ABM Best Practices: Pipeline Acceleration with ABM
Leveraging account based marketing for pipeline acceleration – speeding up your sales cycle – helps your business in several ways.
You generate more revenue which makes your whole team happy. Your marketing gurus smile because they have fewer late nights writing the -nth direct mailer or capabilities deck. And your salesperson can cut back on time dedicated to follow-up lunches (unless Owen Wilson and/or tacos are involved).
But beyond the clear benefit of revenue, accelerating the buyer’s journey also builds your reputation as a competent organization that can complete a sale with little or no friction.
To illustrate the effects of sales speed, think about a car wash. For the carwash owner, getting the cars through quickly and efficiently means faster cash. For drivers, the goal is a clean car with a minimal investment of time.
Imagine for a moment the patron who, after reaching the head of the line, decides to talk with the car wash attendants. This potential customer with the dirty SUV asks about underbody washes, discount coupons, the type of brushes and soap used, and the softer drying towels used by the competitor down the street.
At the end of the conversation, this ‘qualified lead’ decides to delay driving into the car wash. The car wash attendants are frustrated. The car wash owner takes a shot of antacid for the stress. And every patron waiting in line behind the vacillator squirms and mutters, wondering why the owner doesn’t move the slowpoke aside and let interested customers get the car wash they want. A few drivers pull out of line and head down the street to the competitor with the soft towels.
It’s a tough situation for all involved.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) can align sales activity with potential customer’s needs, helping close the sale with those ready to buy and guide others who may be on a slower trek to a final decision. Here’s how it works.
Identifying Customer Location in the Pipeline
ABM can help you identify a potential customer’s current mindset. Within your ABM process, you’ve already determined buyer intent and outlined a plan for engagement. Now, after your initial outreach efforts, you can determine your audience’s level of interest.
Did you get a click-through from an online ad, an inquiry, or email sign-up? Was an ebook downloaded or a webinar viewed? And was engagement one-time only, or has it increased? Has interest spurred discussions with a sales team member? Any visits or presentations? By tracking these interactions, you can understand what customers need from you.
Deliver Relevant Information
Once you’ve assessed the customer’s level of engagement, you can provide information to address their questions or concerns, tailoring the timing and delivery vehicle that best fits them.
For those who show interest but are still in the early part of the pipeline, white papers, thought leadership articles, and capabilities presentations are useful for encouraging deeper involvement. For qualified leads, information such as case studies, product comparisons, and customer testimonials have proven to be powerful conversion content.
Evaluate Engagement and Adjust Messaging
Measuring response to your targeted content provides additional direction for your sales team. Favorable feedback from qualified leads can trigger 1:1 meetings, product demonstrations or site visits, and a closed sale. If your content generates additional questions, then adjust your messaging, note where the customer is in the process, and continue.
If at this point (based on your knowledge of your sales cycle time) a potential customer has stayed too long without going through the carwash, you can let your team know they need to focus on the next car in line.
Targeted marketing can help you accelerate the sales process, generating dollars for your company and satisfaction for your customers.
Want to learn more?
We recently teamed-up with OutboundWorks Co-founder and CRO Ben Sardella for a webinar exploring the latest successes and most innovative tools for Account-Based Marketing and Sales.
Getting to deep insights and laser-targeted programs may seem exhausting considering the amount of data that we can collect today. Luckily, machine learning can vastly reduce the time and effort required to test, extract knowledge, grow and improve your pipeline.
In this webinar, we discussed highly precise and efficient ways to boost B2B demand generation and sales engagement. We show you how to:
- Optimize ads for ABM
- Improve precision targeting using Machine Learning
- Ramp up your sales by using lookalike audiences
- Build rapport with 3 tiers of account personalization
- Using your subject to get your emails opened
Click here to view this informative webinar from Metadata and OutboundWorks!:
