Over the past few years, B2B companies have been transforming their go-to-market strategies to focus more on accounts and less on individual prospects. By narrowing the targeting pool for Marketing and allowing them to target the organizations Sales is looking to talk to, more valuable strategies are developed, yielding favorable results.
The business outcomes of a successful account-based execution may include:
A modern account-based approach is essentially harnessing the above data to go to market effectively via sales and marketing programs. Sales will review relevant data and generate a target account list. This will be passed to Marketing, who will then use the TAL to target ads to only members of that TAL. Unlike traditional advertising that focuses primarily on raw lead generation, the fact that ABM is working off a TAL means that the leads being generated will have much higher quality by, in large. The net of this typically boils down to spending much more efficiently on the marketing end and not flooding sales with leads of questionable quality, leading to a more efficient pipeline overall.
While the above all sounds great, like with any business transformation, account-based initiatives require executive stewardship and deep commitment to people, process, data, and technology to support success. Ideally, the executive sponsorship should be a collaboration between the CRO and CMO. (Note: depending on the company’s size, the CIO or Data Science team should also have a seat at the table.)
Tight alignment at the top will deliver shared business goals that will serve as the initiative’s due north for each executive’s respective teams. Keep in mind, ABM is not a one-and-done task but a constantly evolving process. As Sales further refines, their TAL marketing will need to update ad audiences and messaging to ensure everything top to bottom stays as aligned as possible.