At a time when B2B marketing budgets are under constant scrutiny, maximizing the impact of your account-based marketing (ABM) efforts is crucial for success. By narrowing in on best-fit accounts rather than broad market segments and surrounding them with personalized content, ABM enables you to get more out of your existing marketing budget by focusing your time, resources, and efforts only targeting accounts demonstrating the highest propensity to purchase. And yet, it can be easy to be sidelined by execution challenges or missed opportunities that lead to suboptimal results. By implementing the right strategies, you can ensure that your ABM efforts are not only effective but also cost-efficient.
So how can you and your team ensure that your ABM program yields the highest return? Read on for the top four strategies to help you get the most out of your ABM budget.
1. Keep Marketing and Sales Teams Aligned
Strong sales and marketing alignment is key to maximizing your ABM budget. Synergy between these two teams is crucial for identifying high-value accounts, crafting personalized content and messaging, and ultimately, closing deals faster. When sales and marketing operate in silos, it leads to miscommunication, wasted resources, and missed opportunities. A united front ensures that every dollar spent is propelling towards a common goal: engaging and converting your key accounts.
To achieve this alignment, start by establishing regular communication channels between the teams. Weekly meetings to discuss shared metrics from your customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platform (MAP) systems around pipeline generation, opportunities created, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (CLV) help maintain a consistent flow of information. These interactions encourage both teams to share insights on account behavior, feedback on content effectiveness, and updates on the sales pipeline. This helps both teams understand where and why pending deals get stuck or stall in the sales funnel, so marketing can adjust campaigns around specific funnel stages to help push these prospective accounts across the line. Alignment also makes it easier to perceive gaps and areas of opportunities in campaign performance based on what the sales team says is working and what’s not. This continuous exchange of information ensures that marketing efforts are finely tuned to support sales objectives, making your ABM campaigns more targeted and effective.
Both teams should also work together to co-create an ideal customer profile (ICP) that reflects marketing and sales’ visions of a high-value account. This collaborative effort helps in identifying and prioritizing accounts that are most likely to convert, ensuring that your marketing strategy is invested in engaging accounts with the highest potential return on investment (ROI). By jointly deciding on these target accounts, both teams can focus their efforts more cohesively, leading to a more efficient allocation of your ABM resources.
Moreover, aligning on content creation and distribution strategies is vital. Marketing teams should work closely with sales to develop content that resonates with the key decision-makers in your target accounts. Sales teams possess valuable firsthand insights into the challenges, interests, and preferences of these accounts, making their input crucial for creating compelling, personalized content. This collaborative approach not only enhances the relevance and impact of your ABM content, but also ensures that it effectively supports the sales process, making the most of your ABM approach.
2. Prioritize Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities
While the primary focus of most ABM activities centers around driving top-of-funnel (TOFU) and middle-of-funnel (MOFU) interest to build and fuel the sales pipeline, applying an account-based approach in your customer expansion strategies is an efficient use of marketing dollars.
The costs associated with acquiring new customers is five times more than retaining current customers and there’s only a 5-20% chance you’re able to close the deal. Moreover, studies reveal that it’s 50% easier to sell to existing customers than new prospects. Leveraging ABM in upsell and cross-sell campaigns enables you to laser-focus on creating more personalized experiences for them beyond conversion. Not only is upselling and cross-selling a more cost-effective way to generate more value, but it also helps maintain customer trust and build on the foundation you already have with them. These accounts are already fans of your company—why not drill down to ensure they remain loyal customers while exploring additional sources of value you can provide? 
To implement this strategy, begin by analyzing customer usage data and feedback to pinpoint areas where additional services or products could provide value. Engaging in regular strategic reviews with your client accounts allows for the identification of these opportunities. This not only demonstrates your commitment to their success, but also positions your offerings as solutions that can help them achieve their business objectives more effectively.
Collaboration between the sales and marketing teams is crucial in this endeavor. Sales teams can provide valuable insights into the client’s business challenges and goals, while marketing can support with tailored content and messaging that speaks directly to these identified opportunities. Together, this unified approach ensures that upsell and cross-sell initiatives are precisely targeted and highly relevant, maximizing the impact of your ABM budget by deepening and expanding your foothold within key accounts.
Once you’re ready to prioritize upsell and cross-sell opportunities, consider these helpful tips:
- Consider the timing and their needs: Get to know your customers and what’s occurring in their lifecycle. For example, you wouldn’t sell them a blog management platform when they just outsourced their blog management. Think of their current problems and the value your additional solution provides. Once they notice your services’ value, customers will ask for more.
- Map out your customer journey: Think about how your solution helps a company solve a business problem and how it can help them grow. When do they start seeing the fruits of their investment? Encourage your customer success team to share monthly and quarterly insights around client success, onboarding, and when they tend to acknowledge your products’ deeper value or need to adopt other services. Map out these cross-sell/upsell opportunities based on the performance and outcomes your product gives them.
