Table of contents
Your prospects’ attention is diluted by your incessant emails, your competitors’ sequences, and often the latter’s lack of relevance or timing.
The work of your sales and marketing teams becomes increasingly difficult, which can lead to exhaustion, loss of confidence, and a drop in collective performance.
But how can you survive with outbound when you’re convinced it’s the most relevant channel, you’re still getting decent results, and you want to keep the power and ROI of cold outreach?
By the end of this article, you’ll be able to implement an ABM strategy in your company with the right mix of theory and execution. On today’s menu:
What is account-based marketing?
Account-based marketing is the shift from a massive “prospects” approach to an “account” or “industry” approach ⇒ Instead of sending campaigns to thousands and thousands of prospects, we’ll choose x companies (aka “the accounts”) to reach in the quarter. As the name suggests, this is precisely “account-based marketing”.
Expert Tip 🧠
The prerequisites of an ABM strategy:
- Create a list of companies you want to target in a given quarter
- Understand how these companies operate and who the decision-makers are
- Be able to create targeted marketing for each company
- Create specific pitches for each bread of each company
- Be able to create dedicated sequences for each company
- Be present at as many points of contact as possible, with as many people as possible, and use different channels for each company.
- Have at least one person in sales and one in marketing.
What are the advantages of ABM?
- Get maximum data on accounts and prospects => Imagine knowing everything about those you’re going to address: the latest news, the ROI of every euro in their marketing budget, their entire technical stack, and most importantly: the composition, hierarchy, and decision-making cycle of their team.
- Merge Outbound & Inbound efforts ⇒ Offer high value-added content specifically for prospects (video, study, use case, personalized demo…) ⇒ Set up a nurturing process
- Align Sales & Marketing teams => The major challenge of Account Based Marketing is to ensure that the Sales team can convey their needs to Marketing as much as possible and that Marketing can create content.
- And of course, to considerably increase the response rate and the number of appointments generated, since the messages and sequences will be virtually written for this list of prospects.
Now that we’ve got most of the theory out of the way, let’s get down to business. Let’s go!
How do you create your ABM strategy?
Step 1: Account identification (targeting):
A little theory – targeting in ABM – Targeting is the key to the success of your campaigns. You need to identify 2 things before you start writing your ABM campaigns:
1️⃣IAP: Ideal Account Profile
2️⃣ICP: Ideal Customer Profile
These are better known as “personas”, with a slight difference: forget about “Hélène, 34 years old, CSP who goes shopping at Naturalia”, and instead use the data available to create your IAPs and ICPs.
1️⃣For IAP, we’ll look for signals that show this company is a qualified prospect.
- Static” signals: sales, number of employees, location of head office, whether the company is international or not, etc
- Dynamic” signals: everything that’s happened in the life of the company over a defined period of time (the last 6 months, for example, in B2B): it’s been present at a trade show, it’s raised funds, it’s received an award, it’s massively recruited certain types of profiles, it’s published certain job descriptions, it’s recently changed its CRM tool… and so on.
We’ll find this on Linkedin Sales Navigator, but also on the company’s LinkedIn page, and on Google News, thanks to Google’s Boolean operators…etc.
2️⃣For the ICP, we’re going to look for a perimeter and a decision-making capacity in our prospect. Here, it’s the same thing:
- Static signals: job title, number of years of experience in career, number of years of experience in company, years of experience in current position,
- Dynamic signals: Did she just get a promotion, what does she put in her job description, what does she post on Linkedin or interact with, what are her interests.
We’ll find this out on Linkedin Sales Navigator, but also on the prospect’s LinkedIn page, on Google News, on Webmii
Disclaimer⚠️
**It’s also important to remember that in account-based marketing, as in all other forms of marketing, there isn’t just one decision-maker in the company. Different levels of decision-making need to be taken into account, but we’ll talk more about this in the account mapping section below.
3️⃣. Example of La Briqueterie:
La Briqueterie is an agency that offers Growth & Outbound strategy services (outreach automation, creation of email campaigns, automated LinkedIn campaigns, and training for sales and marketing teams) for companies.
