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Account-Based Marketing: Guide For Modern Marketers

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The key takeaways are that ABM focuses on targeting individual accounts through highly customized campaigns. It treats each client as a 'market of one' to deepen relationships and increase awareness. ABM leverages technology to scale proven fundamentals like reaching the right prospect at the right time.

ABM is a structured approach to developing customized sales and marketing campaigns for individual accounts or partnerships. It differs from traditional marketing in that it focuses on a smaller number of targeted accounts rather than wider audiences. ABM leverages technology to scale proven tactics like account-specific messaging.

ABM is gaining popularity because less than 1% of leads typically convert to customers. Also, technology now allows marketers to scale proven tactics in new ways by focusing more narrowly on individual accounts. This helps cut through the noise of traditional broad messaging.

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Account-Based
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GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

INTRODUCTION
If you’re reading this guide, you’re probably a B2B marketer. If so, you probably
spend a lot of your time coming up with new ways to reach the right prospect, at The reason ABM
the right time, with the right message. Which means you’re one of a million B2B has reached peak
marketers trying to do exactly the same thing. Welcome to the club!
popularity is that
To make it worse, nearly everyone who sells solutions to B2B marketers like us technology and
will promise they can help you reach the right prospect at the right time with
the right message. Not too long ago, you could buy lists from ads in the back of resources have
inflight magazines that made the same promise. Now those promises come from allowed us to scale
marketing technology vendors, as well as bloggers and authors and consultants
putting their own spin on marketing strategies, both proven and unproven.
in new ways.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is the latest strategy those folks are trying to sell
—Craig Rosenberg, TOPO
you. But with ABM, there’s one key difference: ABM isn’t a new, unproven idea;
it’s a new way of combining proven fundamentals to help B2B marketers (you
guessed it) reach the right prospect, at the right time, with the right message.
Only this time, it really works.

What Is ABM?
ITSMA has a reasonable claim to having coined the phrase, and they have a solid
definition:

“Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a structured approach to developing and


implementing highly customized sales and marketing campaigns for single
accounts, prospects, or partnerships. By treating each client as a market of one,
you can broaden and deepen your relationships with individuals at key accounts
as well as increase awareness and demand for your services and solutions. This
ultimately leads to more strategic sales and greater revenue generation.”

Craig Rosenberg of analyst firm TOPO agrees that ABM is actually old school.
“As long as there have been companies and people trying to sell them,”
Rosenberg said, “there have been account-based marketing campaigns. The
reason it has reached peak popularity over the last year or so, however, is that
technology and fresh resources have allowed us to scale in entirely new ways.”

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

We’re simply smarter and faster than we were years ago. And we have better
marketing tools at our disposal. The ABM planets are aligning.

ABM is the hottest topic in B2B marketing.


A quick search in Google Trends shows the rapid rise in searches for “account
based marketing” in the last year. Everybody is talking about it. Vendors and
data providers are shoehorning the phrase into their list of capabilities. You could
probably spend a week doing nothing but attending ABM webinars. (And what a
week that would be.)

Why ABM?
You can answer this question with one statistic from Forrester Research: Less
than 1 percent of leads turn into revenue-generating customers. We’ll let that sink
in for a minute.

More marketers are going after the same people with the same tactics. Traditional
email marketing worked until spam filters and legally-required unsubscribe options. 84% of B2B marketers say that
When was the last time you read every single email in your inbox? With more ABM delivers a higher ROI than
organizations bypassing email by using internal messaging tools, it’s even harder. any other approach. —ITSMA

Content marketing worked well until everybody started to do it. Gone are the days
when you could own a particular word or phrase on the web just by publishing
good content about that term. Inbound marketing still works, but for a lot of
companies, it’s not bringing the results it once did.

Companies who employ ABM tactics see real ROI.


Marketers who adopt account-based strategies are more successful and more
competitive than their peers who market solely to individuals. The data proves
it. (Or if you’re feeling grammatical, the data prove it.) Eighty-four percent of B2B
marketers say that ABM delivers a higher ROI than any other approach, according
to ITSMA.
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

1. ABM FUNDAMENTALS
ABM treats all accounts as a market of one.
Successful account-based marketers embrace an end-to-end view across the
entire buyer’s journey and across all channels. Some call that addressing each
prospect company, or account, as a “market of one.”

Traditional marketing automation campaigns are targeted to a large group of


people who all share similar characteristics (title or department) at a wide range
of companies. You might send one email to 500 directors of IT at 500 companies,
hoping your general IT-focused message is good enough to get some of them
to respond.

