The B2B sales cycle can be a long journey with many twists and turns along the way. Therefore, you need a lot of patience and attention to your lead nurturing process. Especially if you are selling a complex service or piece of software that is going to affect multiple processes within a company.
So today we're talking about a powerful approach to add fuel to your lead nurturing strategy. This is focused on Account Based Marketing (ABM), an approach that has offered great value to B2B organizations in recent years. In essence, ABM creates "separate markets" based on specific accounts, making your marketing efforts very specific and personalized.
In this blog, we discuss three key aspects of ABM that ensure a faster lead nurturing process:
- Personalization using 'best-fit' accounts
- Integration of sales and marketing processes
- Customizing content
Although ABM is often used by companies targeting high contract value customers, these principles can be adapted to different B2B models. It's all about getting to know your best-fit accounts better.
Personalization with best-fit accounts
Personalizing marketing efforts is a primary strategy for generating higher-quality leads. To achieve greater personalization, marketers often use the concept of Buyer Personas. These are fictional representations of a perfect customer, created using data and educated guesswork.
Best-fit accounts take this idea to the next level, replacing guesswork with a scientific, iterative testing approach. You first hypothesize your best-fit accounts based on your best existing customers. Then you run experiments to validate these hypotheses.
By identifying common characteristics of your best current customers, you can go on to segment them. Next, you can create a list of similar companies to target. After this, create a targeted ABM campaign for each of these companies. Keep in mind the key decision makers and their pain points.
As you run the campaign, you collect and measure data to determine if your best-fit account hypothesis was accurate. Once you have the final results, they will inform your next steps.
An ABM campaign that uses best-fit accounts will ultimately save time on your lead nurturing process. After all, you won't waste time and resources on buyer personas that aren't realistic. Instead, you'll create intensely personalized campaigns for the most relevant target companies based on scientifically tested hypotheses.
Integration of sales and marketing
Lead nurturing becomes more time-consuming (and expensive) when there is insufficient communication between the marketing and sales departments. ABM stands out as one of the rare approaches to address this problem. It requires a specialized ABM team, which includes representatives from both the marketing and sales departments. The ABM team ensures that sales and marketing are on the same page when it comes to defining leads. In addition, they ensure that they are working together on a streamlined lead nurturing process.
The result is that the sales department doesn't have to spend time chasing down unsuitable leads. Instead, they get the leads they already know have potential. In fact, these leads now meet the thoroughly tested criteria of best-fit accounts.
Customization of your content
As we discussed the first part of this article, after you use your best-fit account to select the best target companies, identify their key stakeholders. They will be the people who decide if your product is right for their business.
By producing content that addresses not only the company's collective concerns, but also the specific needs of these decision makers, you can tailor your ABM strategy exactly accordingly. Calltraders can determine stakeholders' pain points and priorities through qualitative research. It also focuses on approaching and reaching people in relevant positions.
Once you have created the content that fits the individual pain points, you need to show it to the stakeholders. This is not just about automated email sequences, although they can play a role as well. Instead, this is where lead scoring comes into play, to dynamically adjust the content a visitor sees on your website. With this, the leads in your system that score high relative to your best-fit accounts get to see content that is highly relevant to them.
In addition, you can also reduce friction in the lead nurturing process by using smart sign-up forms. These change depending on what you already know about the lead. They are more likely to sign up for your white paper or webinar if they are not faced with a flood of empty boxes on the landing page.
By using ABM to address these key individual stakeholders with relevant content, you will naturally accelerate the lead nurturing process. Leads will be fully informed about your product, its use cases and its payoffs in relation to their own pain points and their own concerns. The valuable content is precisely tailored to their needs, bringing them closer to a purchase decision.
Important points of interest
Despite the (often) complicated nature of the B2B sales cycle, faster lead nurturing is possible. With an Account-based Tele-Marketing approach, it can be done:
- Achieve unprecedented accuracy in your marketing strategy by using scientifically tested best-fit account hypotheses to identify the most valuable leads.
- Align your sales and marketing departments through the ABM team, creating a more streamlined lead nurturing process.
For optimal conversion, it is important that you create and distribute accurate and, most importantly, relevant content that addresses the pain points and key stakeholders. Even though accelerating your leads to a sale is often counterproductive, a strong ABM strategy will remove time-consuming and unnecessary obstacles from the funnel for a smoother and faster customer journey.
