“The alignment between marketing, leadership, sales and client experience teams is one of the biggest differentiators between account-based marketing strategies and traditional marketing campaigns,” Michelle Boytano, senior manager of account-based marketing at Movable Ink, said.
Boytano has been leading ABM efforts at the visual experience platform for the last year and a half. In that time, she’s learned that cross-team collaboration is key to facilitating an effective ABM strategy. In fact, companies with well-aligned marketing and sales departments have 36 percent higher customer retention rates and achieved 38 percent higher sales win rates, according to research from MarketingProfs.
The multi-department ABM effort at Movable Ink begins their marketing strategies with a planning and research phase. Teams discuss a targeted account’s biggest challenges and how their platform can solve them. Then, the team creates detailed profiles of key contacts within the target organization; even a contact’s alma mater is useful intel. Boytano said her team focuses on crafting multi-channel, personalized messages to contacts based on the information in their profile, and learned through trial and error that traditional mail is a fruitful outreach tactic.
But their methodology could always change.
“ABM is still a fairly new strategy, so our team is constantly learning and iterating our process,” Boytano said.
How do you go about identifying the key influencers on a strategic account?
For both prospects and clients, our sales and client experience teams complete detailed account plans, which include an org chart that maps out people we know, people we want to know, our product champions and decision-makers. These plans help the team create hypotheses around the account’s biggest challenges and how Movable Ink can help to address them.
Account plans are reviewed with marketing at the onset of putting together an ABM playbook for our target accounts. Our teams collaborate on the best path to engage each contact at the organization with highly personalized messaging. A lot of work goes into first-party research. Marketing builds profiles for each individual stakeholder that include details like where a contact went to college, mutual connections with people in our organization and noting important life events like a promotion. All of this information paints a picture of who we are trying to engage with. It allows both sales and marketing to be laser-focused in tailoring outreach to the right people and with the right message.
Don’t wait until your ABM plans are perfect; just get started.”
How do you tailor ABM efforts to ensure your message connects with decision-makers?
Once we’ve mapped the profiles of key stakeholders on an individual account, we put together playbooks of multi-channel, personalized touchpoints. We’ve created a menu of tactics to choose from, which include a variety of channels such as content, social media, direct mail and video. Marketing then collaborates with the sales and client experience teams to build an outreach cadence to ensure touchpoints are persistent to increase engagement. Each tactic maps back to the hypotheses and value drivers we identified in the initial account plan.
The tactics menu has enabled us to be creative with our outreach. One channel that works well for us is direct mail. It’s a physical touchpoint that breaks through the clutter of the many digital ones an individual receives each day. We like to use direct mail in combination with other tactics, like following up with relevant content or an invite to a webinar.
What are the most important lessons you’ve learned from your ABM efforts?
Leadership support makes all the difference. The alignment between marketing, leadership, sales and client experience teams is one of the biggest differentiators between account-based marketing strategies and traditional marketing campaigns.
Don’t wait until your ABM plans are perfect; just get started. Celebrate small wins and share everything with the wider organization to generate excitement about the program.
Be flexible. In the age of COVID-19, we’ve had to reconfigure our plans and create new programs quickly to adapt to the current events. Having a good relationship with sales and client experience teams has made this transition easier to ensure that these teams are supported.
