Editor’s Note: Account Based Marketing (ABM) vs Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) selections from this post appeared in Account-Based Marketing For Dummies
Account-Based Marketing & Account-Based Sales Development
Account-based marketing. Account-based sales development. What does this all mean? If you work in the B2B world, you’ve probably heard these buzzwords at least once in the past year. The question our entire industry seems to have is how does your organization actually do account-based marketing and sales?
To take an account-based approach requires flipping the traditional B2B sales funnel on its head. A statistic from Forrester Research shows that less than 1% of leads generated ever become customers. This means that B2B marketing and sales teams who do traditional lead gen are wasting 99% of their time, energy, and resources engaging people who will never pay your company a single penny. There’s clearly something broken with this model.
For too long in the B2B world, marketing has been focused on lead generation to provide sales with tons of leads. Well, salespeople aren’t called “lead executives”. Salespeople are called account executives because they close accounts, so why aren’t marketers supporting their account executives by taking a more account-based marketing approach?
In fact, we don’t even call the people responsible for answering inbound and outbound leads “lead executives”. These people are business or sales development representatives (BDRs or SDRs) depending on your company. Marketers shouldn’t want to give random leads that came in from your website to an account executive whose mission is to close new deals and grow revenue.
Account-based Marketing and Sales Development Align Sales and Marketing as One “Smarketing” Team
The importance of bringing your sales and marketing teams together to create one “smarketing” team cannot be understated. Working in tandem, B2B “smarketing” teams can do both account-based marketing and account-based sales development with one consistent message that will improve the buyer’s journey. This requires a coordinated effort from all parties involved.
Now, as a unified “smarketing” team, marketing and sales work collaboratively to create content and do activities for the target list of accounts. Marketing takes more ownership of accounts which leads to revenue. Account-based marketing and sales development is a process for which the #FlipMyFunnel model can be used.
Identify
With the account-based marketing funnel, you’re starting the sales process by identifying a single person in an account. You target your best-fit lead and create a contact. This contact is potentially a good fit for your business. You determine if they are a good fit using a set of criteria. This set of criteria aligns with a “persona” or your “ideal customer profile”. Once you have determined this contact meets your ideal customer profile, you begin the process of turning the contact into a full account.
Expand
Here is where it gets interesting. For account-based sales development, BDRs and SDRs should be expanding an account profile with at least three (3) contacts. According to CEB, the average B2B decision-making group includes 5.4 buyers. These buyers should match the personas you’ve created — working with your executive team stakeholders in marketing, sales and customer success — to understand the type of customers who are the best-fit for your product or service.
Engage
Engagement is the name of the game in the third stage of the #FlipMyFunnel ABM model. This is where your content and channels come to life. This stage is by far the broadest since there are so many ways to engage with your contacts in a target account. Successful ABM engagement plans incorporate multiple channels (email, display advertising, sales reach out, etc.) that all work together with the same relevant message. This creates more energy, or pipeline velocity, to help close the deal faster.
Advocate
The final stage of account-marketing is Advocate. This is when your accounts become customers, and then your new goal is to turn your customers into raving fans of your business. This is called creating customer advocates. Customer word-of-mouth marketing through referrals, reviews, and talking to their peers is the most organic and impactful type of marketing.
In traditional B2B marketing, there’s a lack of alignment between the marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Taking an account-based approach means continuing your marketing efforts beyond the buyer journey throughout the entire customer lifecycle to retain (or increase) revenue from your client base.
How KiteDesk works for Account-Based Sales Development
One of the great things about pursuing ABSD is the purity of purpose. The focus of your Sales Development team is uniform and consistent, geared towards the outcome of setting qualified meetings for account executives.
KiteDesk enhances this purity of purpose with a unified software application that encompasses lead generation, lead routing and assignment, and the ability to build lead lists. KiteDesk users can then work those leads through email, phone, calendar, and even custom steps.
The software backs up the unified approach with a ToDo queue guiding SDRs through each activity– there’s no wasted time wondering what to do next.
Finally, there are event-driven analytics that infors reps, teams, and managers what’s working– from lists to tactics. By working in KiteDesk, your team starts to build pipeline in a predictable manner. Before long, you have a consistent, repeatable, orchestrated sales development process.
Using ABM and ABSD Together
When it comes to melding your account-based marketing efforts with your sales development efforts, the best place to start is at the start! The team at KiteDesk uses Terminus to deliver advertising messages to each of the accounts being targeted by the sales development team.
KiteDesk sees the power in exposing target contacts to brand messaging ahead of any sales outreach. By providing marketing air cover, KiteDesk can jump start the awareness gap.
You know the stats that say a person needs to be exposed to your ad seven times in order to create an impression? Well, this axiom is taken to be true by most marketers, and our belief is that familiarity matters when it comes to outbound communications.
Let’s face it, BDRs and SDRs have a hard job. Opening conversations with strangers isn’t easy. But the rewards of pinpointing which conversations to open, which accounts to target, which pipeline to build is worth the effort. And puts control back in the hands of the business.
KiteDesk also uses Terminus advertising throughout the lifecycle of the engagement (aka pipeline stages). By exposing prospects to different brand messages throughout the buyer’s journey, the KiteDesk brand stays top of mind. And KiteDesk is able to expose different aspects of its brand to those prospects through digital channels that enhance the sales executives own communication (and effectiveness).
It’s worth noting that advertising is also useful to bring the brand messaging to multiple members of a diverse buying group within any account. Executing a consensus sale– which is most B2B purchasing these days– is hard enough for a single account executive. At KiteDesk, we believe marketing is obligated to provide additional support throughout the sales cycle.
To Get Started with Account-Based Marketing & Sales Development
Form that “smarketing” team! Get a regular meeting cadence with marketing and sales leaders to better understand what’s going on with each of your target accounts. What are the pain points of these specific accounts? Which decision-makers are you trying to reach? What message will resonate best with these buyers? This gives sales and marketing the opportunity to dive even deeper to really understand the motivations, pain points, and demographics of each account.
Want to learn more? Account-Based Marketing and Account-Based Sales Development Resources
The Account-Based Sales & Marketing Movement (Sales 101 Series)
Terminus ABM 101 ebook
TOPO on Account-Based Sales Development
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