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Marketing goes beyond promotion. Marketing is creativity, profound planning, understanding of your audience, analysing data – especially nowadays, organisations have to go way beyond, and be more sophisticated than ever. Marketing is all around and if it’s done right, it will take your business growth to the next level.
After traditional lead generation, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has opened many doors toward new opportunities. As account-based methodologies have developed over the last few years, we can see how implementing ABM can present:
- more valuable qualified opportunities,
- creating long-lasting customer relationships,
- shorten sales cycles, and
- lead to higher ROI.
By adding personalization to your marketing strategy, all these benefits will be amplified.
Business growth strategies using Account-Based Marketing (ABM) must be more integrated and organized than ever. With endless data to construe and turn into valuable insights, organisations need to be mindful how to utilise this information smartly and in a timely manner, as well as create a unique, personalized message based on the collected and processed data. To make this work sleeker, businesses need departmental alignment, design efficient workflows, and construct the right plan of actions – overall, follow the Smarter Go-to-Market approach.
Therefore, Infinityn - based on their ABM experiences over the past years - built up the Agile Account-Based Growth framework.
Agile Account-Based Growth (Agile ABG) is a framework for B2B enterprises that helps to ensure that revenue grows steadily, consistently, and predictably. While many enterprises look for ABM – as a holistic growth strategy with a mix of account-based methods, whereby you can overcome challenges such as lack of human interaction, long sale cycles, the complexity of ABM strategy implementation, and team alignment. For these reasons, B2B marketers are aiming to create the next generation of ‘account-based’ approach.
The Agile ABG framework encompasses and impacts the entire funnel from research and intelligence to marketing, sales, and customer success.
These various business components are finally tied together under one strategy to ensure a holistic revenue-growth outcome, especially for organizations with high-value products, longer sales cycles, technology-driven solutions, and enterprise-sized target clients.
This orchestrated process utilizes 5 “Account-Based” functions (intelligence: ABI, marketing: ABM, sales development: ABSD, sales: ABS, and customer success: ABCS) at every stage of the account lifecycle.
Each of these “Account-Based” functions or teams also has a keyword that describes its purpose as a component in the greater framework.
ABI (Account-Based Intelligence) =“Research”
ABM (Account-Based Marketing) =“Teach”
ABSD (Account-Based Sales Development) =“Outreach”
ABS (Account-Based Sales) =“Challenge”
ABCS (Account-Based Customer Success) =“Advocate”
Let’s go into more details about the ABM team and their “Teach” function:
Teach (ABM - Account-Based Marketing)
The “Teach” function is the awareness stage of the Agile ABG journey.
The goal of this function is to inform, educate, familiarize, and build trust. Data from the Account-Based Intelligence (ABI) team will be used to start exposing top accounts to your brand, leveraging marketing assets with an account-based approach instead of a lead-centric mindset.
Advertising campaigns will take place and marketing materials will be chosen based on the account's firmographic data, their current interest, considering where they stand in their buying journey. With the collected information and insights via ABM tools and CRM activities, allows us to create something that we call an “Opportunity Heatmap”.
This “Opportunity Heatmap” lets ABM to master personalization and deliver the most relevant content to support the account in every stage of their journey.
Throughout the whole buying journey, marketing and sales should support each stage by following a unified process and the stage for success.
In the Teach function, the ABM team:
- Starts joint efforts and collaborates with ABI
- Shortlists accounts that have shown intent and are at the beginning of their buying journey
- Familiarizes accounts with solutions, educating about value propositions via account-based campaigns
- Educates accounts via content marketing and content strategy to create informative, compelling, and relevant materials with commercial insight
- Builds brand awareness and trust via added value – increasing familiarity and likeability
- Provides accounts with marketing air cover to help them discover the right solution for their needs, bridging the gap between where they are now to where they want to be
- Decides via which channels and means to publish content, and how exactly it will be delivered
- Personalizes communication (chatbots, ads, webpages, emails, etc) according to which account is being targeted, what are their history and preferences, and where they are in their buyer journey. Examples: the website chatbot can be programmed to greet visitors according to their stage in the buyer journey, such as ‘Welcome back!’ if they have previously visited. Or the order in which content is displayed can differ if it is known that a particular account prefers a certain topic over others.
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