Why Should Sales Care About Account-Based Marketing?
Contrary to popular belief, account-based marketing is not just for marketing. Sales is a huge part of the success of any effective account-based execution. Just remember, your sales team is only as good as your marketing team and your marketing team is only as good as your sales team. Hence, sales and marketing alignment is more important than ever when taking an account-based approach. But, what’s the secret sauce?
Top-performing revenue teams are defined by a tight alignment between marketing and sales. By adopting an account-based strategy you can:
In addition, an account-based approach to sales allows you to focus on a select number of target accounts that fit within your ideal customer profile (ICP). By cutting down the number of accounts that you are reaching out to, you can switch your mindset from blindly prospecting with no strategic direction to adopting a Quality = Quantity approach. This allows you to prioritize your day better while also having better success.
In this blog post, we are going to break down specific ways sales reps and leaders can use engagement signals to drive more quality conversations, pipeline, and won deals (and make life easier along the way) all while staying lockstep with their Marketing team and ABM strategies.
1. Work Accounts With Marketing
Redefine Your Total Addressable Market, Ideal Customer Profile & Buyer Personas
As you begin your account-based transformation process, it is important that you sit down with your marketing team to tightly align and define these three key areas linked below:
- Total Addressable Market (TAM): The list of every company you could sell your current offerings to today. In ABM – this isn’t just a profile; it’s ideally the actual list of companies that represent your sellable universe.
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): The profile of customers who are the best fit and likely to be the most successful with a specific offering today. This is the subset of your total addressable market where you and marketing think you’ll have the most success.
- Buyer Personas: A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer personas, consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.
Collaborate With Marketing to Build Account Lists
Once you have worked hand-in-hand with the Marketing team on defining your TAM, ICP, and buyer personas, you can now begin to build out account lists. Terminus makes it easy for you and your marketing team to create lists of companies that match your ICP for specific efforts by making sure that your reps are reaching out to the same companies that marketing is engaging. This can be done through advertising and other channels.
Together you can:
- Set up a quarterly list review cadence
- Establish a process for weekly/monthly check-ins on account lists
- Establish a Salesforce workflow to pull lists out of campaigns as XDRs are able to disposition them, and replenish with newly engaged accounts
Here is a simple three-step process on how to start building account lists:
The FIRE 🔥 Account Intelligence Model
What is Marketing without a good acronym?! At Terminus, we use the FIRE Account Intelligence Model when thinking about measuring engagement. This model comprises all the engagement signals that we are able to feed to sellers. FIRE stands for:
Fit: How well does a company match the firmographic profile of your ideal customer (e.g. industry, size, and technology)?
Intent: Are employees of the company browsing around the web (anonymously) for topics related to your offering?
Relationship: How strong are the interactions between people at your company and people at the target company (e.g. email and meeting frequency, breadth, sentiment)?
Engagement: Is the company interacting with your marketing activities (e.g. anonymously on your website, clicking on emails, reading/downloading content)?
2. Stay Focused on the Right Accounts & Take Action
The Monday Morning Sales Dashboard
When you become a Terminus customer, you are given access to super-simple, out of the box Salesforce reports to help reps focus on their most engaged accounts. Once you access these reports, you can feed them into a Salesforce dashboard for your reps. After the real-time data starts to flow into this dashboard, your reps will have actionable data at their fingertips through a single view to reference on a daily basis.
Setting up Sales Alerts for Hot Accounts
In addition to dashboards, you can set up important alerts. If we’re being honest here, you will be better off if you are doing both.
Trigger alerts right to the inbox of your Sales Reps, so they always know what is going on with their accounts and can prioritize outreach. There are three different kinds of alerts you can set up:
Sales Alerts
Sales alert emails are weekly notifications designed for both sales development reps, account executives, and customer success reps. The report surfaces reps’ owned accounts that are showing the strongest in-market behavioral signals powered by Terminus’ native AI and Bombora intent data.
Note: Sales alert emails are a great way to bring each rep’s most leaned-in accounts and contacts to the top of their inbox each week.
