picture of the abm playbook

How to Design Your Perfect ABM Tech Stack

Account-based marketing (ABM) transforms traditional strategies to help B2B leaders on a mission to achieve their growth goals. Measuring results brewed between a potent combination of marketing and sales teams is the first step. 

However, current processes are often fragmented, meaning leading practitioners must equip themselves with the latest ABM tools to forge a comprehensive strategy built to last. Fortunately, a simple remedy can help improve B2B leaders’ tactics and further growth goals. It starts with a premier ABM tech stack.

What is an ABM Tech Stack?

An ABM tech stack is a technology toolkit built for ABM. Composed of versatile tools, ABM tech stacks helps your business meet and exceed goals whether it be building initial engagement campaigns, personalizing outreach, finalizing reporting, or anything in between. A strong tech stack optimizes and streamlines campaigns and workflows while providing your sales and marketing teams access to helpful resources that can create replicable signature strategies. 

Getting started with a new ABM tech stack can be daunting. We’ll walk you through how to build the best ABM tech stack for your needs.

Which ABM Tools Do You Need? 

Now that you’re acquainted with ABM tech stacks, you’re ready to see how your ABM toolkit can work for you. Selecting the right tools for your perfect ABM tech stack starts with defining your objectives. Identify hurdles your sales team wants to overcome or processes your marketing team wants to be automated. 

Once you’ve mapped out your objectives, assess your current process:

- Are you already using an ABM platform?

- If so, is your ABM platform integrated with your CRM system?

In these circumstances, your primary ABM use case will also come into play. 

Let’s check out three primary uses of ABM to understand your options and how you can best integrate them into your workflow.

Customer Acquisition

Increasing growth is defined by your ability to acquire customers. With new customer acquisition, consider adding a tool to your ABM tech stack that establishes or enhances marketing artificial intelligence (AI). These tools can map customer journeys and help with list segmentation. Leveraging AI and automation can help you recenter focus and get you back on track.

If you’re ready to get back to in-person events,  activate event-triggered ABM tools. These tools can identify and optimize conversations with folks at target accounts and prepare you for desired events. Tools like contact enrichment can also help you by enriching important data that better prepares you to connect with contacts and build relationships. These ABM tools utilize intent data to help you offer the best solution at the right time to your desired accounts. 

Moreover, account list builders are excellent tools to identify and group accounts that match your ICP into a list, so you can uncover the best action to take next before your competitors even discover the accounts.

Customer Retention

Want to positively influence your bottom line and reputation? Focus on customer retention. Keeping current accounts healthy and happy is crucial. Bolster your ABM tech stack with customer experience tools to drive customer loyalty and deepen trust to continue the relationship.

To best serve customer retention, activate collaborative engagement tools that create alignment between your sales and marketing teams. These tools can also help to ensure touchpoints occur in a timely manner, keeping accounts active and providing necessary transparency across each customer relationship.

Account Expansion

Another use case, account expansion generates growth from current accounts through upselling and cross-selling. Integrating ABM directly into your CRM platform provides a convenient path to best-fit solutions for your customers. This is because it provides a direct line to each account’s strategies and goals and enables you to monitor key intent data that signal when your customer may be looking into a new solution. 

ABM tools in your tech stack like account penetration heatmaps and account scorecards provide insight into where expansion strategies are warranted. These tools can also help you further understand what’s worked for your customers and offer appropriate solutions for current and future challenges. 

Remember, much like ABM, there are ideal times to propose expansion in order to match expectations and engage at the right time.

Tune Up Your ABM Tech Stack With Automation

The best ABM tech stack is an automated one. Design your ABM tech stack with automated workflows. Automation simplifies ABM with convenient list-building features, streamlining aspects like demand generation and sales prospecting, and scaling measurement with automatic reporting. 

The best part is that automation can be done with the click of a button — as long as you have the right equipment. ABM tools such as in-market scoring models, targeted advertising tools, product announcement features, and scalable review systems can simplify each process and result in an easy-to-use ABM tech stack.

Reaching Targeted Accounts Requires Cross-Team Collaboration

ABM is founded on great communication across teams. Even though your teams have different objectives, it’s fundamental to organize your ABM tech stack with tools that align between marketing and sales and even revenue operations and customer success.

Conclusion

The best ABM tech stack will look different for each organization, but it’s essential to know your needs to design the best stack for you. Consider how unique solutions can help you accomplish your goals whether it be smashing your growth targets, seamlessly executing your strategy, or actively building strong customer relationships. 

ABM is hard to get right, but there are paths to success that can leave you feeling confident in your ability to grow. No matter what your needs are, we’re here to help you get there. Are you ready to see what ABM can do for you? Take our ABM Assessment to learn how to adjust your focus and start integrating your processes with the best ABM tools to suit your needs.