Earthling Interactive business and marketing technology groups integrate websites, web applications, eCommerce, CRM, and digital marketing to ensure your money is well spent and gives high value to your customers.
Account Based Marketing is not an entirely new concept. Salespeople often try to land customers that will buy the most from their business. However, with Account Based Marketing, or ABM, the process of selling to those accounts is more intentional, involves more people, and using technology as the link for each stage of the process to both plan and measure success.
What does Account Based Marketing mean and why is it important?
Let’s start at the beginning, what is Account Based Marketing, and why is it important to a company’s bottom line? Account Based Marketing is a sales technique that involves Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service teams working together to get customers and improve profitability for the company from key customers.
The ABM Process:
- Develop a target account list.
Identify a small number of accounts with high revenue potential that are most likely to buy from your company and the people on the buying committee.
- Engage buyers everywhere they are.
Sales and marketing should work together to develop an omnichannel campaign that may include advertising, content strategy, social media, and networking that specifically is aimed at the buyers for the targeted accounts.
- Deliver connected engagements.
Marketing’s data can inform sales at each step of their engagement level with the campaign and include other data from other sources such as customer service to decide whether current steps are working or if a change is needed.
- Grow customer relationships.
The role of customer service grows to feed the sales engine with marketing and sales to expand the relationship with the customer.
Following this pattern gives a higher Return on Time (ROT) by finding the most profitable clients as well as a better ROI on marketing dollars by targeting specific people and companies rather than industries and leading to increased profitability by lowering costs and increasing sales.
Earthling Interactive – your technical ABM partner
Essential to implementing ABM is communication and coordination between three groups: Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service. The key part to that communication and coordinating the groups is technology. Earthling Interactive’s model of a successful technical ABM implementation stack may use separate platforms with integrations for the three groups, but in most cases a single platform or vendor such as
Salesforce,
HubSpot or
SharpSpring provides a complete solution for all three.
To get started, Earthling Interactive will work with your Sales team to identify the targeted accounts. Making sure they are entered into your CRM correctly, and mail synchronization is working correctly to capture sales activities are important to making the next steps work.
Next, our staff will coordinate your Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service teams to ensure that the same accounts and opportunities are accessible and feeding the CRM correctly. For marketing activity, this will show the impact that campaigns by the prospect and tie the campaigns to the close of the sale.
Before campaigns start running, Earthling Interactive will also collect and implement requirements around customer service, marketing and notifications. If a potential sales account has an issue and it is tracked by the customer service team in the integrated platform, marketing automation rules can be set up to stop marketing being viewed by that prospect avoiding possible embarrassment for the company, the prospect’s feelings that could be a setback to landing the customer, and ensuring that money isn’t spent that may be wasted by showing them the ad while a case is open. Sales can also be notified to address and follow up with the prospect when they are notified of an issue.
The last step before starting the sales/marketing ABM cycle again is assessment. How will the company know who Sales should continue to pursue or what efforts are working to land those accounts? Earthling Interactive’s team will work with the stakeholders to create reports and dashboards, as well as supply analysis and consultations based on that analysis to plan and improve the next phase of the ABM plan.