ABM is personalized to individual decision makers.


ABM looks at all the decision
In a market of one, you think about the needs of all the influencers in one
makers within a company, not
company. What does the IT director care about? How about the CFO? Does the
one general persona spread
VP of marketing have a say in the IT budget? ABM looks at all the decision makers
across many companies.
within a company, not one general persona spread across many companies.

This approach makes it vital to truly understand each individual within an account.
ABM focuses on customer value. If you’re targeting your highest-potential
prospect companies, it’s worth taking the time to make your pitch relevant
to a relatively small, high-value group of key people.

ABM is personalized to customer needs.


According to ITSMA, 75% of executives will read unsolicited marketing materials
that contain ideas that might be relevant to their business. What percentage
will read unsolicited materials that aren’t? We don’t need a survey to place that
number at or around zero percent. You know that from your own inbox.

ABM forces marketers to do the hard work of making sure they engage in a hyper-
personalized way. If your subject line doesn’t immediately address a decision
maker’s specific needs, it will not work. Smart ABM marketers don’t just target to
titles. They personalize the message to a specific persona at a specific company.
Don’t think: “How the XYZ Widget Can Drive More Business.” Think: “How We
Can Solve Problem A at ABC Corp.”

ABM forces marketing alignment.


One group in your marketing department might be creating blog posts and
ebooks. Another, separate group is deciding what content should be used for paid
lead-gen campaigns. Product marketers are creating product sheets and solutions
documents. Field marketers are planning events and road shows. The PR team is
pitching stories to industry publications. Are all of these efforts aligned around one
clear, recognizable message? They should be.

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

ABM forces sales and marketing alignment.


ABM is all about focusing
Account-based marketers ensure sales teams already know what questions to ask
on the right leads, not just
by transforming disconnected audience behaviors into true account-level insights.
more leads.
One key to transitioning to ABM is aligning marketing with sales during account
planning, mapping your accounts to identify quality targets (not just lots of targets),
and then focusing on the leads that align with those prioritized accounts.

Making ABM work requires marketing and sales to align on success metrics,
agree on account engagement strategy, and meet daily to check on progress.

Traditional lead-based metrics, like lead volume, impressions, and traffic present
challenges in ABM, as these figures don’t correlate to revenue, and many leads
generated aren’t targeted. ABM is all about focusing on the right leads, not just
more leads.

The best ways for a marketer to measure success in ABM include number of
accounts identified, number of key contact relationships, acceleration of pipeline,
reduction in sales cycle, and, ultimately, revenue.

And all of that requires sales and marketing to work together and ultimately align.

2. NAMED ACCOUNTS
With ABM, an organization defines a target set of accounts and then employs
campaigns that will resonate with each prospect or account individually. You’re
probably familiar with the term “named account.” Like all terms specific to
marketing, it means a lot of things to a lot of people. ABM requires companies
not only to have a shared understanding of the definition of named account,
but a unified method of engaging with them.

What is a named account?


Traditionally, sales and marketing reps focus their efforts on chasing leads. On the
surface, this is entirely logical: you need to generate leads in order to make a sale.
But pursuing individual leads is probably not the most effective strategy. Smart
marketers focus on named accounts.

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

Named accounts refers to a single company (account) assigned to either a


marketing or sales rep. That one account may itself contain several potential leads
within the organization. Named accounts are essentially the building blocks of a
focused marketing effort.

Apart from streamlining your operations, named accounts will also tend to be
more engaged and more ready to buy. (Hotter, if you prefer.) If you can identify a
company’s needs, you can be confident the leads that result will be interested in
what you have to offer.

Named accounts for ABM.


ABM requires an even more careful approach to named accounts. According to
Bev Burgess, ITSMA’s senior vice president and ABM practice co-lead, putting
together a list of a hundred accounts and throwing them against the wall isn’t
really ABM.

A named account list for ABM needs to include more than just contact
information. You need to have insight into those accounts to build a targeted value
proposition. You need to understand the business issues each account is facing on
a specific level in order to show the decision makers how you will help solve them.

Plus, a target list that lives only in a marketer’s database ignores the key element
of sales-marketing alignment. “The marketer becomes part of the account team,”
Burgess says.

The second difference is when you are doing ABM, you’re creating an account-
specific marketing plan and integrating it with the sales plan. They’re aligned and
integrated: the marketer becomes a part of the account team.

