ABM is a Strategy
ABM is a strategy, not a channel, and you don’t need to spend $100,000 on software to implement a new strategy.
Here's how you can start running an ABM program without purchasing expensive tools like 6sense:
Let me clarify—ABM tools can be extremely valuable. However, it frustrates me when marketers say they want to implement ABM but are simply waiting for their CMO to approve new software. Building a solid ABM foundation begins well before you invest in software.
Here are 3 things you need to run an ABM efficiently:
Target account list alignment
The best ABM teams spend significant time choosing accounts and defining their account list criteria. Everyone in the team understands exactly why they are working with their specific list of accounts, going well beyond basic criteria like employee size and region.
It's crucial to understand the unique reasons customers choose your solution. Before making any major investments in ABM tooling, invest time in listening to prospect calls, engaging with the sales team, and thoroughly understanding these customer motivations. These triggers and firmographics naturally then become part of your targeting and account selection process.
Lean in on creative ways to build relationships.
ABM at its core is about building one-to-one and one-to-few relationships with target accounts. While many think of ABM as just personalizing landing pages and ads, it can be much more dynamic. Creative teams are increasingly using various engagement methods like podcasts, webinars, and event programs to forge meaningful connections.
This diversified approach not only makes ABM programs more efficient but also more enjoyable for the team to execute. After all, no one wants to spend their time endlessly personalizing the same page or ad for hundreds of different accounts.
Simplify tracking
One of the biggest pitfalls in ABM is over-complicating tracking. Keep it simple by focusing on a few key metrics before starting your ABM program. These should include measurements like account-level engagement and pipeline growth. The key is to get everyone aligned around the same metrics and utilize your existing technology stack.
For tracking and measurement, you have several options. If you're using HockeyStack, you can quickly set up an ABM dashboard using their templates. Otherwise, leverage your existing web tracking technology and create a basic dashboard in your BI tool to measure account-level metrics.
Treat ABM like any other strategy. Start small and don't rush to invest $100K in technology. Take the time to build a solid foundation first.
Begin by addressing the fundamental questions of ABM: Are marketing and sales aligned on WHY we're targeting specific accounts? This alignment is crucial for success and ensures everyone is working toward the same goals.
The next step is to clearly define WHAT those target accounts look like. Create detailed profiles and criteria that will help identify the most promising opportunities. Then, determine HOW you'll build meaningful relationships with them, focusing on personalized approaches that resonate with each account.
Only after you've confidently answered these questions and established a working process should you consider investing in sophisticated technology. This approach ensures you're making informed decisions about your tech investments based on real experience and proven needs.
What is attribution?
What people think attribution is:
Many organizations have misconceptions about attribution, viewing it primarily as a way to assign credit for sales and marketing outcomes. This often leads to teams focusing on individual touchpoints, trying to identify a single decisive channel, or simply attributing success broadly to "the team." These approaches can create unnecessary competition between departments and reduce attribution to a simple ROI calculation for budget justification.
This narrow view of attribution misses its true value as a strategic tool. When teams get caught up in claiming credit or obsessing over individual metrics, they lose sight of attribution's real purpose: understanding and optimizing the customer journey to drive better business outcomes.
What attribution actually is:
Attribution starts with understanding the complex patterns in buyer journeys, campaigns, and revenue paths. This foundational knowledge helps teams map out how different touchpoints contribute to success.
Organizations need to analyze data through multiple models to build this understanding and conduct incrementality testing. This creates a complete picture of attribution rather than relying on simplistic single-touch models. When combined with both qualitative and quantitative data, teams can make more informed strategic decisions.
The insights gained from proper attribution enable smarter execution across marketing activities. Teams can improve their outbound campaigns, account-based marketing (ABM) initiatives, list-building processes, and ad bidding strategies. They can also design and measure experiments to continuously optimize their approach.
Most importantly, effective attribution helps align all teams around revenue goals. Rather than creating silos or competition, it provides a shared understanding of how different efforts contribute to overall business success.
If you're fighting over credit or trying to track everything, you're doing attribution wrong.
Early involvement of marketing is crucial
Shaping Product Development
Marketing provides valuable insights that can guide product development from the start. By understanding customer needs, market trends, and the competitive landscape, marketing helps ensure the product aligns with market demands. This prevents wasting resources on features customers don't want and focuses development on solving real pain points.
Building Brand Identity
A strong brand identity is essential for startups to stand out in a crowded market. Early marketing efforts help define the company's values, personality, and unique value proposition. This foundational work informs all future marketing and communications, creating a cohesive brand image that resonates with the target audience.
Attracting Investors and Partners
Systematic marketing efforts signal quality and potential to investors, which can help funnel more capital into the startup. A well-crafted marketing strategy demonstrates that the company understands its market and has a growth plan, making it more attractive to potential investors and partners.
