Tag Archives: Account Based Marketing

Turn Your Top Prospects into MQL’s with Lead Scoring

August 18, 2022 admin

How To Scout Players For The Pros? Score. Select. Offer. WIN.

If a professional sports team wants to become a dynasty, that organization will absolutely need to have a top notch scouting network. Sure, a team may be at the top of their game now, but time changes everything. Top players will leave or retire. Unforeseen injuries will impact the lineup. The team’s ownership needs a steady stream of talent coming through their pipeline to replace those losses and improve the team.

Your business also needs a way to be continually looking towards the future by building out their client lists. You can think of the marketing department as the talent scouts for your company’s team. The Adobe Marketo Engage platform can help you build a scoring program that tracks your prospects from unknown all the way through the sales funnel. Once Marketo Engage knows about a prospect, their actions will be able to push them through each stage of the sales cycle, assessing their quality and if they are deserving of a roster spot.

Assessing The Pipeline

Your scoring program should be the result of a collaboration between your Marketing and Sales teams. The two groups need to be candid with each other. Transparency will only benefit the end product. This conversation should range from email campaigns to job titles to business size to webinars to physical trade shows and even more depending on the number of channels you utilize. How important is each facet of your approach to generating a sale?

The point is they will need to assign value to prospects’ demographics and actions. What are the most likely things that will lead to a sales opportunity? The two departments should devote significant resources to the project. If you have strong reporting already, you should be going through it in detail. Without formal data, you could start with some standard industry best practices and rely on anecdotal input from sales representatives.

Each demographic quality and action can be assigned values depending on how their relative importance is viewed. At what collective value of actions and demographics does the sales team think a prospect is ready to be sold to? Once determined, this threshold is when a prospect becomes a MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). Just like a scouting network, Marketo Engage is sorting through all of your prospects and only bringing Sales those that are good for the team.

Finding The Right Prospect

Your business will decide what actions are most predictive of sales opportunities that closed successfully. Leadous can help you translate those decisions into a working Marketo Engage program, meaning your instance will be customized for your organization. You can leverage our expertise and experience to build any scoring program no matter how complex. We can help you make sure everything is built according to best practices so you can be confident in the way your prospects are accumulating points on their journey towards becoming MQLs.

If you had to establish your scoring program without hard data, simply by getting one up and running, you will have drastically improved your reporting capabilities which is very beneficial in and of itself. Just as a sports team’s needs change over time leading to changing interest in specific players, the scoring program will need to be revisited as you periodically reassess the scores you assigned to your demographics and actions. Actions that were once highly predictive may become more loosely correlated with positive outcomes over time. Expansion could place greater emphasis on new regional demographics. You may even find that your MQL threshold needs to be adjusted.

You need to revisit your scoring program to make sure it stays reliable. You will never make it perfect. The most promising player can still unexpectedly blow out a knee. Your goal should be refining the program to be as close to perfect as possible. Incorporate patterns and lessons learned from incorrectly identified MQLs to update your program.

You can also decide what to do with a record that MQL’d but still did not lead to a sales opportunity. Should they be recycled back into your marketing programs? If so, try to incorporate modifications to typical procedures in order to make them more likely to work out to a positive outcome on the next attempt. If not, sometimes a player just is not what the team needs, and the talent scouts need to move on.

Build Your Dynasty

A well developed scoring program will make both Marketing and Sales happier in the long run. It allows both departments to focus their energies in the most productive places. The Sales Team gets to gain confidence that the contacts they work with are more receptive to their efforts. The Marketing Team gains data that proves the effectiveness of their initiatives and how they lead to revenue.

The Leadous team is happy to guide you through the construction and maintenance of a scoring program that becomes a reliable model for your business. We can help your marketing department become the talent scouts that make sure your team never has a down year and is always in the discussion for a championship season. Reach out to an expert today.

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ABM and Marketing Automation – Name A More Iconic Duo. I’ll Wait…

November 1, 2021 admin

Batman & Robin, Han Solo & Chewbacca, Will Smith & Carlton Banks, Marketing Automation (MA) & Account Based Marketing (ABM) — they’re all iconic duos but only one can leverage the power of your data to grow revenue across your key accounts.