Focusing on named accounts improves efficiency in two ways:

First, it avoids the possibility of reps stepping on each other’s toes and duplicating
efforts. There’s no point having two people assigned to selling to the same
company. In fact, it’s bad.

Secondly, in a modern B2B environment, the vast majority of companies will have
multiple decision makers, so it’s essential to first identify all relevant decision
makers and build your sales and marketing strategy accordingly, instead of
shunting from one lead to another.

Moving to a named account approach.


So how do you move from leads to named accounts? Like everything else with
ABM, it doesn’t require anything particularly radical. All you need to do is arrange
your leads/contacts strategically.

This can be a very manual process. For example, when a sales or marketing rep
identifies a lead within a company for whom your product or service is relevant,
that lead would be flagged in your CRM, and that rep would be instructed to focus
on bringing in more strategic leads specifically from within that account and build
a pitch around them.

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

Moving to a named account approach for ABM may sound daunting at first, since
some CRM and marketing automation systems are geared toward leads, and the
leads (people) may not be connected to the companies (accounts) they work for. In
our section on predictive analytics, we’ll cover how this process can be automated
for far greater effectiveness.

Customizing and repurposing content for ABM.


Despite what we said earlier about the challenges of content marketing, it is still a
highly-effective element of a unified marketing strategy, and of an ABM strategy.
Useful, practical content that helps prospects solve their business problems is still
one of the most effective ways to fill the top of your funnel and move prospects
through to close.

Creating and implementing a content marketing strategy for ABM does not, at its
essence, require any radical shifts in the way you approach content marketing in
general. ABM will simply inform the way you target and promote your content,
much in the same way as ABM would inform—but in no way displace—your
company’s wider marketing strategy.

The difference is with ABM content marketing begins with the “who.” Again,
you’ll be treating accounts as markets of one, and contacts as influencers within
those accounts. That means you need to be versatile in who you direct and
promote your content to, and be much more specific.

On the one hand, content will need to be aimed at specific companies. But at the
same time, you will need to identify key influencers within those accounts, and
target them specifically as well. These audiences will also typically be far more
engaged and in most cases further down the funnel, and therefore require making
your content more specialized and niche.

Do I need to flip my funnel?


In fact, there are many who argue that you should forget the traditional marketing With ABM you’ll be
funnel altogether. Or at the very least flip it. encountering leads for the
first time in the middle or even
“Flipping the funnel” is a term coined by marketing author Joseph Jaffe, who
near the end of the funnel.
argues that a traditional, linear approach to guiding leads from the top down the
sales funnel is inadequate. This is a particularly easy case to make with ABM
where, as already mentioned, you’ll be encountering leads for the first time in the
middle or even near the end of the funnel.

How would I flip it, anyway?


Whether or not you feel that flipping the funnel is a helpful metaphor, this highly
customized approach can be carried out in two ways for content marketing: 1)
manually create custom content for individual accounts and leads, or 2) use your
marketing automation system to more carefully segment existing collateral.

Even the former approach is simpler than you might think, by adapting and editing
existing material, particularly gated content. A quality webinar, ebook, or customer
interview can be sliced and diced into multiple blog posts, customer brochures,
social media posts, or even infographics, customized and targeted to particular
audiences based on their needs and interests.

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

It’s worth emphasizing again that none of this needs to impact your broader, top-
of-the-funnel content. Both are important, and are in no way mutually exclusive.
In fact, many B2B companies that adopt ABM continue implementing other
traditional marketing methods at the same time, sometimes tasking separate
marketing teams for each.

But when it comes to the “how,” all of the same basic rules of B2B content
marketing still apply.

Speak to your target audience and address their problems.


If this particular rule of thumb is true with B2B marketing in general, it becomes
all the more important with ABM, given that your content needs to be carefully
tailored towards a very specific, relatively small pool of individuals (or in some
cases even customized for a single crucial prospect).

You need to carefully study and get to know who you are talking to with each
piece of marketing collateral, and create content around those profiles. The most
important question you need to be asking is: “What keeps our prospects (or this
one prospect) awake at night?”

That’s not necessarily the same as their most-pressing business goal. Even
though you’re marketing to accounts you’re still ultimately talking to human beings.
“Increasing company ROI” or “improving lead to conversion rates” could, on a
human level, boil down to “Please make my life easier and help me keep my job.”

Choose quality over quantity.


