The 3 Pillars of Account-Based Marketing

Account-Based Marketing: The complete guide

Definition, objective, and examples

Also known as "Strategic Account Marketing," ABM is a B2B strategy that combines both marketing and sales development. It's a comprehensive sales technique that sits at the intersection of inbound marketing, content marketing, marketing automation, and inbound sales. It's perfectly suited for companies whose target market consists of a limited number of high-value clients—those famous strategic accounts.

The idea is to implement a dedicated strategy for each target account with a high level of personalization to increase the conversion rate from prospects to clients. This B2B marketing technique also helps increase penetration rates within target accounts by promoting cross-selling and driving deep account knowledge.

The major advantage of this technique is that its ROI is significantly higher than "mass" digital marketing strategies typically used when dealing with a market that's limited in number of clients but high in value.

Account-Based Marketing and Inbound Marketing

You'll often find inbound marketing paired with account-based marketing, and rightfully so. The connections between these two methods are numerous, but the two strategies can actually exist independently of each other.

Inbound marketing is the art of attracting prospects to your website through content marketing and converting them into leads through marketing automation. Inbound marketing allows you to easily and precisely identify qualified leads and can effectively fuel your ABM efforts. We could model the relationship between inbound marketing and account-based marketing this way:

But it would be incomplete and biased to summarize ABM as merely a continuation of inbound marketing. It can absolutely exist without inbound marketing, though I strongly recommend not going without it. Account-based marketing can be implemented by identifying key targets and contacting them through modern prospecting methods. However, just like inbound marketing, ABM needs content.

Content marketing is what links these two strategies together.

ABM: The essential alignment between sales and marketing teams

Account-based marketing can be easily implemented in companies of all sizes. However, there's one absolute prerequisite for this strategy to work: collaboration between marketing and sales teams with a shared objective.

To be completely honest, I believe this alignment is necessary and vital, regardless of whether you use account-based marketing or not. Today's B2B sales reality shows that if you want to grow, you need to perfectly understand your customers and deliver value throughout their entire buying journey.

This requires skilled and empathetic sales teams. Sales teams that promote educational content (through blog articles, for example) with high added value, tailored to each customer type produced by marketing teams.

From there, it's just a short step to the sales methodology that should govern them all: Inbound Sales.

The 3 C's of Account-Based Marketing: Best practices to remember

There are three fundamental pillars in this strategy: targeting, content, and continuity. All three are absolutely essential and excellent ways to achieve success.

Targeting: The first pillar of ABM

The first pillar, the most obvious one, is targeting. This is the very principle of this strategy—addressing a precise list of key accounts. The objective is to create the most complete inventory possible of key accounts existing in your industry.

Even though we're talking about accounts and not people, you need to have the ideal company profile for your product or service in mind.

How many employees does it have? What industry does it operate in? What might its challenges be? Where is it based? What's its revenue?

You can then create a list of relevant companies by cross-referencing the ideal company profile with databases like Kompass or social networks, particularly LinkedIn.

This is also where you can leverage the list of leads that inbound marketing has helped you generate: newsletter subscribers, people who have downloaded your premium content, etc. Among these leads, you might identify key companies and even get an idea of your brand awareness with these companies.

Once you've identified key accounts, you'll need to identify the relevant contacts within each company. For this, I strongly recommend planning buyer persona modeling workshops specifically for your ABM operation. Who will be your users, who are the influencers, who are the buyers, and finally, who are your detractors within these companies? You need a very precise vision of these profiles.

Content: The second pillar of account-based marketing

No ABM without content. Nothing to add.

Okay, if you insist...

To implement effective personalized campaigns, you need to understand that the idea is to deploy all necessary means so that your key accounts become your clients. And "all necessary means" actually refers to a battery of high-value content designed to specifically address the needs of all your targets within a key account.

By content, I don't mean brochures or self-centered messages. You need to help them solve their problems and thus prove that your product or service is the best fit. For each piece of content, you need to illustrate it with concrete examples directly related to your key account.

Example: If you're selling a project management solution, you need to create effective content to teach them innovative techniques in project management and team leadership. In this case, your key account is a large industrial company in the automotive sector. Use examples of innovation projects in change management to overcome major technological challenges. Even better, illustrate with a case study directly inspired by what you do with... their direct competitor.

More broadly, all your content must be tailor-made for the target company but also for the target person within that company.

Of course, the secret lies in the fact that many pieces of content will be 80% identical between two competing companies among your key accounts. You must do the additional personalization work each time. Your return on investment depends on it.

Continuity: The third pillar and philosophy of account-based marketing

Strategic account marketing is long-term work. You must constantly update your list of strategic accounts but especially the list of people you're targeting and with whom you've interacted within these strategic accounts.

Content production must be continuous, and so must sales efforts. Furthermore, it's crucial that sales and marketing managers precisely track actions to maintain control over your sales process and ABM actions.

To help you, there's an extremely relevant sales method for sales that justify an account-based marketing approach. This technique is the MEDDIC approach. It allows you to obtain a significant amount of information and effectively track the most complex and lengthy sales processes.