Creating Demand and Awareness
By starting marketing efforts early, startups can begin building awareness and generating interest in their product or service before launch. This helps create a receptive audience and potential customer base, making it easier to gain traction when the product is ready for market.
Informing Business Strategy
Marketing research and analysis provide valuable data that can inform overall business strategy. Understanding the market landscape, customer preferences, and competitive positioning helps startups make informed decisions about product features, pricing, and go-to-market strategies.
Cost-Effective Growth
Early-stage startups often have limited resources, making cost-effective marketing strategies crucial. By focusing on organic growth channels like content marketing, social media, and SEO from the beginning, startups can build a strong foundation for growth without significant upfront investment.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
Many startups fail due to a lack of market need or poor marketing. By involving marketing early, startups can validate their ideas, refine their value proposition, and ensure there's a market for their product before investing heavily in development.
Early marketing involvement is not just about promotion; it's a strategic approach that informs product development, shapes business strategy, and lays the groundwork for sustainable growth. By prioritizing marketing from the start, startups can significantly improve their chances of success in a competitive landscape.
Marketing is an Investment
Marketing should be viewed as an investment, not an expense, representing a significant mindset shift for management. This shift, while challenging, holds the potential to significantly boost product visibility, drive sales growth, and contribute to overall company success. Yet, it often faces budget cuts due to a lack of perceived value and tangible ROI by top management.
To bridge this gap and demonstrate the strategic importance of marketing:
Align your marketing strategy with business objectives by emphasizing revenue-driven outcomes rather than vague goals. For instance, instead of focusing solely on increasing webinar engagement, highlight how webinars contribute to lead generation and sales conversion.
Cultivate relationships with key stakeholders, including management and sales teams, by educating them on the value of marketing and involving them in decision-making processes. Having internal advocates can help elevate the perception of marketing within the organization.
Emphasize meaningful metrics that align with business goals, present data that links marketing efforts to revenue generation, and use storytelling to contextualize performance. Transparency in reporting results, both successes and setbacks, builds credibility and fosters trust among decision-makers.
Ultimately, to shift the perception of marketing from an expense to an investment, marketers must demonstrate tangible value and return on marketing investment (ROMI) and foster trust with management. Marketers can drive positive organizational change by adopting a strategic and transparent approach.
Role of B2B Marketing
Marketing transcends sales and should not be mistaken for mere lead generation; it certainly isn't designated to aesthetics alone. Nor should it operate under the directive of merely executing orders from sales teams.
In many B2B contexts, marketing is mistakenly relegated to:
Generating an arbitrary number of leads
Executing sporadic marketing initiatives as dictated by sales and executive teams
Enhancing the aesthetic appeal of materials
Such a misalignment squanders time and financial resources and substantially limits the potential of both the sales and marketing functions. In an effective business model, sales and marketing should act as complementary forces—akin to hunters and farmers, which are both essential for collective survival and prosperity.
Effective B2B Marketing Operation Should Encompass:
Revenue KPIs:
Focus on marketing-sourced revenue through inbound opportunities that evolve into business deals.
Avoid evaluating every initiative solely on immediate ROI; consider the long-term impact and value of market segmentation, thought leadership, and customer engagement strategies.
Strategic Ownership:
Clearly define the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) using detailed, current customer insights.
Map the buyer's journey and influence it effectively through precise positioning and messaging.
Select and prioritize channels, partners, and communities that align with strategic goals.
Awareness and Demand Generation:
Implement full-funnel marketing strategies to enhance awareness and generate demand.
Employ content hubs and nurturing programs tailored to address the needs and behaviors of targeted buyers.
Demand Capture:
Leverage high-intent channels for targeted campaigns.
Offer seamless experiences for inbound leads.
Utilize engagement thresholds and intent data to initiate strategic account interaction early.
Alignment between Sales and Marketing:
Coordinate on goals, metrics, and targeted accounts.
Unify around the ICP, including qualification criteria and segment-specific value propositions.
Campaign Orchestration:
Ensure marketing activities span the entire sales funnel.
Collaborate closely with sales and customer success teams to optimize timing and tactics for campaign intervention.
Analysis and Optimization:
Conduct thorough reviews of past campaigns to refine strategies, targeting the disqualification criteria, content, and messaging.
Recognizing that marketing is neither an extension of the sales team nor a mere aesthetic enhancer is critical. Marketing must be viewed and utilized as a strategic, dynamic force capable of considerably scaling an organization's market approach. This strategic positioning aligns with current best practices and sets the stage for sustained long-term growth and profitability.