Expert Tip 🧠
Our IAP
Software publishers with:
- 10 to 50 employees,
- who offer a B2B service,
- make at least 1M in sales or have raised at least 1M in the last 2 years, have at least 2 people in marketing and 3 people in sales.
Our ICP
Member of the management team responsible for the Growth / Sales / Marketing aspect of the company. Between 10 and 50 employees, it’s often one of the company’s partners who decide. The C-levels (in this case management / marketing or sales respo) may be the mission bearers, but they are rarely the final decision-makers. Operational staff, who will be implementing the tools and are in the field on a daily basis, will often be the instigators/requestors in this case.
That’s not to say we can’t work with others, but this is our core target: it’s where we’ve had the best quality/performance/budget ratio for 4 years.
It’s where we have all our sales arguments, our most relevant use cases, customers who can speak for us, campaign examples galore, good results, and credibility.
So we know that our closing rate will be much higher and that we’ll make the difference in the event of a tender or competition because we’ve specialized in this field
Step 2: How do I find my IAP and ICP?
A little exercise for you; following the theory above, define :
1) Your IAP, which must contain at least :
- 3 static data
- 1 dynamic data
2) Your ICP, with the same data.
Ask yourself the questions and dig deeper:
- Which are the companies for which I could be most relevant?
- Why?
- In these companies, who should be my contact(s)?
How to find data on your KPIs and PAIs – LinkedIn Sales Navigator :
Screen caption:
Sales Navigator is the tool of choice for ultra-qualitative prospect and account targeting. The Sales Navigator home page is divided into 4 sections:
1️⃣ & 2️⃣ – Access to the database of prospects and accounts: this is where you can have fun with the battery of filters at your disposal to target your IAP & ICP.
3️⃣. Alerts: Sales Navigator features an intelligent news engine, allowing you to monitor the latest alerts on your accounts & prospects: recruitment, job changes, news…etc.
4️⃣. Customer portfolio: you can enter your existing customers and benefit from two considerable advantages;
- exclude your existing accounts from the IAP search to avoid having them listed again
- follow the news of your existing accounts to seek a possible upsell if signals are promising
5️⃣. Personas: this feature is still in its infancy, but it’s very promising. You give it information about your personas, and it identifies prospects for you to go after. When you’re on a company page, you can also ask it to display the personas that correspond to you, in that company only.
6️⃣. Priority accounts: here we return to the principle of the ABM strategy, having a few accounts that interest you and that you monitor on a daily basis in addition to your prospecting sequences.
Expert Tip 🧠
Bear in mind that LinkedIn’s aim here is to feed you the highest-quality information so that you can generate business. So the more information you give it, the more it will be able to push your accounts, prospects & news relevant to your prospecting. Sales Navigator’s vision is also to act as a pre-CRM, and we’ll see later that you can add notes on accounts or prospects, log tasks or calls…etc.
Step 3: Perform your first Sales Navigator account search:
1️⃣ Account search:
Go to the account search engine and you’ll find a range of filters for the companies you’re targeting.
There are different types of filters that can be included, excluded and combined:
💡 Important account filters:
- Annual revenue
- Number of employees
- Growth in the number of employees
- Head office location
- Industry
- Number of LinkedIn page followers
- Number of employees in a region
- Growth in the number of employees in a region
- Technologies used
On top of these filters, we can add keywords to include or exclude, which will refine our search. Keywords will search for occurrences that appear anywhere in the profile (description, posts), whereas filters will search only for what the company has entered in its information (size, employees)
Example: La Briqueterie
1️⃣. Number of employees: 11 to 50 ⇒ beyond that, the decision cycle is too important and too long for us.
2️⃣. The company’s location: Marseille ⇒ This simplifies exchanges for us, it creates a bond of proximity and as we distill training into our programs, we’ll be able to do them in person, which is a real advantage for customers.
3️⃣. The industry: Software Development ⇒ “Software Development” & “Internet” are the two categories that list tech startups on Linkedin. There’s no secret to finding your own: LinkedIn has its own way of categorizing, so you’ll just have to poke around.
