AJ Wilcox
At June’s SLC | SEM, we heard from AJ Wilcox & Sangram Vajre on Account Based Marketing. AJ started his crowd-pleasing session with some pro tips on how to generate leads that will make your sales team worship you.
So what is Account Based Marketing? Account Based Marketing is a marketing practice in which your advertising efforts will directly target another company in an effort to make B2B sales. Account Based Marketing leverages platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn to specifically target decision making employees at corporations that you select. Previously, Account Based Marketing was rather limited, LinkedIn used to only allow a 100 cap on companies to target per campaign & Facebook had spotty data, with only letting you select 1 company at a time. These caps and limitations have now changed! LinkedIn now has a 300K limit & automatic uploads; Facebook also makes this easier as well with specified demographic targeting.
As AJ's progressed, he intrigued the audience with his insights and pro tips on how to help synchronize the relationship between sales & marketing. So how exactly do you generate leads that your sales team will love?:
- Start by getting a list of dream logos from your sales team of companies that they would like to work with – Create an inclusion audience and layer filters on top for these
- Then create a suppression list of all your competition
- Add all competitors into this list and exclude across all campaigns
- Fly under the radar like you can’t with Search
- Add all of your customers to a list
- Exclude them as well, why pay for clients that are already using you?
- Add all of your customers to another list
- Include them in a campaign
- Share products/news to re-engage
- Cheap clicks
- Add all companies that are in a lead status that haven’t closed to another list
- Create a list of companies who have become a lead and exclude current customers
- Stay in front of the purchasing committee while they’re considering buying
- Add media companies for your PR strategy
- Results in earned media attention and links
Sangram Vajre
SLC | SEM’s next presenter, Sangram Vajre, captivated the audience educating listeners about the difference between traditional marketing metrics & Account Based Marketing metrics. Sangram stated that only less than 1% of leads become customers. Sangram taught us to flip the traditional lead based funnel, resulting in an account based funnel like his image below:
Sangram went on to explain, “The whole point was, if you are in B2B you should know the companies you are going after.” Who you are selling to is no longer a secret. ABM is about proactively getting in front of the accounts you would like to target.
Here, he defined this flipped funnel more in depth:
- Stage 1 – Identify – This is the most crucial step. Select the accounts you would like to target
- Stage 2 – Expansion – Expand your reach
- Stage 3 – Engage – This means figuring what works for those that you are targeting, what will engage them (personalized video emails, ads, direct mail)
- Stage 4 – Advocate – With the right focus and reach to the right people, while engaging people on your terms, even if they don’t become your customer they will become your fans. You can have advocates without having them as your customer.
Sangrum also went on to discuss Terminus. Terminus is a tool that helps to get your ads in front of crucial decision makers. The Terminus marketing cadence describes multiple touch points on a 20 day cycle throughout 3-4 people in the organization with personalized messages to each. This helps to get your foot in the door.
He definds the Terminus Account Based Marketing playbook, while giving us many pro tips and helpful suggestions:
- Pre-targeting – The purpose is to generate as much awareness as possible. Measure this by how many qualified accounts did you get.
- Account Nurturing – This is when you already have a lead within an organization and you begin creating a pipeline through a consistent set of messages across all channels.
- Lead-To-Account-Matching – Collect leads and only work on leads that they felt were the best fit. This can be giving leads to your sales team in tiers in order of priority.
- Pipeline Acceleration – Accelerating accounts that are stuck in the sales pipeline. Most companies don’t have a leads problem, they have a pipeline problem. Changing focus on leads can help these through the funnel and convert.
- Wake The Dead – Look at closed opportunities and get in front of them 6+ months later.
- Land & Expand – Double down on accounts that you already know that you are going to go after.
- Renewal & Upsell – Get in front of existing customers and renew them. Find upsell opportunities.
Make sure that you are consistently figuring out the items that will have the highest impact for your potential customers so that you can turn them into fans or heroes of yours. Continue monitoring important metrics such as the time a business spends with you. Spending a certain amount of time with a business is something that can always lead to sales.
In case you missed this killer event, we announced details for DMC 2017. Take a look at the conference lineup and snag your tickets today!