LinkedIn Ads Strategy for B2B SaaS
Developing strategies that effectively generate and convert demand is crucial. Here's a structured approach to achieving this:
1. Educational Content Strategy
Firstly, focus on educating your target audience. High-quality content should:
Illuminate fundamental industry problems and solutions, mainly targeting those at the initial stages of the customer journey.
Drive traffic through engaging multimedia content, optimizing for both visibility and audience retention.
Establish a foundation for more targeted interactions, preparing audiences for deeper engagement.
2. Product Explanation
Ensure potential customers understand your product's unique value:
Introduce your product comprehensively, using both introductory and more detailed content layers.
Enhance product awareness through strategic content in the preliminary stages.
In the retargeting phase, demo videos can help you explore specific product features, reinforcing the product's utility and expertise.
3. Building Trust
Trust is the cornerstone of conversion:
Display social proof, such as testimonials and case studies from reputable companies, to validate your claims.
Guide potential customers to detailed stories on your website that showcase successful outcomes and underline the credibility of your product.
4. Conversion Tactics
Seamlessly guide prospects through the conversion funnel:
Engage individuals interested in your brand with targeted, compelling offers.
Use sophisticated lead generation forms to capture and convert interest efficiently, ensuring these prospects are quickly integrated into your CRM for follow-up.
Effective Techniques on LinkedIn Ads
In leveraging LinkedIn Ads, specific unconventional methods have proven effective:
Product Screenshots: Direct visuals of the product can enhance transparency and attract interest.
Demo Request Ads: Effective even for those who need to be deeply engaged with your brand.
Creative Design: Contrary to expectations, less polished creative designs can yield higher engagement due to their authenticity.
Lead Generation Forms: These are vital for capturing high-intent leads but require a robust follow-up system to be effective.
Through educating potential customers, building product understanding, establishing trust, and deploying targeted conversion mechanisms, businesses can enhance their market presence and customer acquisition rates. Consistently applying these strategies leads to long-term success, as they align with the ongoing digital transformation in the global payments landscape.
Sales & Marketing Collaboration
Marketing is undergoing some of the most profound changes it has seen in the past two decades. These transformative shifts impact the marketing team and spill over into the Sales team. Regrettably, many B2B companies are still clinging to outdated practices, resisting or finding it difficult to adapt to these changes. This resistance to change could significantly contribute to the mounting pressures being felt by Marketing.
The old way of Sales and Marketing collaboration:
Get input for targeting in paid campaigns
Handover as many leads as possible
Create pretty collateral
The new way:
1. Shared Goals
Sales and Marketing are two sides of the same coin, so it only makes sense that these two teams have shared goals in order to achieve success. Whether the goals are to generate a net new pipeline, renew contracts, accelerate the pipeline, or go upmarket, these teams need to work hand-in-glove.
2. Aligned Metrics
Then, of course, with the shared goals, the KPIs need to reflect on meeting those targets. Beware of metrics based on a Marketing to Sales hand-off of leads - it's a trap you want to avoid.
Instead, look for leading indicators to determine whether you're making progress toward meeting your goals.
3. Shared account qualification
It can be incredibly tempting to cast as wide a net as possible, but success is achieved by having a laser-sharp focus for campaigns and goals. Together, agree on the firmographics, technographics, and custom qualification criteria for targeting and list building.
4. Shared account scorecard
Taking account qualification a step further, take the time to agree on your prioritization criteria, such as revenue potential, relationship, product-need evidence, and vendor awareness.
5. Buying committee structure
Align the typical roles of champions, decision-makers, influencers, and blockers with their goals, needs, and pain points. This will allow you to build robust sequences, ad targeting, content creation, etc.
6. Joint account prioritization and planning process
Agree on the primary sources of account insights, intent, and engagement data, who is responsible for these sources, and how often they should be checked. Then, regular meetings should be set up to review the pipeline and prioritize newly identified accounts. Also, the insights and next steps for accounts currently in the active focus or pipeline should be reviewed.
7. Buying triggers and jobs to be done
B2B buyers don't buy because they saw an ad or an SDR email or received the fifth nurture email. They buy because their business priorities shift to a high-priority challenge they cannot afford anymore. Analyze and agree on":
- The buying triggers and the jobs to be done by your best customers, especially those with whom you have a competitive advantage
- Signals that can help you map clusters of accounts with the same triggers and JTBDs
- Content, messaging, and activities to market to these clusters
8. Joint programs
Define joint programs by defining specific sales and marketing activities to:
- Generate awareness in target accounts
- Nurture and move forward accounts that are early in the buying journey
- Collect key insights about target accounts
- Accelerate opportunity creation with highly engaged accounts
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Fixing marketing and sales collaboration is not just a challenge but also one of the most significant opportunities for 2024. With the right strategy, we can overcome the hurdles and achieve remarkable success.
