Account-based marketing (ABM) has emerged as a powerful strategy for manufacturers looking to align their sales and marketing efforts to drive growth. It involves tailoring marketing efforts to a specific set of high-value accounts rather than casting a wide net. This focused approach allows manufacturers to deliver highly personalized experiences, addressing each target account’s unique needs and pain points. By targeting high-value accounts with personalized campaigns, ABM helps manufacturers build deeper relationships with their key prospects and customers. Before diving into ABM, it’s crucial to ensure you’re fully prepared. In this blog, you will explore the essential pre-launch ABM checklist for manufacturers, highlighting ten key factors to consider.
Essential Checklist Manufacturers Must Consider Before Starting ABM
1. Get your team ready for ABM
Your team needs to be ready for the ABM shift. This involves cross-functional alignment between marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Your marketing team should target leads resembling your ideal customers, and the sales team should increase their participation in marketing efforts. Both teams must move away from traditional funnel thinking and align on shared KPIs that measure success in building relationships with target accounts. The lead handoff between marketing and sales should be eliminated, as building a lasting prospect relationship is a collaborative effort. It is essential to ensure everyone understands the goals of ABM and their roles in executing the strategy. Training and regular communication are key to fostering collaboration and ensuring a unified approach.
2. Prepare a Target Account List
Identifying and agreeing on a list of target accounts is foundational to ABM. While salespeople typically work with TALs, marketers often focus on personas. Both are valuable, but the TAL is paramount. This list should include high-value prospects that align with your business goals. To create TAL, you must start by analyzing your existing customers to identify common traits such as location, industry, size, revenue, and challenges they face. This creates an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to guide your TAL. Consider creating multiple ICPs for different verticals or segments. Tools like Zoominfo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help build your TAL based on these profiles. Use data-driven insights to select accounts that have the highest potential for return on investment (ROI).
3. Understand Prospects Buying Behavior
Manufacturers must deeply understand the buying processes of their prospects. This includes knowing the key decision-makers, their pain points, and the factors influencing their purchasing decisions. A typical B2B buying committee often consists of seven members with varying responsibilities across the buying journey. Understanding how prospects buy involves identifying active buyers and providing relevant information at each stage of their journey. However, many ABM practitioners struggle with limited visibility into early buying stages, as B2B buyers often engage with sales only when nearing a decision.
To address this, leverage insights from experienced sales team members and conduct interviews with current customers to illuminate early buying stages. This knowledge enables you to create more relevant and impactful marketing strategies. It’s crucial to note that ABM reveals unseen aspects of the buying journey, but the goal isn’t to drive conversions prematurely. Instead, focus on delivering timely, valuable information without imposing conversion requirements during the research phase.
4. Develop Strategic Messaging
Crafting strategic messaging that resonates with each target account is crucial. Your messaging should address the specific needs and challenges of each account, highlighting how your solutions can help them achieve their goals. Personalized communication can significantly increase engagement and conversion rates.
An ultra-targeted marketing approach demands equally precise messaging. Segment your TAL and tailor your messaging to address each segment’s unique needs and understanding throughout the buying journey. Focus on guiding buyers toward a deeper comprehension of their challenges and the value of your solution.
Involve both marketing and sales teams in message development to leverage collective expertise and ensure consistency across all touchpoints. Align messaging with the prospect’s current problem awareness level, avoiding premature self-promotion. Consistent messaging from digital assets to sales presentations enhances the prospect’s experience and reinforces your brand’s credibility.
5. Create Effective Content
Crafting strategic messaging that resonates with each target account is crucial. Your messaging should address the specific needs and challenges of each account, highlighting how your solutions can help them achieve their goals. Personalized communication can significantly increase engagement and conversion rates.
An ultra-targeted marketing approach demands equally precise messaging. Segment your TAL and tailor your messaging to address each segment’s unique needs and understanding throughout the buying journey. Focus on guiding buyers toward a deeper comprehension of their challenges and the value of your solution.
Involve both marketing and sales teams in message development to leverage collective expertise and ensure consistency across all touchpoints. Align messaging with the prospect’s current problem awareness level, avoiding premature self-promotion. Consistent messaging from digital assets to sales presentations enhances the prospect’s experience and reinforces your brand’s credibility.
6. Implement The Right Tech Stack
Your ABM approach can range from low- to high-tech based on your budget. The more sophisticated your tech stack, the easier it is to manage multiple accounts. Some basic requirements to run an effective ABM campaign include Digital Content Hosting – Preferably your website, CRM to track contacts and accounts, and marketing automation platforms like HubSpot.
The rest of the requirements depend on how complex your campaigns are going to be. You can use advanced-based advertising to target digital ads to your target audience. You can use LinkedIn for larger campaigns and for ultra-targeted campaigns, you can invest in ABM platforms with advanced ad serving.
