The Fundamentals of ABM: From Zero to Hero

You’re focused on maximizing your capabilities as a business. To do that, you need to implement flexible strategies that can change alongside your business. You need a playbook. 

Account-based marketing (ABM) is exploding in popularity. In fact, according to Hubspot, 70% of marketers reported using ABM in 2021. However, it can be overwhelming to get familiar with it, whether you’re new to the practice or simply trying to get it right. 

When you implement ABM, it’s critical to ensure you’re actually targeting accounts you want instead of adding to the noise to work with anybody. ABM is a tactic oriented towards success, but there are a few key factors that must be at play in order to do it well. The practice values customer experience and engagement over all else, and its indicators can pinpoint what you need to do to ensure your target accounts are happy with what you’re offering.

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Enter the ABM Fundamentals Playbook

What if we told you you could work a strategy that targets your top 100 in-market accounts and converts up to 20% of opportunities? 

Whether you’re new to ABM or looking to branch into a new sector, the ABM Fundamentals can help you complete your first end-to-end ABM campaign and transform your ABM into a strategy for growth. At the end of the day, you really need to have those accounts truly hear you in order to get to work. 

The ABM Fundamentals are guided by the five key steps of our Always-On ABM process to help you launch, execute, and measure your latest ABM campaign. Moving forward, you can build trust in your customer base and never miss another growth opportunity.

Step 1: Identify Your Top In-Market Accounts

The first step of the ABM Fundamentals sets your campaign up for success. Each week, you’ll automatically receive your top 100 in-market accounts with defined audience profiles. This reveals which accounts are the best fit to target and effect outreach. After you identify these accounts, the focus pivots to enriching those accounts. 

This enrichment is powered by different types of data including integrated intent data and firmographic data to start targeting those accounts. So you can begin prioritizing these accounts for outreach during the next steps of your ABM campaign. Prioritization will be tuned by account scoring that’s built exclusively around your data in your CRM to put forth the best strategy.

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Step 2: Actively Market to Target Accounts

It’s time to run your ABM campaign. This is where you’ll introduce your company to your target audience. During execution, you will launch your two-week omnichannel marketing campaign across paid media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and Twitter. As you actively market, you can map engagement at the account level to know when accounts are qualified and ready for sales outreach. Actively marketing spotlights your campaign to your top 100 accounts with precision, rather than casting a wide net on accounts that aren’t your priority targets.

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Step 3: Handoff to Sales for Outreach

After your marketing team finishes the marketing warm-up, it’s time to activate sales for outreach. Your sales team will run two to four-week sales cadences with automated outreach across email, direct mail, and LinkedIn to bolster your presence and put a face to your company. This handoff is fundamental to your ABM strategy, helping sales reach out to contacts up to 5x more likely to engage because they’ve been properly warmed up and are marketing qualified accounts (MQAs).

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Step 4: Measure Results

You identified your target accounts, enriched them, and successfully launched your ABM campaign. Now, it’s time to prove your ABM campaign’s ROI. Here, you’ll schedule regularly running reports to put value behind your campaign. 

Measure results using captured data throughout your ABM pipeline. This way, you can uncover insights into your ABM campaign’s performance and achieve up to 20% new opportunity creation.

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Step 5: Optimize Signals & Attribution

Wrap up your campaign with recommended performance optimization of your in-market account lists. With optimized signals, you’ll be able to effectively measure attribution and decide what to do next. Tools like real-time scorecards can help here. The final phase helps your business solidify future ABM strategies to optimize your next ABM program accordingly. This way, you’ll validate key performance indicators and improve pipeline velocity to achieve the fastest path to revenue. 

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Choose Your Next Direction With ABM

Once you’ve made it through the fundamentals of ABM using Always-On ABM, you have a choice to make. Which direction will your ABM journey take you? You could become a self-made ABM pro and continue using Propensity’s ABM technology of your choice to independently run your next ABM program. 

If you feel secure in the approach you’re familiar with, you can continue leveraging our ABM experts. When you choose this path, you’ll move forward in your journey by working hands-on with our ABM specialists to achieve 5-7x opportunity creation with future ABM programs. 

A successful future with ABM is attainable. Are you ready to take the next step? Take our in-market account data assessment to get your top 100 in-market accounts and get on a faster path to revenue.

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