As I mentioned earlier, deploying an account-based marketing strategy is within reach of any company that commits to it, and to prove it, I'm proposing a challenge with key steps: 7 days to implement an ABM strategy in your company.

Day 1: The ideal target company—Those famous strategic accounts

Start by bringing together your sales and marketing teams. Get them excited about this fantastic project that will require strong teamwork. Together, they're going to change how you develop, and their combined expertise promises a bright future... and therefore bonuses 😜 (just saying).

The first thing they need to accomplish on this first day is creating a profile of the ideal company for your products and services. What are the most important identification criteria: industry, revenue, location, number of employees...

Sales expertise will help understand which companies are most receptive to your offers in the field. Marketing teams can cross-reference this data with key metrics like revenue per customer, number of leads meeting these criteria, etc.

Goal: By the end of the day, have the typical profile of your strategic accounts.

Day 2: Target details, their journey, and motivations

You have your key accounts. Great! But you don't talk to an "account"—you talk to the people who work there. That's the objective of the second day of work.

Still as a team and not separately, organize a complete persona workshop to identify who within the strategic accounts is your target and who are the stakeholders. I'm not just talking about "who signs the check."

You need to understand who will be the functional decision-maker—in other words, who decides whether a solution meets the need or not. Who will be the solution user? Who will be the financial decision-maker?

And finally, also think about who will work against you?

If you're using this strategy, it's because you're not selling mugs—you're selling a solution with a complex sales cycle that's likely to change how your target works. If that's the case, you're definitely disrupting someone. Ignoring this means losing some control over your sales process.

Think about detailing as precisely as possible the stakes for your different targets. You can, for example, draw inspiration from the jobs-to-be-done approach to deepen each contact's motivation.

By the end of the day, you'll have modeled the typical profile of all your targets within strategic accounts.

Day 3: Create your strategic account list

After two days of reflection and taking a step back, you're now ready to build your databases. Using existing databases, your leads and contacts generated by inbound marketing, as well as external databases, list all your target companies. Be as comprehensive as possible and segment your lists.

Indeed, an endless list of strategic accounts without segmentation would be ineffective. Group accounts that are close to each other, for example by industry. This will allow you to structure personalized campaigns for each homogeneous target group.

Also, for each identified target group, try to match one of your client references—this will feed your upcoming content and help you identify sectors where you're already well-positioned.

By the end of the day, you'll have a list of target companies grouped by sector, size, or location.

Day 4: Identify people to contact

Final targeting step: take about ten strategic accounts. For each one, your teams must identify the people to contact. Remember, on day two you modeled the profile of everyone involved with your solutions.

You just need to put a name to each of these profiles for each of these companies. This might seem complex, but there's actually a tool that will help you a lot: LinkedIn.

It's the most up-to-date professional database on the market, and by using the right search methods, you should quickly find the right people. Think about cross-referencing this information with marketing databases, whether they're your newsletter subscribers, former leads, etc.

If you can, also check if among the people following your LinkedIn company page there might be some of your target contacts. You can check part 3 of our LinkedIn company page guide if needed.

By the end of this day, you'll have mapped the people to contact for your first 10 key accounts to initiate a sales process.

Day 5 and day 6: Time to fire up those keyboards

Now we're getting into the tough stuff. Writing effective content isn't always easy, and to be honest, it can take more than two days if you're starting from scratch. Moreover, to fully execute your ABM strategy, you'll create much more content and therefore need much more time. But let's be ambitious—the idea is to get you started and begin within 7 days.

You probably already have content for your SEO or client case studies, for example. Logically, you created this content to address the specific questions and challenges of your individual personas. That's a good foundation, but it's insufficient—you need to provide your main targets with ultra-personalized content. Rework the key articles on your website that will help them initiate their buying journey so they appear written specifically for them.

We agree, the substance isn't necessarily radically different. For example, project management remains project management whether it's at L'Oréal or Yves Rocher. But there are specificities to consider. Adapt your examples to best match your target's context. Demonstrate your experience with one of their competitors or detail a methodology specific to that company.

The important thing is that you're able to demonstrate your understanding of their daily challenges and help them solve them with content tailored specifically for your target.

At the end of these two days, you'll have your first content to address to your main targets to initiate the sales process and perhaps some first meetings.

Day 7: Sending and tracking your account-based marketing campaign

All that's left is to deliver this content to your targets! There are many different channels available, and you should choose your channels based on your target and your content format (video, white paper, article...).

Use the best commercial prospecting methods, social selling, and don't hesitate to use sponsored content and advertising campaigns on social networks.

Remember to track and measure the effectiveness of each of your campaigns, identify what works, and improve what needs improvement. ABM isn't a "one-shot" technique—it's a high-value commercial development approach. You'll need to evolve and find the right formula for each account.

It's a lot of work, I admit, but it's worth it. 80% of marketing directors believe this strategy offers better ROI than other marketing operations. And sales teams aren't left behind since they believe ABM reduces "wasted time" in ineffective prospecting by nearly 50%*. And by the way, this leads to better relationships between your marketing and sales teams!

The challenge to implement Account-Based Marketing summarized in an infographic