The healthy future of your business may depend on the needs of your sales team to be able to meet their goals more quickly. This can be difficult, however, if

• Marketing doesn’t have an aligned vision with sales and you’re having trouble justifying both to your finance team; or
• Executives in your organisation are looking at enterprise company deals, instead.

This is where Account-Based Marketing (ABM) can help, offering a customer-centric strategy that can see your various departments working together more effectively. Quickly growing popular amongst B2B businesses, you may be curious about whether or not ABM can work for you.

Usually, the ABM process takes roughly 12 weeks before you start seeing the results that you want. This is longer than many businesses can wait in these economic times. Here, we’re going to look at how AmbitionABM can help with our quick start pilot to get your new approach to sales on the ground and running in as little as four weeks.

What is ABM?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is an approach that varies from organisation to organisation. Most of them are built on the foundation of targeting high-potential customers with initiatives that personalise your outreach, bringing sales and marketing closer together to more effectively guide key stakeholders through the sales funnel with better results.

Correctly utilised, ABM is able to drive growth while ensuring that your marketing efforts, and budget, are better in line with the goals that your sales team is trying to achieve. The benefits of ABM campaigns include the following:

• Increased annual contract value.
• Bigger deal sizes than a traditional go-to-market approach.
• Improved customer lifetime value and win rates.
• 1-in-5 sale success for highly targeted accounts.

Businesses are best suited to the ABM approach if they work primarily through B2B channels, manage large contracts, can lend multi-channel expertise to their campaigns, and have a significant list of high-profile customers that they are trying to target. It’s an approach that needs time and budget to carry out properly, which has been something of a barrier to those looking to adopt it in the past.

The ABM timescale

As mentioned, the time required to carry out an ABM transformation in your business can be a barrier to many organisations. ABM campaigns can take 12 or more weeks before the execution of their tactics allows you to start seeing real results. An example of the traditional ABM process with its timings is as follows:

• Scoping the ABM programme (defining programme objectives, selecting the ABM model, selecting accounts and defining success) = Week 1.
• Account insights (in-depth account profile, identify key stakeholders, relationship mapping) includes 1:1 calls with sales/account team = Weeks 2 – 4.
• Strategy & planning (map opportunities and areas of focus, agree on strategy) includes a group workshop = Week 5.
• Account messaging & GTM plan (Develop value propositions and supporting message) = Week 6.
• Campaign execution (Create content and execute) = Week 7 +.

Even after you start executing your campaign, it can take a further five weeks before you start seeing the results that you want. For a lot of organisations, that is simply too long to wait.

The AmbitionABM Quick Start

At AmbitionABM, we realised the traditional ABM process is at times too long and costly for decision-makers to be able to justify, even when the results really would benefit their organisations.

With the economic downturn, marketing teams have seen challenges including budget reductions, and they need to be able to show their senior management that the ABM approach delivers early value wins.

As such, we decided to provide a Lite version of ABM and what we call a ‘quick start’ pilot for 1-2-1 and 1-2-few ABM types where we would deliver results within as little as 4 weeks and reduce the cost by over 50%.

The Quick Start ABM Services include the following:

• Discovery calls with account teams in order to better understand your account goals, opportunities, and blockers, and what we can do to maximise your approach.
• A review of research and account plans, to help find the strategy that offers quick wins based on your ongoing efforts.
• Delivering 1x ABM asset for each account, creating a manifesto, future, vision, or story that can be used across the multi-channel.
• Providing the services of a social luminary/social selling for 3 months. Starting from week 1, we aim to show results by week 4, with up to 35-45% ROI connection building.
• Quick recommendations on adaptations that can be made to your approach, immediately, showing some of the benefits that an ABM approach can offer your business.

With the help of our social luminaries, we can help you target account stakeholders across social media with both owned and earned content. This can include strategies such as posting thought leadership content snippets to build the profile of the account lead, establishing relevance in the eyes of stakeholders, and providing outreach to build connections within target accounts.

Get started with AmbitionABM today

At AmbitionABM, our priority is to help you get ABM right. In the long term, this may mean developing a comprehensive ABM plan through precision targeting, more effective attraction and retention of strategic accounts, and investment in customer engagement across the entirety of the marketing funnel. However, for those of you who need quick results, our ABM Quick Start can help many of you start to appreciate the benefits of an ABM approach much more quickly.

At AmbitionABM, we offer the same approach to handling the right customer, the right way, at the right time, regardless of the scale of our services. We will work with you to develop an understanding of your market and customers, turbocharging customer potential, and formulating ABM objectives that lead to success, whether it’s in the short-term or long-term. Get in touch with our team today to learn more.

Contact us online or give us a call at +44 (0) 20 3745 1263 today where we can share some case studies and show the impact we’ve made!