ABM (Account-Based Marketing) is a marketing strategy that focuses on the accounts that matter most to your business. These strategic accounts are the prospects with the highest conversion potential, the ones that deserve the most attention and effort from marketing and sales.
The general idea is to stop spending time, energy and money on a multitude of prospects, not all of whom actually interest you, and to focus instead on the right ones. An ABM strategy suggests selecting a small volume of prospects that are genuinely worth it.
But how do you recognise the prospects that are worth it and deserve the most effort?
Which doors are absolutely worth trying to open?
Which Mixdata features should you bring to bear to get there? And how do you set it all up…
In this article you’ll find the answers to your questions, along with the 5 key steps to a successful ABM strategy.
1/ Draw up a precise list of your strategic accounts
Mark out the playing field clearly, in other words your list of strategic accounts.
It all starts with a list of accounts, and to build it, Marketing and Sales need to be able to work together.
A well-run ABM strategy assumes that the marketing and sales departments are aligned, focusing on the same highest-value accounts and working to win opportunities on those target accounts. They need to be able to share information, share target-account lists and, above all, share as much knowledge as possible about the group of accounts and about each one in particular. The experience, intuition and field know-how of the sales team help the marketing teams define the famous “Ideal Customer Profile” (or ICP) as accurately as possible.
Another key asset to help them: on Mixdata, you can qualify companies against more than 800 different criteria to find the ideal target. Each search section and each specific criterion lets the platform user describe the market, the activity and the life stage of the ideal prospect precisely. From a single screen, you can then define a group of similar, addressable companies at the time of estimation. The search engine gives you the precise number of companies that will make up your “playing field”.
Simple yet decisive features:
- A simple exclusion system can be switched on to screen out companies that are already customers, so you focus exclusively on a conquest and new-business strategy.
- A Dataviz feature lets you visualise the make-up of this list graphically and how it breaks down by market (NAF, headcount, turnover, geographic distribution, etc.).
2/ Map out all the companies linked to each major account identified
When you work on strategic accounts, which are often structured, it helps to be able to quickly identify the entities that revolve around each of these ideal prospects. You have already started discussions, or even signed a first contract, with entity A. Knowing that this same entity A operates within a group of interconnected companies can open new doors to entity B in the same group. Your pitch becomes entirely legitimate with these companies, and you have a ready-made reason to call.
The Mixdata platform
- shows you which companies are linked to company A and lets you list them so you can work on them straight away
- draws up a complete, clear and visual map for you
- offers a list-creation feature to save you time
- helps you identify the specific decision-makers so you can work the whole group at the same time.
3/ Map the decision-makers and “decision groups” within each company
Once your key-account list is built, reaching the right decision-makers attached to your main accounts is just as crucial.
Who should you engage, follow or win over within each account? How do you address the right decision group, and who should you contact?
As we know, decisions are increasingly collective in large B2B organisations, and it can prove decisive to win over several decision-makers so you give yourself every chance of success.
On Mixdata
- the “Contacts” section on the company profiles brings together all the employees of a single legal entity and lets you filter by department so you can discover how a department is made up
- a clickable icon lets you go straight to LinkedIn to explore each person’s level of responsibility
- the watch feature on your contact book will alert you to any departures or arrivals among your contacts.
One of your contacts is moving on? Remember to win over their successor, and to stay in touch with your former contact in their new organisation. After a certain level of experience, decision-makers very often move either into a neighbouring functional area or into a sector close to their field.
A new decision-maker is arriving? Mixdata’s Appointment alerts feature will let you know when they take up their new role, so you can contact them straight away.
4/ Set up alerts on your strategic accounts
Account-Based Marketing (ABM strategy) relies on a small volume of strategic prospects to follow and monitor in order to build a unique relationship with each target prospect. As a result, the day-to-day life of Account Managers is full of a whole series of actions: market monitoring, account watching and monitoring, contact watching and monitoring, competitor benchmarking, but also meetings, analysis and recommendations, drawing up quotes… Some of these actions can be systematised by Mixdata.
The alerting feature available in Mixdata lets your sales people receive alerts and stay regularly informed about the changes that occur at each target prospect:
- the creation of new entities
- fundraising rounds
- changes of management
- mergers and acquisitions
- the appointment of new key decision-makers
- recruitment
- building-permit applications
Any moment in a company’s life can trigger an alert. The tool keeps watch for its users, who receive notifications when things move. You can then react immediately and make the most of the ready-made reason to call.
5/ Create targeted marketing and retargeting campaigns on your priority accounts
Key-account managers need to stay present all year round with the right decision-makers. They have to find ways to be there at the right moment, when the project starts to take shape.
Two levers to pull for this:
1/ Mixdata lets you create and deliver hyper-personalised content tailored to each account. We’ve called this feature SAM, Mixdata’s Sales Automation!
The benefit is twofold:
- offer individualised expertise to your high-potential prospects to maximise your chances of converting
- stay in your prospects’ minds as long as possible thanks to recurring, bespoke messages and content.
From Mixdata
- you turn your Contacts list into a mailing list
- beforehand, you have written your email sequence in a text-based, personalised, named format. We’re talking here about fairly simple sending scenarios. The message should quickly make clear why you’re reaching out to this person, what’s in it for them to read you, and offer a “next step”. You can plan 2, 3 or 4 emails… and set the sending dates.
- SAM animates your contact list, warming them up to give you time to call them all one by one
- you collect the openers and the clickers (the tool handles any unsubscribes for you).
Finally, you focus on the phone follow-up or the one-to-one handling of the most responsive contacts, for greater efficiency.
2/ Mixdata lets you cleverly target your key accounts on LinkedIn Ads by creating and uploading a targeted audience. The idea is to keep up your visibility strategy with this audience that is so crucial to you, through different means and across different channels.
You create your account list on Mixdata and export it in LinkedIn Ads Matched Audience format. We’ve created a specific, custom export just for this. All you have to do is upload it to Campaign Manager and launch your campaign!
Want to talk to our experts and see whether Mixdata can help you? We’re waiting for you here
Mixdata is the benchmark B2B database on the French market: 14M companies, 23M linked contacts, 3M emails… For any demo or estimate of your prospecting segments, we’re here! www.mixdata.com
