Imagine wanting to amaze your family and friends by cooking a new dish. You would need to have the key ingredients to start.

Well, the core components to account-based marketing (ABM) strategy is relevance and personalisation.

Since you are targeting selected set of accounts, the communication and offers to them will need to be relevant and personalised.

Start with monitoring changes at target accounts and understanding what matters to them. Use social intelligence to uncover what your prospect cares about. Then go ahead and personalise content marketing efforts and create offers based on their current challenges and needs. For example, this can be a prospect-specific report containing valuable insights accompanied with custom images and other deep personalisation tactics to deliver conversion. For strategic accounts, it could be an early renewal campaign with a compelling offer or a custom up-sell/cross-sell campaign.

It is also about assigning relevant employees with the prospect’s relevant employees. Take a step back and look at your sales and their past sales history, their previous selling relationships, the quality, and quantity of their connections to a specific account. Build a role-based list and match your employees with their peers at the prospect’s account. One suggestion would be to start from ‘top to bottom’ and assign VP or another c-level executive to his/her peer at the target account followed by sales lead, delivery to customer care, each with the responsibility for further cultivate  the relationship.

Sales and marketing alignment is of paramount to drive and deliver successful ABM strategy. You would need to set up closed-loop reporting where both teams work together from start to finish. Sales and marketing collaborate on account planning and mapping as well as deciding on offers and success metrics. This will include allocating resources, identifying the cost of marketing campaigns, the cost of converting prospect, defining levels of sales funnel and the marketing and sales initiatives that should follow to execute a profitable campaign and close deal. Teams would need to agree on detailed agenda moving forward containing content calendar based on the buying persona and actions required from assigned marketing and sales lead.

I’d love to hear your components and tactics for successful account-based marketing strategy. Also, welcoming any questions you might have regarding account-based marketing approach. Please post them in the comments.