Account-based marketing is more than just a buzzword.
With the evolution of marketing technology (martech), there are more than 2,000 different types of software, applications, and tools that make it easier than ever for B2B marketing and sales professionals to connect with their best-fit prospects. At Terminus, we’ve started a #FlipMyFunnel movement, bringing together innovative B2B “smarketing” (that’s sales and marketing) teams to push each other to challenge the status quo.
What is account-based marketing?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is all about focusing on accounts instead of leads. With ABM, you’re no longer doing traditional lead generation to pour new contacts into the top of the funnel. The key performance indicators (KPIs) for ABM are pipeline velocity and revenue. Marketing and sales alignment is at the core of everything. You’re starting by identifying your accounts, or the companies you want to do business with, then doing absolutely everything you can think of to move them through the pipeline. You’re using tactics to engage those accounts on their own terms. These tactics include activities such as content marketing, events, direct mail, webinars, and much more.
Think about it. You have all these martech capabilities, but you also need a strategy for how you’re going to reach your target accounts. ABM is all about coming up with great strategies, the content to support those strategies, the execution, and account-level attribution. To help create a game plan, you’re going to need a smarketing team leader, a champion: your account-based marketing hero.
This is why we’ve decided to create a brand new job title: The Account-Based Marketing Hero.
Here at Terminus, we’re hiring an account-based marketer to be a quarterback for our marketing and sales teams. This is a unique role that requires a love for marketing strategy, sales enablement, creative thinking, and the drive the see things through. The right person for this role will live and breathe account-based marketing. Our ABM hero believes in a world where marketing and sales are truly aligned around the same goals. In addition to running ABM at Terminus, this person will be in charge of collaborating with our top 25 customers to make sure they are successful with their own account-based marketing campaigns. This person will have a limitless energy and dreams of becoming a CMO one day.
We believe there are five major ways an Account-Based Marketing Hero will make a world of different for your B2B organization. They will:
Make Your Top 25 Customers Heroes
If the mantra that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers, then why isn’t marketing doing anything and everything in its power to make your VIP customers your heroes? Marketing and sales spent all this time, money, and energy to bringing in new customers, so your smarketing team should continue to work together with your customer success team to retain your top customer accounts.
The way you can determine your top 25 accounts is by looking at your current client list and aligning it with your ideal customer profile (ICP) to determine which of your customers do in fact meet your ICP. Then, look at their monthly or annual recurring revenue (ARR/MRR) to create a list of your top 25 customer heroes. These will be the clients you reach out to for case studies, customer references, and invitations to speak at your events.
Build the Ultimate Account-Based Marketing Playbook
Your smarketing team needs a cohesive playbook of strategies and tactics to execute account-based marketing. These tactics must work across the stages of the buyer’s journey — from prospect to opportunity to closed-won deals — and extend all the way to the customer experience. We call this the ABM framework. With account-based marketing, you continue to market to your customers to identify potential opportunities for upselling and cross-selling potential. Your ABM hero will help personalize your account-based marketing framework to create game plans for targeting all these potential revenue opportunities in both your prospect target accounts and among existing customers. Then, he or she will determine which marketing activities to use.
Act Like a CMO
Your account-based marketing hero will be your Chief Account Officer (CAO). Our industry is starting to see the titles “Chief Growth Officer” and “Chief Revenue Officer” pop up, and these roles are more than just fancy job titles. This leader is responsible for bringing home the bacon. Your ABM hero will work with every department in the company and rally the troops to get what you need to execute on your ABM playbook and measure results. Every day will be different, but your ABM hero will have no problems wearing many hats.
Create Brilliant Strategies and Compelling Messaging
First and foremost, your ABM hero is a marketer. This leader will look at account-based marketing from both a creative and operational perspective. They will create tons of different ABM strategies and be able to help develop the messaging and ideas for your marketing assets. As both a storyteller and a marketing operations manager, the ABM hero can see a new campaign through from conception to the finish line.
Experiment, Measure, and Optimize
ABM heroes get excited every time a new campaign kicks off and eagerly wait for data to make it better. They love analytics and have a passion for figuring out what types of campaigns are working best and fixing campaigns that aren’t performing. Their agile approach to marketing will help you consistently spend your marketing dollars where they’ll be most effective.
Are You an ABM Hero?
So what do you think? Will 2016 be the year of the account-based marketing hero? If you want to be an ABM hero on the Terminus team, we’re always looking for positive, supportive, and self-starting people to add more fuel to our fire. If you think you’d be a good fit, check out our careers page. We’d love to hear from you!