With B2B content marketing generally, quantity is important too (whether for SEO,
brand awareness, or general online presence and thought leadership). However,
the niche approach of ABM places even greater emphasis on focused material.
Remember, you’ll be targeting a relatively small number of highly engaged, well-
informed leads, who in most if not all cases will be much further down the funnel
(if you haven’t flipped or done away with the funnel altogether). Generic “How
Integrated Cloud Applications Will Change Your Life Forever” clickbait just won’t To create effective content,
cut it. you always need to define
your goals carefully.
Have clear measures of success.
To create effective content, you always need to define your goals carefully. But
while soft metrics such as shares, Retweets, other engagement, more followers,
or increased traffic are all legitimate measures for most marketing content, the
targeted nature of ABM requires more concrete metrics, like increased pipeline
velocity, lead generation, or revenue.

Be engaging and creative.


At the end of a long day, do you enjoy monitoring a telecommunication medium
used for transmitting sound with moving images in monochrome (black & white),
or in color, and in two or three dimensions?

No. You watch TV. The first is the Wikipedia definition. The second is what
people actually say. So why are we all still writing about seamless best-in-class,
multichannel, cloud-based marketectures that are flexible, extensible,
and feature-rich?

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

Jargon is never an effective way to engage with readers. People like to engage
with other human beings, and to be talked to (not at). This is even truer when
you’re fine-tuning your targeted ABM content. Have fun, tell a story, offer handy
tips, and use visual content where possible to make your material more engaging
and easy on the eye.

When addressing a specific problem, case studies illustrating your solution can
be particularly useful. How has your product or service solved similar or identical
problems in the past? As mentioned already, the great thing about case studies is
that they can usually be refashioned and reused over and over, so one customer
story could form the basis of multiple pieces of content (ABM or otherwise).

Remember: creating customized content for ABM doesn’t require coming up with
brand new material every time—so you can be an ABM ninja without reinventing
the wheel.

Outbound engagement.
Typical B2B lead generation efforts for sales development reps (SDRs) or business
development reps (BDRs) involve searching LinkedIn and Google, navigating
impossible phone directories, and playing email roulette to connect with the
right prospects.

With ABM becoming popular, more SDRs are focusing their outbound efforts on
specific accounts, rather than canvassing industries or company types to find key
influencers and decision makers.

While focusing on key accounts may seemingly help reduce the legwork involved,
SDRs are still spending way too much valuable time trying to identify the right
people. Even if you know the companies you want to contact, you still need to
know the names of the decision makers.

Inbound lead routing.


Here’s a nightmare scenario for many B2B marketers. (If your children are reading
along with you, this might be the time to put them to bed.) You carefully craft a
campaign, deliver it effectively through your marketing automation, your prospects
open your message, like it, and click through to your desired call-to-action.

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

Then nothing happens.

It’s scary because it’s true. In our ABM case study section, you’ll see how one big,
smart company with a big, smart inbound marketing program found out they had
200,000 valid leads sitting in their CRM that no one had ever contacted.

An ABM approach to inbound lead routing matches the contact info of the people
who responded to your CTA with the key account data of the companies they
work for. If someone contacts you for information, or requests a call or a demo,
and that person already works for a customer of yours, you want that person to
get a response from that company’s account team.

If the person who contacts you works for one of your top prospects, you want to
make sure you contact that person first. Lead-to-account matching, a feature of
ABM solutions built on predictive analytics, can make sure that happens. (More
on predictive analytics later.)

3. GET YOUR DATA HOUSE


IN ORDER
Ready for another visualization? You’re planning a birthday party for your child.
You book the clown, the magician, and the pony. You stay up all night making
personalized cupcakes for every child. And on the day of the event, three people
show up: your plumber, an insurance agent, and that one kid from camp two
summers ago who tried to make your kid eat a wasp.

B2B marketers face the same problem with every campaign. There might not
be as much crying involved (or there might be). Multiple studies have placed the Inaccurate data had a direct
amount of bad data in the average company CRM database anywhere from 50 to impact on the bottom line of
70 percent. A survey by Experian Data Quality found inaccurate data had a direct 88% of companies.
impact on the bottom line for 88% of responding companies, with the average —Experian Data Quality
company losing 12% of its revenue because of it.

Marketers have tried to avoid the data problem with volume, sending more and
more emails with lower and lower conversions. Perhaps you’ve heard that the
definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting
different results.

ABM requires a personalized approach that addresses the individual needs of the
individual decision makers. How can you accomplish that if you can’t be sure who
they are, or even their accurate email address?