👨🎓 Lessons Learned
Mistakes and failures are a natural part of marketing; it comes with the job.
We've all heard "Fail fast" or "Failing to plan is planning to fail." I know there are lots of opinions on the matter.
Regardless of your approach to experimentation and failure, what you do with the information learned matters.
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One of my biggest mistakes happened a few years ago. Chasing after some sweet marketing development funds, I rushed through a campaign to introduce the company to a new audience. In a rush to meet a deadline, I cut the campaign down to two mediums. Essentially putting all my eggs into one basket.
Worse yet, the campaign just focused on pain points. There was no storytelling or humanizing of the company—just bland pain points meant to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.
It fell flat.
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Remember, business is human. Tell a story and be relatable. Show an interest in understanding your prospect's business. It goes a long way to being a better marketer and hitting your goals.
Beware of short deadlines and the compromises they ask of you. Ask yourself if you can do everything you know you should do for the campaign to succeed. People consume information differently: video, short text, long text, audio, self-discovery, word-of-mouth, etc, so prepare your story in as many formats as possible to be heard.
Let's get off the MQL rollercoaster
It seems obvious; you want to skyrocket your customer base and supercharge your revenue. But here's the thing: an over-reliance on Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) can stunt your growth. It's time to break free from this cycle and explore alternative strategies to take your customer acquisition game to the next level.
So, how can you achieve this lofty goal? Simple. Follow these steps:
Step 1: Develop a compelling brand story 📖
Customers are drawn to captivating stories that resonate with their values and needs. Craft a brand narrative that engages and inspires your target audience. Bring your company's mission, uniqueness, and value proposition to life. Show them why you're the perfect fit for their needs. Remember, B2B is still human-to-human.
Step 2: Leverage the power of referral marketing 👥
Your existing customers are your biggest champions. Capitalize on their loyalty. Encourage and reward them for referring your products or services to their networks. Word-of-mouth is a powerful driver of customer acquisition, and it's time to harness its potential.
Step 3: Nail your customer experience journey 🛒
Want to win over customers and keep them coming back? Deliver an exceptional end-to-end experience. From the moment they discover your brand through to purchase and beyond, make every touchpoint memorable. Personalization, responsiveness, and seamless interactions are key.
Step 4: Build strategic partnerships 🤝
Sometimes, collaboration can be the key to growth. Identify partners who align with your brand and have access to your target audience. Together, you can create powerful joint campaigns, share resources, and tap into each other's customer base.
Step 5: Embrace the power of social media 📱
Social media platforms are more than just cat videos and memes. They offer unparalleled opportunities for customer acquisition. Create engaging content, participate in relevant discussions, and leverage the targeting options available to you. Engage and connect with your audience where they spend their time.
By diversifying your customer acquisition strategies beyond MQLs, you'll open up a world of possibilities. Remember, reducing reliance on MQLs doesn't mean abandoning them altogether. It means broadening your approach and exploring untapped avenues for growth.
Looming recessions are tough for marketing teams
But we just pulled off some fantastic results for the quarter with our Google Ads.
- 500% increase in Closed Won!
- 70% decrease in Cost per Closed Won!
I've been so busy in the account, working on keywords, ad copy, bidding strategies, and landing pages, I didn't realize how well the quarter was shaping up.
As much as I'd like to share some secret tricks to this success, it's a lot of hard and iterative work. Here are some of the highlights:
1. Used Opteo as an AI assistant to flag any number of issues, big and small
2. Set up ClickCease to deal with all the fraud and bot traffic. Worth every penny!
3. Jumped into SEMrush and studied competitors' strategies. It illuminated some keyword groups we didn't previously have in the account.
4. Spent time listening to Gong calls and talking with the Sales team to glean the keywords our prospects and customers use about Resolve.
5. Put to work just about every ad extension (now called Assets) Google has to offer: images, site links, company name, logo, and callout.
6. Refined the ad copy. With Responsive Search Ads, testing ad copy as before feels impossible. So I focused on getting the Ad Score to at least Good and updating the copy with any lessons learned from landing page tests and Sales conversations.
7. Under Keywords, I checked out the "Search terms" that triggered my ads, sorted by CPC, and excluded anything irrelevant.
8. Reduced the use of 'broad match' keywords, preferring phrase match.
9. About every three months, I went through all the campaigns and pruned any keywords that had yet to result in conversions for at least the last six months. I'd also hunt for new keywords to add to the mix and test.
10. I also switched to a Maximum Value Conversion bidding strategy - not all leads are the same, so providing Google Ads offline conversion data for the most valuable leads was essential. It took a fair bit of work to get all the conversion data set up and working correctly, but so far, it appears to be working well.
11. Oh, and plenty of copy and layout experiments with the landing pages!