Did you know that research recently published by Forrester showed that sales and marketing teams that use an Account Based Marketing (ABM) approach to their activities are 6% more likely to exceed their revenue goals than teams who adopt other tactics to hit their targets?
But what exactly is account based marketing? And how can you leverage HubSpot to make sure your sales and marketing teams are really working together to maximise your investment in the system?
Fear not, read on for a deep-dive into exactly why account based marketing could unlock business success.
Account based marketing is one of the fastest-growing trends in the B2B marketing industry for a good reason. In the past, marketers have tried to broadcast generic messages to the biggest audiences possible. Almost by definition, these messages have had to appeal to large numbers of people at once and can never address the specific issues that a single customer might have.
In contrast, ABM tactics aim to use data and technology to identify high-value prospects or accounts (i.e those who already have a strong interest in the products and services you’re selling) and then deliver personalised marketing communications across various channels to the key decision makers within these organisations.
This is where some of HubSpot's new Breeze AI tools come in. The new software means your teams can build pipelines and close deals with AI-assisted ease, ultimately transforming leads into loyal customers.
In particular, sales teams we work with are already loving several features including:
What’s more, the new Breeze Prospecting Agent can analyse your CRM data and automatically identify high-value accounts, saving your team valuable time and resources.
Breeze AI makes it easier to execute an effective ABM strategy because it helps your teams have the tools and insights they need to deliver the right messages and the right times to the right people of your key accounts. Because when you’re able to use AI to treat each customer as an individual, you can personalise their buying journey and achieve incredible results.
“When two marketers are competing for the same customer’s business, all other things being equal, the marketer with the greatest scope of information about that particular customer - the marketer with the most extensive and intimate relationship with that customer - will be the more efficient competitor." Peppers & Rogers, 1993
By aligning both sales and marketing to the same goals, your business can increase sales opportunities and prioritise the accounts that are more likely to convert. In turn this can deliver:
Luckily, a powerful CRM like HubSpot makes it relatively straight-forward to implement an ABM strategy.
First, you can use HubSpot’s analytics tools to identify and target your existing accounts that have the biggest potential upside. By using actual data from your own sales history you’ll be able to eliminate and disprove assumptions that might have been holding your business back from achieving its potential. Once you understand exactly what your best customers look like, you can start to plan out a marketing strategy that you know will work for them.
Then, it’s all about personalisation. Hubspot’s integrated marketing functions mean you can advertise directly to your target accounts, without waste. Imagine bringing key decision makers directly to your website with personalised email marketing, LinkedIn email sequencing, paid social media, SEO, content marketing.
Once you’re bringing the right people to your site, Hubspot makes it easy to engage and convert. By looking closely at your traffic data, you can start to see hidden insights into what information helps specific customers commit to a sale. And by tracking users across your site and activities, you can get even more data to use to build your campaigns. Then use personalised landing pages, smart lead-flows and even chatbots to help you make sure your customers are having the conversations you want them to be having, at exactly the right time. Again, Breeze AI now supercharges HubSpot's marketing capabilities.
And because HubSpot makes it easy to record the outcomes of conversations and attribute sales to activity it’s simple to see how your account-based marketing and sales strategies are performing and adjust to deliver even more growth.
Hopefully we’ve demonstrated why ABM could be the way to bring even more growth to your business. But what are the practical steps you can take today to actually start seeing this upside?
If you’ve not yet put an ABM strategy in place within HubSpot, we’d suggest you start by downloading our FREE GUIDE “How To Target Key Accounts With Account Based Marketing”, which contains a handy planning template to begin planning your account-based marketing strategy right away.
Alternatively, if you’ve invested in HubSpot to align marketing and sales and begun a digital transformation project to bring ABM into your organisation, but are yet to see any real ROI, ProsperoHub could help. Our experts can deliver a growth strategy tailored to your business, add focus to everyday sales and marketing operations, and even develop a fully realised lead flow strategy that generates more revenue.