- Encourage your sales team to check-in with customers: Just because customers don’t communicate directly with their customer success team members that they’re ready to expand services doesn’t mean they’re not interested. While marketing can track website visits and the product team can look at how customers use your product, determine a time frame for your sales team to check-in with existing customers. Could be six months, for example. They can use this time to gauge their satisfaction with your solution and if they can expand. Have your sales team group their current accounts by timeframe or readiness to expand into more solutions.
3. Establish Clear KPIs, Expectations, and Objectives
Having a clear understanding of what you’re working toward is fundamental for maximizing your ABM budget. Establishing clear key performance indicators (KPIs), expectations, and objectives not only provides a roadmap for your ABM efforts but also creates a framework for measuring success and optimizing performance. Setting these benchmarks allows your marketing and sales teams to focus their efforts on activities that directly contribute to achieving your business goals.
First and foremost, defining the objectives of your ABM campaign is critical. These objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Whether it’s increasing brand awareness within target accounts, generating more qualified leads, or closing larger deals, having a clear understanding of what you aim to achieve sets the stage for all subsequent planning and execution. This ensures that your ABM budget is allocated towards initiatives that directly support these goals, thereby enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of your campaigns.
When it comes to ABM KPIs, it’s important to select metrics that align with your overall business objectives and ABM goals. These could range from engagement metrics, such as website visits and content downloads, to sales-oriented metrics like the number of opportunities created, pipeline velocity, and deal closure rates. Tracking these KPIs allows you to monitor the health of your ABM initiatives and quickly identify areas that require adjustment. This continuous loop of measurement and optimization makes it easier to fine-tune your strategies, ensuring that your ABM budget is being used in the most impactful way.
Setting expectations is another critical component of this strategy. This involves establishing clear guidelines on what marketing and sales can expect from each other throughout the ABM process. For marketing, it might mean delivering a certain number of qualified leads or creating specific content tailored to key accounts. For sales, expectations could revolve around the timely follow-up on leads or the provision of detailed feedback on account engagement. By clarifying these expectations upfront, both teams can operate more cohesively and efficiently, minimizing wasted effort and maximizing the return on your ABM budget.
It’s vital to review these metrics regularly with all stakeholders involved. This not only includes marketing and sales but potentially also other departments that contribute to or are affected by ABM efforts, such as customer success and product teams. Here, leveraging technology to track and measure campaign analytics is key. Utilize a comprehensive ABM activation and ABM measurement platform to provide valuable insights into account engagement, campaign performance, and overall ROI. This enables you to track progress in real-time, make data-driven decisions, and adjust your strategies as needed to ensure you’re always moving towards your objectives and making use of every marketing dollar spent.
4. Leverage AI to Create More Personalized Content and Messaging
One of the biggest challenges with ABM is resource allocation. Many teams struggle to balance the time, effort, and resources needed to create personalized campaigns with the compelling content and messaging needed to engage the entire buying committee. And as the number and diverse makeup of these decision-makers continues to grow, this challenge will only continue to grow.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is a crucial component in maximizing your ABM budget by enabling the faster creation of more effective content. It can analyze vast amounts of data from various touchpoints to uncover deep insights into individual account preferences, behavior patterns, pain points, and engagement triggers. This level of analysis enables marketers to craft a higher volume of content and messaging that is highly relevant and tailored to each key account, increasing the likelihood of resonating with target audiences. By implementing AI for content personalization, you can ensure that your digital marketing materials speak directly to the unique needs and interests of each account. This could range from customizing email communication to dynamic website content, to personalized social media messages.
One of the biggest benefits of leveraging AI in ABM strategies—especially the use of generative AI (genAI)—is that by streamlining the content creation process, it frees up time for you and your team to focus on other areas to improve campaign performance. While ABM is a highly effective approach to reach all buying committee members with the content and messaging needed to drive them toward a unified decision, it’s still a largely manual, time-consuming, and resource-intensive process. The effort needed to create personalized content to scale consumes a significant amount of time, which can drain your team’s time and lead to errors, fatigue, and inconsistency. By accelerating and automating the content creation process, teams have more time to focus on perfecting messaging rather than ideating it, which allows them to dive deeper into campaign strategy and insights.
The Bottom Line: Drive More Pipeline with Less
Post-pandemic economic pressures and uncertainty has placed additional rigor around marketing spending and results. As overall budgets get tighter, marketers will need smarter strategies that maximize their efforts and improve operational efficiency. A data-driven, multi-channel ABM approach is the most effective way to deliver measurable results. Through a unified strategy, you gain the best view of how specific accounts are progressing through the buyer’s journey, allowing you to adjust campaign effectiveness in real-time rather than waiting until the end to realize what went wrong.
With a holistic view of your unified ABM strategy and efforts, the centralized ML Platform is the best solution for marketers looking to maximize their budgets. As the only ABM activation and measurement platform to combine three sources of intent signals, four leading media channels, and ROI metrics, we help you accelerate every stage of the buying journey to drive more quality conversions. Talk to us today to learn how we can help you maximize your ABM efforts and spending.