Custom Salesforce Alerts
You can customize your out of the box Salesforce reports to supercharge your alerts and even trigger special notifications off your most important signals. For example, website visitors over the last 30 days.
Note: We recommend triggering Website Visits – 30 Days.
Sigstr Alerts
You and your team can get real-time notifications in your inbox anytime someone engages with one of your Sigstr email signature marketing campaigns. These notifications will let you (and perhaps more importantly, your sales team) know when customers and prospects are interacting with your brand, allowing you to reach out when it’s most relevant.
Note: Must have Sigstr to have access to this feature
3. Gain Valuable Opportunity Insights
Account Insights
Unlike in B2C, B2B companies don’t have millions of transactions to build complex models around what is driving business. Oftentimes, companies only close 10-20 deals in a quarter. Sales and marketing will bend over backward trying to identify what is or is not working.
Account Insights is the perfect tool to understand the complete story of each account. You can go through specific deals and see all your marketing and sales touches on one timeline. Review closed-won and lost opportunities to see exactly when sales opened the opportunity, which stakeholders were involved, and identify patterns.
Note: At Terminus, we use this to review closed deals, identify patterns, and celebrate sales and marketing alignment.
Use Relationship Data for Better Forecasting
Managing relationships is the lifeblood of B2B sales and marketing. Building a strong connection with your accounts and contacts will often make the difference in winning or losing a deal. We all know this, but in reality managing hundreds of accounts is hard.
Our friends are Gong recently did a study where they analyzed over 500k sales emails sent during sales opportunities, then applied AI to isolate the sellers’ and buyers’ patterns with pinpointed algorithms. What they found is that email velocity is the #1 behavior that leads to closed-won, or lost, deals. The #2 behavior was who was actually sending the email (ideally the prospect) and lastly, #3 was how multithreaded you were in an Account.
Well, good news. Terminus can measure all of this and more!
Relationship scores use AI to measure your interactions with accounts to calculate a score that your teams can use to manage relationships at scale. Our technology uses emails, calendar events, CRM data, and more to help you know when an account needs a little more love or is primed for an expansion opportunity. In practice, this allows you to customize outreach for happy customers, personally reach out to unhappy ones, and keep accounts in the pipeline engaged throughout their journey.
4. Outpace the Competition
Bombora Intent
Bombora’s data aligns marketing and sales teams, enabling them to take coordinated action when a company is actively researching a topic more than usual.
Marketers armed with intent data can drive more qualified demand, while sales teams can use it to prioritize accounts where they are likely to have more quality conversations. With Bombora intent you can:
- Identify threats early by showing sales and customer success when competitors are moving in or when contacts are drifting away.
- Engage in-market accounts by serving Terminus ads to target accounts with surging intent.
- Become more relevant by personalizing your ad creative with specific surge topics based on intent.
- Easily add intent to your CRM and automate Terminus ads, improve reporting, and alert sales.
Using Terminus Data to Personalize
Personalization in today’s world is critical to the success of both your XDRs and AEs. The days of can-spam, automated emails, and monotone voicemails are something of the past. Prospects want to do business with real humans and expect to be treated as such. Unfortunately, not all salespeople are created equally…
With Terminus, you can equip your sales reps with an abundance of data that will allow you to be more genuine. You can personalize based on topics, subject matter, and interests that are coming directly from the prospect or company. Questions like:
What is my account researching?
Use intent to see if your account is researching a competitor, specific topics, or even you!
What content have they consumed?
See exactly what marketing content your contacts are engaging with and reach out with contextual messaging that resonates.
Who is leaning in?
Buying centers are complicated. Sift through the noise and see exactly who is in the deal.
Is their interest spiking?
Never miss a hot account. Know when an account is spending increased time on your website and see what they’re looking at.
Closing Remarks
The importance of sales and marketing alignment is growing more and more important within the ABM space. Although this may sound like a lot of change and work it is important to reevaluate if the way you used to do things is still cutting it or is there a better way waiting to be discovered.