Some companies address this challenge in a manual way, building target account
lists manually and researching the right people to reach through their online
presence, then calling and hoping to get through. This approach may work for
companies with a specialized product and a relatively small list of target accounts.
But it’s obviously heavy on people power.

For the average B2B company, this approach doesn’t scale, which is what we say
these days to mean: “There is absolutely no way we can do that unless we hire a
whole bunch more people.”

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

The data roadblocks to ABM.


As mentioned before, the average company’s CRM system is, to put it kindly, a
mess. When was the last time you heard a marketer say: “I love my database!”
When was the last time you heard a salesperson say: “These leads are perfect!”

ABM requires a list of elements working together, but if you’re building your
campaigns on inaccurate or incomplete data… Do we even need to finish
that sentence?

The value of personas and personalization.


Most B2B marketers have a database full of contacts, gathered from their
marketing automation tools, and other sources such as leads from events and
tradeshows. The problem is that the data is often severely limited, which severely
limits your chance of success.

If you’re looking to an external vendor or software solution to help you define


and segment personas for your demand-gen efforts, look for a vendor that
goes beyond the title. To give you what you need, any solution will need deep
understanding of people on an individual level: the person’s roles, responsibilities,
technologies used, and day-to-day pain points. Very little of that can be easily and
reliably determined by title alone.

For example, a Director of Marketing might be a marketing operations person or


a demand gen person. Or she could be focused on product marketing, solutions
marketing, or field marketing. And by the same token, the primary decision maker
for marketing in a given company could have any of a dozen titles.

By going beyond the title to understand the roles and responsibilities of a person—
on an individual level, specific to that person—you can successfully personalize
your outreach to make sure it is topical, timely, practical, and personalized. Even on
the simplest level, a marketing operations person is more likely to open an email
or engage with an SDR on a phone call if the phrase “marketing operations” is
mentioned, compared to a generic pitch targeting the marketing domain.

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

It’s easy to create quick personas based on title or a few other factors, and never
look back. But if you do the work now of creating accurate personas based on
role, company size, industry, job function, technology used level and department,
keeping them up to date will be much easier. It’s a valuable investment of time
and effort that will pay off in better engagement.

4. PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
FOR ABM
What is predictive analytics?
All marketing and sales teams deal with the pain of bad person and company data.
Between incomplete form-fills, attendee lists from events, and anonymous web
visitors, trying to make sense of this information can be a complete mess, not to
mention a huge waste of time.

Considering how far marketing technology has evolved, it’s surprising that the
database problem still plagues most marketers. It’s getting worse as marketing
continues to expand into new channels and technologies.

Traditionally, marketing and sales teams have looked to data and lead vendors to
help cleanse and enrich their data. The problem with this method—as most will How many people do you
agree—is that the data from many vendors can be out of date by six months if know who have switched
not more, rendering it useless. How many people do you know in B2B who have companies, gotten new jobs
switched companies, gotten new jobs in the same company, been promoted, or at the same company, or
even changed their phone number or address in the last six months? How about in been promoted in the last
the last six weeks? Or six days? Now multiply that by everybody and you’ll see the six months?
magnitude of the data problem for B2B.

In a typical day for anyone in sales or marketing, you will likely visit at least
one social or web channel (LinkedIn, Twitter, Google) to get more context on a
particular person or company (or even just to find an accurate phone number). You
do this because you know that whatever is available on the open and social web is
most likely the most accurate and up-to-date information.

The open and social web is comprised of mostly unstructured data—such as data
that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-
defined manner so there’s a manual element to finding the information you need
and then synthesizing it with your existing records. This process makes it difficult
to support at scale.

Predictive analytics platforms for B2B lead generation have entered the market
to address this challenge. They provide an intelligence layer to aggregate and
reconcile multiple data sources while also bringing in contextually relevant and
valuable external information. (Who just got promoted? What company has just
hired five new developers? What technologies does the company use?) This type
of platform not only eliminates the need for the majority of data cleansing tools,
but also provides an on-demand, virtual database of the most accurate person and
company information.

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

Imagine the time saved and the improved efficacy of your campaigns if your
database was on-demand and always up-to-date. It’s no longer a fantasy with
predictive analytics.

What is lead scoring?


According to David Raab, lead scoring means estimating which current leads are
most likely to become customers. This is used to prioritize marketing and sales
activities to achieve the best results. In practical terms, this lets salespeople
concentrate on the most promising leads while other leads are managed through
lower-cost marketing contacts such as email nurture campaigns.

Determine which leads are worth your time.


