ABM, Account Based Marketing, we’ve all heard about it. (If you haven’t go here and get caught up, quickly)

It’s the new big thing. Or maybe it’s not. Well, it kinda is.

Let me put it this way. ABM is a legitimate element of a 21st Century selling organization. No, you shouldn’t rely on it. No, it’s not a silver bullet. Yes, you can screw it up. Now it’s not something we’ve been doing for years with a fancy new name. Yes, it’s a methodology that requires expertise, creativity and commitment to doing correctly.

With that said, you know I’m not one to pontificate on the newest and the greatest. I prefer to get down to the real deal.

Therefore, I asked Brandon Redlinger, Director of Growth at Engagio to break down some solid, best practices that could be leveraged today to create solid outcomes in your ABM efforts.

There are some good ideas in here. Take notes, pay attention and enjoy.

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I’m sick and tired of every blog post, podcast or talk that declares “ABM isn’t new!” Sure, there are elements of ABM that smart B2B practitioners have been doing for years. However, there are many elements that have been reinvented or even newly added. But rather than spend our time arguing, I think our time is better spent on moving the industry and idea forward.

Don’t get me wrong – answering the questions what and why are important, and I’ll give you my answers, but the more interesting thing to address is how. How do you actually execute an effective ABM program?

With that said, let’s just jump into it. Here are 5 tactics you can use right now to close larger deals with Account Based Marketing and Sales Development.

How to Use Other Members of Your Team to Sell to An Account

In her book Whale Hunting with Global Accounts, Barbara Weaver Smith explains that today’s buyer wants to meet not just you, the sales rep, but also the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and everyone else on your team. This begs the question if people want to buy from the whole team, why do we only expose them to certain members during certain times?

Leverage all your players in your team. What if you could leverage your SME, marketing manager, engineer, or any other resource on your team in an active sales cycle? We love to get our executives involved when breaking into new accounts or accelerating deals. After all, an executive is much more likely to respond to an executive than a sales rep.

This is what one of our Executive Alignment Plays looks like.

The players involved on our team are the account owner, the play owner (i.e., the person who sets up and runs the play), and your executive. In this instance, there’s only one player on their team – the executive sponsor.

This is the first touch of the Play:

To: Executive Sponsor

CC: Account Owner

From: Your Executive

Email body:

Hi {{first name}},

{{snippet – this is one or two sentences containing a relevant point or connection for a reason you’re reaching out}}.

I’d love to have my team share with you some of the account based practices our partners, such as Apttus and VMware, are deploying. I think they would be very helpful to {{company name}}.

If you’re interested, are you available to chat next week? I’ll have {{account owner}},one of our Account Executives, send over a calendar invite.

Best,

{{Executive Sponsors}}

What’s happening here is the play owner, is lining up this Play for our executive. All our executive has to do is go in, add any personalization to this message, and hit send.

Read Your Prospects Minds with Intent Data

Intent data can uncover signs that a target account is in the market right now for solutions like yours.

This can include any behavioral data that indicates the right activity, including:

• Topics people at this company are researching on 3rd party sites
• Participation in forums
• Content downloads
• Ad clicks

This data is sourced from forums, job boards, and similar sources. In addition, intent vendors such as Bombora, MRP, and The Big Willow can deliver a layer of insight to maximize your findings, depending on your specific solution and targeting criteria. Intent data is increasingly important because most enterprise IT vendors are selling to the same 5,00-10,000 companies. If you can get to them when they’re actively thinking of this kind of solutions, you have a major advantage.

Look into the Future with Predictive Scoring

Predictive Scoring forecasts the companies most likely to close by analyzing historical data from customers who have already closed or become opportunities. Models will often include all the firmographic, technographic, intent, and engagement data that you might use in a manual scoring model. The difference is that predictive models allow you to analyze vastly more dimensions and data points. Predictive Scoring looks at leading indicators at a level and volume that far exceeds our human ability.

Though not an exhaustive list, consider partnering with organizations that provide predictive analytics solutions, including:

• Leadspace
• EverString
• Lattice
• 6sense
• Mintigo
• Infer

Use Social Intelligence to Listen to Your Customers

According to the ITSMA, “75% of executives will read unsolicited marketing materials that contain ideas that might be relevant to their business.” So, how do you know what executives at target accounts care about? Listen! Leverage services like Google Alerts, or even better Mention.com (much more powerful, and worth the price). This way, you can keep pulse of what’s going on in your target accounts and their industries. The power of Mention.com is that you can also monitor their social activity, which will help you uncover what they care about.

Repurpose Existing Content for Top Tier Accounts

Take an inventory of your current content, from whitepapers to ebooks to case studies. Then cross-reference that with your intent data and insights from your social intelligence efforts. The insights you generate are only an asset if you use them. The idea is simple: Dial up the relevance and resonance of your interactions and content and you increase the quantity and quality of your engagements.

All of the content you’d use in a normal sales and marketing process is effective in an account-based marketing program. The key is to focus on tactics and formats your audience engages with. Not every piece of content has to be specifically re-designed for a target account—that approach doesn’t scale. Instead, think about a balanced mix of content, with each piece falling somewhere on the content personalization spectrum:

For lower-priority targets, you can use simple personalization and can turn a relevant but broad piece of content into a super-relevant piece with some simple tweaks. An example would be tweaking the introduction and conclusion or customizing the landing page.

For top tier accounts, consider spending more time and resources creating a super personalized and relevant piece of content. For example, you could produce a webinar for just one account around a specific challenge simultaneously positioning your company as the experts.

Conclusion

As you can see, the lines between sales and marketing are blurring. In the traditional demand gen model where sales and marketing are completely separate. One team would own half of what I’ve just written about, while another team owned the other, and never the twain shall meet. However, when you’re taking an account-based approach to revenue, it’s not just recommended that sales and marketing work together, it’s demanded.

Which brings me to my final words of wisdom before parting: Stop calling it Account Based Marketing. These labels only perpetuate the misconception that one department is responsible for thinking and acting at the account level. For complex B2B sales, nothing could be further from the truth.

That’s why it’s leaders in the space, like Jon Miller, David Brock and Craig Rosenberg (to name a few) call it Account Based Everything.

Brandon is the Director of Revenue Generation at Engagio, an ABM company. He’s an ABM fanatic, and so is Engagio. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.