scalable marketing and sales engine?
Before buying into one of the many, expensive and elaborate platforms, I suggest a 5-step approach to test out the ABM model based on how we did it.
1. Building an Internal [GROWTH] Team
Don’t rollout ABM strategy across the board. Find a small, yet powerful growth team that can champion it. There will be a lot of learnings that this team will discover that can later be instilled in the full team when you scale with ABM. We built a lean growth team with complete ownership of the ABM program. Consolidating learnings and quick iteration was essential for us.
- Marketing Team: Content and Demand-gen Marketer
- Sales Team: Sales Lead, Solution Engineer
Our team met weekly to share learnings and discuss what was working and what was not.
2. Defining & Research Target Accounts
This is the most crucial part of the process for any ABM program. ALL your ABM activities flow from your target accounts — and often sales and marketing disagree on what makes a good prospect.
In our case, we had a strong interest in our platform from several prospects all in a specific new vertical. We decided to focus on that vertical and then used a variety of competitive analysis tools (like BuiltWith and AdBeat) to narrow our focus to accounts where we offered the most value.
We also took the extra step of sourcing role-based contact lists for our target accounts to focus our efforts. There are tools like Navigator, Datanyze, and a few chrome plugins (crystal, dux soup) to get the information on these accounts to personalize the outreaches.
So as you define your target accounts, think ahead to the type of segmentation that will help you personalize your marketing and sales process and make sure you conduct that research early. You should spend a good amount of time on this research so your outreach is personalized and gets a favorable response. In our case, it was 90% response rate. Crazy, I know!
3. Getting Alignment on Goals
For us, goals and measurement were critical components of ABM. We wanted to know WHY our tactics did or didn’t work to ensure that we could transfer our learnings to future programs.
We created a defined list of metrics mapped to our ABM funnel. Each metric had an owner from our team who was responsible for improvement and learnings.
“Getting sales and marketing aligned around common goals is a common pain point for many ABM programs.”
For us, marketers had to fight to convince sales that they were no longer responsible for a standard metric like the total number of qualified leads. Instead, marketers were responsible for funnel progress towards a certain stage, which was driven by content creation and delivery to accounts.
4. True Value (offer) for the Target Accounts
This is where ABM gets really exciting for a marketer. A defined list of accounts and roles meant that we were able to build true prospect-specific offers.
Instead of generating leads, our goal was to get meetings or calls for our sales rep: so we built a FREE eCommerce conversion audit specific to each account that we used as the hook. This is a lot of pre-work but it’s such an incredible offer (sample custom eCommerce audit) that it’s hard to resist. Our response rates were ~ 90%. This could be tough to scale unless you can find a way to replicate the skill-set and process. But if we are talking about 50–100 new accounts as a goal, this is doable.
We also created a wide variety of conversion and brand content to use to fuel our retargeting engine.
5. Delivery Channels
Roles and buyer personas should define your delivery channels, but for us, the most important criteria were good retargeting capabilities: we wanted to get our message in front of our target accounts as much as possible to keep top of mind.
Here is a template to create buyer personas
Here’s What We Learned
What we learned from our ABM program was far more than which marketing and sales tactics are successful at scale (though we certainly learned that — along with which ones are not).
To us, the most important part of ABM was Sales and Marketing teams working together (this is that God Bless ABM moment …) with the discipline of:
- Identifying a core set of target priorities and an attractive offer
- Creating a cross-functional SWAT team oriented towards those priorities
- Unleashing them to build solutions around them
- Regularly measuring and communicating results
We’re excited to apply this process to other growth areas around other departments like Client Success, Support, and even Engineering.
So, can you run ABM without a dedicated platform?
Yes, you can definitely run an MVP program without a dedicated ABM platform and while that should be a start, I’d suggest using one of many tools out there when you are ready to scale. There’s a lot of value in ABM platforms like DemandBase, Engagio, Terminus, RollWorks for mature programs.
We wanted to run a lean MVP to prove the concept and didn’t want to evaluate and pay for a dedicated ABM tool. By defining our target audiences very selectively, building an intentionally short funnel, and having a dedicated team running the project, we didn’t need the advantages (identifying new audiences, real-time intent signaling, data consolidation) of a full-fledged ABM platform.
Now we are ready! We’re conducting research on various platforms as we plan to scale up our program.
Hint .. all you ABM SDRs out there :)