You can also leverage intent data to determine the buying stage of your target accounts. You can purchase Intent data as a standalone service or integrate it into a larger ABM platform. You also need to evaluate various ABM platforms based on their costs and capabilities, such as Account-based live chat, Technological data, Automated campaign orchestration, Predictive analytics, Dynamic personalization (ads, emails, websites), Automated sales alerts, Revenue attribution reporting, CRM, and marketing automation integration.
7. Manage Data Effectively
Accurate, actionable data is crucial for ABM’s success. A well-organized data management system ensures your team can effectively utilize the influx of data generated by your ABM program. Before starting ABM, you must ensure that all your customer and prospect data is current and accurately documented. The data must also be synced with your sales and marketing platforms even before you introduce an ABM platform. Your team must also decide where ABM data will be stored and how it will be used if not using a new platform.
Once you have decided on the ABM platform, it must be integrated with your existing CRM. Many ABM platforms integrate with popular CRMs, but custom data management might be necessary depending on your business needs. Syncing data between platforms, even manually via spreadsheets, can work but requires significant effort. Plan your data strategy upfront to avoid costly rework.
It is essential to effectively manage data as it provides visibility into account engagement, sales interactions, buying journey stages, known contacts, and next steps for nurturing accounts. Map out your data architecture based on the information needed, desired automation, and actions triggered by collected data. A well-planned data management strategy will help you save time money and achieving positive ROI faster.
8. Integrate ABM With Your Demand Generation Program
ABM is highly effective in niche B2B markets but should be complemented with traditional and inbound marketing strategies, such as paid search, SEO, print ads, and trade shows. Avoid siloing ABM and other marketing efforts, as this diminishes campaign performance. In some instances, your traditional marketing may attract leads that are not on your TAL but fit your ICP. Your team must have a plan to identify and integrate these new target accounts into your ABM campaigns. Identify how ABM can enhance your broader marketing strategy and create synergy between the two approaches. This integration will maximize your reach and impact across different market segments.
9. Establish a Measurement Plan
One major challenge for manufacturers adopting ABM is measuring success with the influx of new data. Many struggle to shift from an inbound mindset, focusing too much on conversions and getting overwhelmed by account-level data. Establishing a clear measurement plan is crucial for evaluating the success of your ABM initiatives. Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that align with your business objectives. Regularly track and analyze these metrics to understand what’s working and where improvements are needed. Choose a tech stack that simplifies measurement. Many ABM platforms offer integrated, automated reporting.
We recommend tracking the following metrics:
- Total Match/Reach: Are you reaching your target accounts?
- Account Engagement: Track ad clicks, site visits, and asset interactions per target account.
- Conversions/Connect Rate: Include all successful sales connections influenced by ABM.
- Opportunities Created
- Deals Closed/Revenue Generated
- Pipeline Velocity
10. Develop an ABM Roadmap
Launching an ABM program is a significant undertaking. Following this ABM checklist will give you a strong start, but trying to perfect everything before launching can delay your program indefinitely. Define your ideal state and identify key campaigns to launch first. Begin with broad targeting of named accounts and narrow your focus over time.
Start with campaigns that support current opportunities, aligning with your sales team’s existing processes to impact revenue quickly.
We recommend developing ABM campaigns gradually. Work backward through the buying journey, rolling out campaigns for earlier stages as you progress. Choose one key vertical for a full-journey campaign, start with customer expansion/upsell campaigns based on existing accounts, or pilot a one-to-one campaign targeting a high-value account.
Create a realistic ABM roadmap to get key campaigns launched quickly. Be flexible to adapt to new opportunities and dedicate time to analyze and optimize your ABM campaigns that are on-going. By focusing on critical areas first and gradually expanding, you can avoid getting stuck in ABM planning and start driving value sooner.
Launching an ABM initiative requires careful planning and preparation. By following this essential pre-launch ABM checklist, manufacturers can set the stage for a successful ABM strategy. With a dedicated team, a well-defined target account list, and the right tools and processes in place, manufacturers can leverage ABM to drive growth and build lasting customer relationships. It is always important to connect with an experienced ABM provider to ensure there are no loopholes in your ABM approach and misalignment between your existing content marketing, lead generation and sales strategy.
How The SMarketers Can Help?
We help B2B companies of all sizes generate opportunities within their high-value accounts by implementing omnichannel Account-Based Marketing (ABM) at scale. Our ABM experts can help you with technology-driven market research, intelligent account profiling, relevant messaging, and outreach, and account nurturing to ensure maximum conversions. You can also leverage our ultimate ABM toolkit that will help you implement ABM successfully.
We recently helped a leading Fortune 500 tech giant generate over 80 sales qualified accounts within 9 months with the help of our targeted abm for Indian MNCs. Get in touch with our experts to know more about our ABM services and approach.
