10Stories Blog 3 Keys to Account-Based Marketing

If you sell a product that's worth real money, it's worth asking yourself if you should be using account-based marketing. It's easy for popular terms to trend towards irrelevance, so let's define some key characteristics of an account-based strategy.Instead of using buyer personas, assume the company firmographics are the most important characteristic.Instead of marketing and sales agreeing on the definition of a qualified lead, agree on qualified companies and create a joint list.Instead of leads in a funnel, look for increasing success within a company.All of these rely on your product having a large footprint inside a company. If an entire department gets only a bit more value than just a single person, then you'll probably have more luck with a wider approach. If you have a product that can change an entire department? You owe it to yourself and your organization to give account-based marketing some real thought. There are 3 keys to working a set of accounts as effectively as you can already work a set of personas.Have a thesis about perfect accountsI hate to be the one to tell you this, but you probably don't know everything.You might have a good idea of what your customer companies look like. Within this base, there's probably a subset that's much better for your company. They buy more, they renew at higher rates, they close faster, and they ask about new features because they get it. You want more of those customers, right?To start, take a guess their shared qualities are and write down all the other companies that match those characteristics. As you start to market to this list, you should already know how these customers buy. You know the channels, you know the messages they respond to, and you know how long it takes for them to start really engaging with sales.You might not know that this is what the perfect account looks like, but starting from your customer base gives you a solid guess. And if you're wrong? You'll figure it out quickly, because you're marketing and selling to all these companies in the same way. You can change it and try something else. You'll find the right shared characterstic quickly, I promise.Have a failure criteriaNow you have a list of accounts. Sales is calling them, you're demanding your vendors do IP-lookup ad targeting, and everything seems to be going well. What happens after 3 months when an account isn't responding?You need to drop it.At some level, you should never give up on a company that's the perfect customer. But you need to have some backstop that keeps you from dumping time and money into a pit that will never fill up. I've worked with reps who have made 250+ calls to the same account. Nobody ever picked up. Nobody ever returned their emails. Maybe that just means direct email and calls are bad, but it could mean something deeper isn't working. Some options to disqualify a company for a time:They just bought your well-funded competition on a 3-year contract.N (5? 8? 15?) people told your rep they have a solution and it's not important enough to change.They almost bought, but the deal died at the last minute because an SVP wouldn't fund it.This doesn't mean the account isn't the perfect customer. It probably means they're not going to buy for the next 6 months. That's OK. Pull them off your list, drop the name into a reminder, and put them back on in 6 months. You'll get another shot, but it's not worth wasting resources on an account that can't buy right now.Create activities, track to opportunitiesIf everything is clicking along, how do you make sure you're influencing the right deals?Remember that everybody in the same account works with each other. Many times in the same building. They probably even get lunch or coffee or beer together, and they gripe about work. They complain about inefficiencies and office politics. They talk about cool products they saw recently, especially if it's revelant.THAT channel is the key to the whole strategy. If you can get two people talking about your product, everything will suddenly start to go up and to the right. The downside? You'll never know that conversation happened. Your sales rep might, but there's certainly no metric you're tracking that captures that conversation.The only way to tap into that information is to infer it from success. If you get a lot of engagement from an account, it's not a coincidence that a director filled out your Contact Us form on a Monday morning. Make sure you're measuring marketing activity at the account level, and look for opportunities to open anywhere nearby. It's the only way to take advantage of that lunch-room conversation and know how to create more conversations like that.