The process in this case is to start with a database of past leads and build a model
that identifies those who eventually reached a goal such as sales acceptance or
making a purchase. Scores can be assigned to individuals or companies, can be
based on both behaviors and attributes, and can use external as well as company-
owned data.

Behavior-based scoring measures “engagement” and changes over time.


Attribute-based scoring measures fit against an ideal customer profile and is
usually stable. Some systems assign separate fit and engagement scores.

Determine which leads have the most potential.


Lead intelligence derived from predictive analytics provides guidance to sales
and marketing teams about how to treat individual leads. The key element here is
predicting which leads are close to initiating a buying project, making a purchase
decision, or otherwise responding to a contact.

Models are built by correlating behaviors such as web searches or page views and
social media comments with important outcomes such as requesting a proposal
or making a purchase. The goal is to help internal teams apply their time to the
most pressing needs. Lead intelligence can also be informed by the product, offer,
and channel recommendations provided by content models.

Consider company context.


A key element of creating accurate personas is an understanding of company
context. There’s no such thing as “one size fits all.” Your targeted persona will
vary based on company industry and company size. Make sure your persona
segmentation takes those relevant company characteristics into account.

For example, the job level of decision makers usually depends on the size of the
company. A director might have ultimate say in the buying process and unlimited
signing and budget authority. Or he might have three levels of vice president
between him and the person who signs the checks. This can vary by industry
as well.

If you’re basing your persona segmentation on title alone, you may be aiming too
high or too low, or even both.

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS

5. PUTTING IT ALL IN PRACTICE -


ABM CASE STUDY
Imagine logging into your online bank account one day, only to discover $200,000
sitting in your checking account that you’d simply overlooked.

It’s hard to imagine how that could occur. (Wouldn’t it be great though?) Before
RingCentral launched their ABM strategy, they were unaware of 200,000 qualified
leads floating under their radar, on their own systems.

RingCentral, a leading provider of SaaS solutions for business communications,


was already running one of the most sophisticated demand-generation programs
in B2B. But they recognized that, even with their extensive expertise and
sophisticated lead generation strategies, an account-based focus would help
their sales and marketing teams achieve their full potential.

In implementing an ABM strategy, RingCentral cleaned up their database and


streamlined their approach to sales and marketing. Part of the problem, they
discovered, was that 30% of their inbound marketing leads were either inaccurate
or incomplete. They were either missing key contact info like email and phone
30% of their inbound
number, or the data they had was wrong. Worse still, two thirds of the contacts
marketing leads were either
in their CRM could not be matched to the accounts where they worked.
inaccurate or incomplete.
Inbound leads from highly-qualified prospects—including prospects who worked
for companies where RingCentral already had a foothold—were sent to the
general inbound queue rather than to the right named account team. Or they were
ignored altogether because the leads lacked the data needed to score them.

After transforming their strategy with ABM, powered by predictive analytics


and lead-to-account matching, not only were those 200,000 unmapped leads
rescued, but new inbound leads were automatically routed properly. The ROI was
clear. With well over half a million leads now routed using their ABM approach,
RingCentral has seen:

• 2.3x increase in percentage of actionable inbound leads.

• 6x increase in lead-to-account match rate.

• 65 hour decrease per quarter, per rep dealing with lead routing
and administration.

• Major reduction in operational cost by eliminating inferior data sources.

• Significant net-new pipeline.

And that’s what ABM is all about: taking a targeted, strategic approach to
sales and marketing that separates the wheat from the chaff and focuses your
company’s efforts on the leads most likely to convert.

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About Oracle Marketing Cloud
Modern Marketers choose Oracle Marketing Cloud’s digital marketing solutions to create engagement, orchestrate
experiences, connect data, and optimize interactions that attract and retain ideal customers. These solutions connect
cross-channel, content, and social marketing with data management and activation on a proven system that marketers
love and IT trusts.

Visit oracle.com/marketingcloud

About Leadspace
Leadspace predictive analytics, built on a Virtual Data Management Platform, offers customers best-in-class data and
intelligence to power B2B demand generation. Chosen by seven of the world’s ten largest enterprise software companies,
Leadspace helps marketers increase lead conversion and boost pipeline with net-new lead discovery, account based
marketing, on-demand database enrichment and predictive lead scoring, on both the company and individual employee
level. Leadspace is trusted by more than 120 leading B2B brands including Oracle, Microsoft, Marketo, RingCentral and
BloomReach. Based in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, Leadspace is backed by Battery Ventures, JVP and Vertex.

Visit www.leadspace.com

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