In the video above, Sigstr’s VP of Marketing, Justin Keller, talks through the meaning of relationship marketing. Also, how teams today are using authentic relationships for ABM success.
Learn more by watching the video above or reading through the script below.
ABM is all about focus. Focusing on the kinds of accounts that will ultimately be your favorite customers and engaging with people within those accounts. And really connecting with them on a human level so they understand and internalize your brand’s promise and that you are a trustworthy person that can bring that to life for them.
In an account-based sales and marketing program, alignment is really tough. It’s crucial between those two teams because marketing is there to try and engage and support the sales process but more than ever, marketing is involved throughout the entire funnel. They’re there to help drive that sale.
To do a really good job of it, you need to have a good set of metrics that you’re sharing with sales. Whether that be engagement metrics, sales metrics, or a relationship score. Then, it requires a lot of open communication between the leaders of those teams and the teams themselves.
Authentic relationships are everything when it comes down to it, in terms of ABM. It used to be like, “Hey let’s see how many people we can get into our funnel and count on closing one percent of them.” And now it’s really about finding the people that we really want to engage with and we can win with. At the end of the day, that’s all about relationships.
We actually recently ran a survey: 87% of the world’s best sales and marketing people believe that relationships are absolutely critical to their revenue success. Digital marketing for the past 15 years has gotten lost and now I’m really really glad that it’s coming back to the forefront for marketing teams to really focus on relationships.
We spend so much time building out lead scoring frameworks trying to understand the buying behaviors, firmographic, and demographic traits we really like to engage with. But at the end of the day, they don’t matter in a relationship-based sale. It’s really about how you’re communicating and engaging with the human. Sure, lead scores are helpful but measuring relationships is what I think is going to become really important for marketers.
