The B2B business space is evolving faster than ever. The traditional approach in B2B sales and marketing — which places a little too much focus on demand generation and lead qualification — is fast becoming obsolete. Most B2B businesses are suffering from a revenue impact gap in their sales and marketing funnel. In fact, according to Forrester Research, over 99% of the B2B leads never even get converted to customers! Hence, new age marketers and salespeople are fast switching to Account Based Marketing (ABM). It is a more fine-tuned and tailored approach suited for modern marketing needs.

ABM is not just a buzzword. It’s a brilliant B2B technique where marketing and sales teams specifically target the best-fit client accounts. The two teams ultimately work together to turn them into customers. Consider the traditional approach as casting a wide net, where you have to painstakingly sort through the leads.  ABM is more like spearfishing — targeting one client at a time, with a higher chance of nailing that deal. Though it originated in the 1990s, ABM didn’t gain prominence until recently. This was partly due to B2B marketers’ fixation with demand generation.

Account Based Marketing can benefit a wide range of businesses. But it’s especially useful for mid-market companies dealing with longer sales cycles, multiple stakeholders in the decision-making process, and of course, high-value deals. If your business fits this description, you might need to integrate ABM into your marketing plan for the next quarter.

In this step-by-step guide, we'll walk you through the essential steps of getting started with Account Based Marketing. We will share the best practices of ABM, important terms to keep in mind, and also how to bolster your account based marketing on HubSpot. Though predominantly known for inbound marketing, HubSpot has recently integrated advanced ABM on their platform. These tools can cater to the specific needs of your ABM target accounts and boost engagement.

Step 1: Target Account Selection

The first step of ABM is to identify the accounts that align with your ideal customer profile (ICP). This process involves creating a list of target accounts with the potential to yield the highest return on investment. Here's how you can go about it: 

Identify and list

Identify the potential target accounts that match the best with your ICP and create a list. You can import the list into your HubSpot portal for easy tracking and organization. 

Create Tiering

Even with accounts that fit like a puzzle with your buyer persona, not all carry the same importance. So it is best to divide your target accounts into tiers based on their potential value. 

For example, high-value accounts that are the best fit for your product/service can be ranked Tier 1. These accounts should receive hyper-personalized, one-to-one ABM. Tier 2 accounts are still a good fit, but not your primary focus — they can be treated with ABM Lite. Meanwhile, Tier 3 accounts can be approached with Programmatic ABM. They are lower priority but still qualify as potential customers.

To break it down further, strategic or one-to-one ABM is the most resource-intensive process that might require months, if not years. B2B startups follow this for clients with high ROI and adequate resources to address their identifiable needs. It needs personalized communication to get your prospect’s attention and then initiate conversations.

ABM lite is deployed when sales/marketing teams identify a cluster of 5-10 target accounts with similar needs and challenges. Instead of personalizing for every person in the company, the personalization here happens on the factors of groupings. This could be based on industry, size of the company, markets served or challenges faced.

Programmatic ABM comes in handy for smaller companies with limited budgets to spend on each target account. They tend to use marketing automation tools or CRM like HubSpot to optimize the process. This approach is personalization at a bigger group level. Ideally, you should create groups of 100-200 companies, based on similar traits or problems faced. And then create targeted communication to drive engagement, catch attention, before having a conversation.

Account Scoring

Account Scoring is an effective method to prioritize your accounts. It is based on their fit with your ICP and their levels of engagement. Higher score is allotted to the accounts which are more aligned with these criteria.

One effective way of doing Account Scoring is based on aggregating Lead Scores. The count of contacts you have per account, and their engagement can be used to calculate and assign Account Scores.

You can always prioritize your outreach based on account scores. It is a holistic approach to determine the needs of every stakeholder involved with your target account. For best results, focus your efforts on those showing the highest levels of interest. 

Step 2: Identify Buying Committee

The Buying Committee signifies the stakeholders and purchase decision-makers at your client company. That is, the people behind the Target Accounts. They are the members you are planning to target through your ABM strategy. The committee can include decision-makers, influencers, budget holders, blockers, champions, legal, and even end-users. Identifying them helps you go from, “We need to engage with Acme Inc.” to “We need to engage with the Head of Finance and Head of Marketing at Acme Inc.”

Create Buying Committee Org Chart

Creating a chart can help you visualize the hierarchy and roles of individuals involved in the purchasing decision. An org chart will help you understand the dynamics in your buying committee. Afterwards, you can plan and structure your ABM outreach accordingly.

