Common Challenges with Account-Based Marketing
Over the years, we’ve helped hundreds of B2B teams overcome some of their biggest marketing and sales challenges. And while every company faces its own unique problems, we’ve found that many challenges are universal for small businesses and enterprise companies alike, regardless of industry or team structure.
When it comes to implementing a successful account-based marketing strategy, the most common challenges are:
- Not having one centralized place to manage target accounts.
- Managing too many disparate point solutions and tools.
- Having no easy way to consolidate data from different sources and turn that data into actionable insights.
- Operationalizing a target account strategy across departments.
- Demonstrating value and proving ROI.
We hear you — and frankly, we’ve been there too.
So, we worked closely with our customers to create a single, unified platform to help marketing and sales teams solve these challenges. The new Terminus Account-Based Platform was created specifically to help you execute your B2B marketing strategy and be more successful as one revenue team.
Putting ABM Into Action with the Terminus Platform
The Terminus platform is built around the TEAM framework for ABM. TEAM outlines the necessary components of any target account strategy: Target, Engage, Activate, and Measure.
In our webinar Put ABM Into Action with TEAM, our chief product officer, Bryan Brown, outlines the TEAM framework. Let’s take a look at the top six criteria you should look for in an ABM platform, how this maps to the TEAM framework, and where Terminus fits in.
Identify and Target Your Best-Fit Accounts
What to look for:
- Account Targeting Functionality – Easily build lists of your best-fit accounts, then slice and dice them into the segments that make the most sense for your organization.
. . - Centralized Source of Truth – Bring all your data into one place that’s accessible to your entire revenue team.
In Terminus, the Account Hub is the central place where marketing and sales can build target account lists and operationalize their ABM strategy. It unifies previously siloed information like insights from your marketing automation platform, firmographic data, intent data, engagement data, and beyond.
You can use this information to identify your best-fit accounts and quickly spin up targeted lists based on any criteria that are important to your team. The Account Hub also acts as your target account command center, making it simple to get a 360-degree view of each account.
Engage Your Buyers and Activate Relevant Outreach
What to look for:
- Account-Based Advertising – You need a way to proactively scale engagement with all the decision-makers at your target accounts, even when you don’t have them in your database.
. . - Real-Time Engagement Data – Deliver timely account insights to your sales team so they can strike while the iron is hot.
ABM is about engaging the right people at your target accounts throughout their lifecycles and activating personalized outreach at the right time. The key is to coordinate this across multiple channels, such as ads, emails, and direct mail.
Account-Based Advertising is where Terminus has long excelled, enabling you to deliver highly targeted ads to both known and unknown contacts at your target accounts. We’ve also added additional triggers so you can send emails and trigger automated workflows that complement your ads.
This extends to your sales team as well. With Sales Insights, sales reps can see which of their accounts are engaging with content and product pages, and which are the hottest so they can prioritize outreach and not wait for someone to come in via inbound. Based on this data, they can shape their outreach based on what content or products their accounts are most interested in.
Measure Your Results Throughout the Funnel
What to look for:
- Full-Funnel ABM Analytics – ABM isn’t just about generating demand. Choose a solution that offers account-based reporting that spans the entire customer lifecycle and lets you prove your impact on pipeline and revenue.
Measurement is mission critical to any marketing program, but even more so with ABM. Terminus’ Account-Based Analytics allows for faster, data-driven decisions to optimize campaigns, provide actionable intel to sales, and improve marketing spend. Instead of simply measuring leads, modern marketers track account engagement metrics throughout the funnel and tie those KPIs back to pipeline and revenue.
More importantly, with measurement, you now have visibility into how much of your account’s entire buying committee is interested — not just the known contacts. Going a level deeper with Opportunity Journey insights, your team can see who at each account was involved at various stages during the buying journey. This gives you visibility into which touchpoints had the most impact and what specifically made the deal come to life. What content did your accounts engage with, and who specifically was involved in the buying process? With Terminus, you can now see which pieces of content got the most engagement and may have been critical in moving the deal closer to closing.
And Finally…
What to look for:
- Customer Success-Driven – Select a vendor that provides a true partnership, not just a tool.
This one doesn’t quite fit into the TEAM framework, but it’s equally important. You need a partner who will be there every step of the way, from planning and strategizing to execution and measurement.
The Terminus platform was built with ABM at its core, taking into account the biggest pain points account-based marketers and sales teams commonly battle. The solution is a powerful command center for managing all data points and tracking engagement insights to power effective ABM strategies.