4️⃣. Number of employees in the department ⇒ Here I’ve chosen to target companies with at least 3 people in sales. This information guarantees that the company is willing to develop the business and invest in it. It also shows that there’s a team in place, processes, and therefore things to improve 😉
5️⃣. Growth in the number of employees in the department ⇒ Here I’ve chosen to target companies that have seen their Marketing team grow by 30% YoY (year on year, the situation from last year to today)
6️⃣. Choosing keywords ⇒ “Software Development” is a category that includes both IT development agencies and software publishers. I also asked Sales Navigator to pull out only those companies that contained “B2B”, “SAAS”, “Software”, or “program”, etc. in the description.
The result: only one company. A small market, you might ask? In reality, I have a single, perfectly calibrated company that I can select and work with in my ABM strategy.
Once we’ve found the companies that match our needs, we select them and add them to a list of accounts:
Step 4: Search for prospects matching the account
Now that we’ve got the companies we like, it’s time to find the people to contact within them. Follow this tutorial to find out how:
1- In Sales Navigator, go to “Prospect Search”
2- Go to the “Account List” filter
3- You’ll find the list of accounts you saved earlier, select it by pressing “Include”
4- And there’s the magic: all the prospects from the companies you’ve selected will appear.
5- Now it’s time to repeat the filter operation, but this time on the prospects.
Here I’ll use only “marketing” & “sales” to see the interesting profiles appear.
6- Once you’re happy with your filter combination, save your prospects by clicking on the “Save” button in a list with the same name as your account list.
7- You can access all your prospect lists as follows:
Step 5: Mapping accounts
Now that you’ve selected the prospects that correspond to the account, your whole team needs to have a clear view of how the account is composed, so they know which actions to take on whom. To map an account, here’s what you need to do:
1- In the Sales Navigator home interface, go to “Accounts”
2- Go to the relevant account list
3- Click on the account you’re interested in.
4- Scroll to the bottom of the page. You’ll see an option called “Relationship Map”
here you can map the account. In other words, you can drag and drop the leads you’ve previously registered and define a hierarchy. You can also tag the account’s prospects with 5 levels of information:
- Decision Maker
- Champion
- Evaluator
- Procurement
- Influencer
5- On the left-hand panel, you can add prospects to this cartography
6- And assign them a role
7- Then have fun dragging and dropping prospects below/above the others to map your account.
Are you beginning to understand where I’m getting at? 😌
Final result for La Briqueterie:
Remember to differentiate the role of each mapped person:
- Influencer
- Procurement
- Evaluator
- Champion
- Decision Maker
Step 6: Launch your first ABM campaign with La Growth Machine
Go to https://app.lagrowthmachine.com/campaigns and create your account.
You’ll arrive at the LaGrowthMachine interface.
1- Click on “Leads” in the panel on the left.
2- Here you’ll find all your leads from all your campaigns. To create a new audience, click “New Audience” in the top right-hand corner.
3- Enter a name and description for your audience.
It’s quite important to find a common nomenclature for your audiences, so you can find your way around later.
4- Once you’ve created your audience, it’s obviously empty. Click on “Import Leads” in the top right-hand corner
5- A window opens with two choices: either import leads directly from LinkedIn or import from a CSV.
Note that LaGrowthMachine now offers automatic lead enrichment in all its paid plans. So you can choose to import LinkedIn and LGM will fetch the emails for you.
On the other hand, the quality of the emails and the rate of emails found will always be lower than if you carry out all the steps manually, as they are based on DropContact, an inexpensive data enrichment tool of lower quality than Datagma, for example. But that’s for advanced users 😉
6- To sum up:
Final result: 1 campaign per hierarchical stratum 1 audience per hierarchy: You’ll need to create as many campaigns & audiences as decision-maker types.
Conclusion :
Sales Navigator and La Growth Machine are two infinitely powerful tools for implementing an Account-Based Marketing strategy.
If you target your accounts precisely and deliver well-crafted marketing to them, the appointments should start pouring in from now on.
Enjoy your visit and see you soon for a new article
Written by
Comments