Map Buyer Personas

Different stakeholders in a buying committee have different concerns and priorities. It is best to map out the buyer personas from within the buying committee. This can include representatives from sales, finance, marketing, and executive leadership. 

Lead Scoring

Lead Scoring focuses on individuals rather than a business as a whole entity. ABM Lead Scoring helps you identify the most engaged and relevant individuals from your target business account, who can comprise a diverse group from different departments. An aggregation of Lead Scores helps you ascertain the Account Scoring. 

You can assign scores based on their interactions with your content, website visits, and engagement with your marketing materials. A stepwise approach can be useful here:

1. Accurately identify who is on the buying committee and place them into a buying group.

2. Score each member individually based on their level of engagement and interaction.

3. Calculate the average score of all the members. 

4. Check this score against a threshold, which can be set based on your internal research. If the lead scores above the threshold, you can accelerate the account further into your sales cycle. If the lead score comes below the threshold, it is often sensible to de-prioritize that particular account. 

The process of lead scoring can also be automated via HubSpot ABM using the default Score Contact property. 

Step 3: Build Account Coverage

Account coverage refers to the process of prospecting and adding contacts for a target account into your CRM or ABM tool. 

Having a comprehensive understanding of your target accounts is crucial for an effective account based marketing plan. You can expand your account coverage by:

Using Business Info Database

Tools like ZoomInfo, Apollo.io, RocketReach etc can redirect you to a centralized database. Here you can get detailed biodata and information about the key decision-makers in your target accounts, based on your Buying Committee.

This data is essential for crafting personalized messaging in your initial ABM outreach and driving faster lead responses. 

Running Lead Conversion Ads

LinkedIn is the ultimate goldmine for B2B marketers. Run targeted ads to reach decision-makers within your target accounts, keeping your brand at the centre.

Step 4: Drive Engagement

At the end of the day, engagement is the heartbeat of ABM. It's not just about reaching out. It's about setting meaningful interactions that can resonate with your target audience.

Design Persona Problem Centric Campaigns

Craft campaigns that address the pain points and challenges faced by your target clients. The content of your campaigns should offer specific solutions to their unique problems. A good way to start this is to get your Marketing and Sales teams to brainstorm on categorical challenges of a target account. This should be followed by creating a value matrix to design ABM campaigns. 

Use Tiering for Personalization

Leverage the tiering system to personalize your ABM engagement strategy even further. For instance, Tier 1 accounts deserve hyper-personalized interactions with one-on-one communication. You can craft personalized messages and content for these accounts. Dedicated case studies or success stories that resonate with their challenges is a tried and tested strategy that works wonders.

Engage with your Target Accounts

Do this through various channels, such as emails, targeted ads, social media interactions, webinars and offline events (when possible). The high value accounts must be communicated via the most important channels like personalized emails, LinkedIn DMs or in-person meetings. 

On the other hand, lower priority accounts can be engaged via thought leadership / growth hack advice, website landing pages or social media ads. 

Another great tactic for engagement with target accounts is creating dynamic website content. It is basically content that changes based on the account's tier. Though a bit technical to implement, it can yield incredible results for your ABM strategy. In this context, doing ABM on HubSpot CMS can prove to be effective. 

On HubSpot, you can create personalized landing pages. These pages will pull information from the CRM database to integrate dynamic content on the website. Also, you can insert personalization tokens to directly address your target accounts. This can be by name, company, title, and any information you have stored in your CRM.

There are ways to bolster your engagement on ABM campaigns even further. You can opt for account-specific advertising on Google, LinkedIn or Facebook for best results, using HubSpot ad extension.

Measuring Success for your ABM Strategy

The end goal of ABM is to drive engagement with the Target Accounts. These engagements should eventually lead to conversations with the right persons within the target accounts. That is, the buying committee members. If your product has merit, these conversations should eventually turn into business opportunities.

Measuring success for ABM is based on two factors, engagement and conversations. How do you engage with buyer personas in our target accounts, and how do you eventually drive conversations with them. The ultimate evidence of the success of your ABM is definitely the number of target accounts you manage to convert into happy clients. 

Once you've set up your foundational ABM workflow, you can fine-tune it further. Continue to adapt your ABM based on the complexity of your product's sales cycle. Account based marketing is a dynamic strategy that allows you to zoom in for precision or zoom out for a broader approach. That is, depending on your goals and the nature of your business. By selecting the right accounts, identifying the buying committee, building account coverage, and driving engagement, you can create meaningful interactions that lead to successful conversions. 

However, it is important to remember that ABM is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. It depends entirely on how precisely you can tailor your approach to each account's unique needs and challenges. That is an expertise you gain over time.