Combine the technology of a MA platform like Marketo Engage and the focused data used in ABM and a more powerful strategy is produced: Targeted Account Management (TAM). Marketo Engage users can use TAM to identify the best matches in your lead database for your sales teams and monitor engagement just for that group. Ultimately leveraging different channels to creatively target specific leads using ABM can accelerate customer acquisition while supporting retention, and expansion revenue opportunities for your marketing, customer success, and sales teams.

Teamwork is key to success with this strategy. Like the classic duos above both marketing and sales must be stakeholders – aligned and working together.

Identifying the Target
Pull lists of accounts that can be targeted together by industry, location, company size or what makes sense to your company. Determine account personas that can be reached across multiple channels. Get sales and marketing teams to align on definitions and share what is currently working to move leads through the funnel.

Creating Content
Have touch points across many channels. Marketo Engage allows your team to create multi-channel content and create campaigns that allow you to analyze and learn how to optimize your approach.

Highlighting Lead Scoring
Marketo Engage allows for scoring to measure behaviors that indicate engagement. Make sure both marketing and sales have agreed on what qualifies the best leads and analyze lead behavior to reveal how leads turn to opportunities. Review lead scoring campaigns regularly to determine the level of engagement of your accounts.

Leadous’ Marketo Certified Experts can walk through this live to get a feel for where you think your team is at as 2021 draws to a close. Depending on how in-depth your team would like to get with training and how much strategy is already in place we can assist with optimizing your company’s ABM and TAM- Contact Our Experts today.

Tips

The ABCs of ABM

August 12, 2020 Kelsey Moen

In our latest Leadous digital transformation podcast, Tracey Ellis, CEO at Leadous, and Holly Hartling, Consultant at Demand Chain, joined us to talk what’s new and what’s next with Account Based Marketing (ABM). Below is a quick highlight reel from the podcast, for the full episode you can listen on YouTube here.

Advice for teams looking at where ABM fits in their digital marketing strategy

While ABM may feel like the next big thing on the block, Tracey reminds us that we’ve actually been doing ABM for awhile. Most sales teams call it account-based penetration, where they base their sales efforts off a list of top target accounts. The only difference now is we’re plugging marketing into the equation earlier and more often so that before sales can even reach out, the accounts are warmed up and familiar with your brand story.

Just getting started with ABM? Start here

We say it often on the blog, you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. Your ABM strategy is no different. Holly suggests starting off your ABM strategy with a serious audit, including:

What are the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing programming? For your weaknesses, do you have the budget and buy in to level those up?
Is your marketing funnel working?
Are you tracking all the way through the funnel? If not, do you have the data and tracking to get you there?
Are you tracking the leading and lagging indicators along the marketing funnel?
Is your database clean? Do you have the contacts you need to make ABM work?

These are just a few of the areas to fortify to get you off to a running start with ABM.

The next step is to assign a sponsor for someone committed to the success of the project. With a clear owner, you have someone ready to take the project all the way forward.

Your sponsor should be pulling together documentation, aligned across both sales and marketing (and ops!) that governs the rules of engagement for leads and contacts through the funnel. Everyone needs to be on the same page about who can be communicated with from your database and at what points during the buyer’s journey before you get started.

Finally, your sponsor will want to clearly lay out what success looks like. Outline clear SMART goals, and make sure you have a plan for what you’ll do in the event of both success AND failure. Both are likely to happen at some point, plan ahead for mis-steps and you’ll be able to recover faster in real time.

For the full podcast, including more tips on preparing your sales and marketing teams for ABM and some of the measurable results Holly and Tracey have seen from organizations implementing ABM for the first time, listen here.

Tips

4 Steps to Launch Your Account Based Marketing Strategy with Marketo

May 10, 2019 Kelsey Moen

Close your eyes (metaphorically). Imagine your perfect, home run of a customer. The one in that industry that looooves the value you bring to the table. With the size, location, business model, pain points, etc that sit smack dab in the middle of your sweet spot.

Now imagine you had the chance to talk to that prospect, with a message that speaks directly to who they are and their pain points. Seems like a no brainer situation, right? That’s every sales and marketing person’s dream! Making that fantasy a reality is what Account Based Marketing (ABM) is all about, and why it’s become the new hero of marketing strategies.

ABM is a strategy that finitely targets your marketing tactics to your highest value, best fitting, prospects. And it works. In fact, more than 87% of B2B marketers say that ABM sees a higher ROI compared to other demand gen tactics.

So, how can you use tools like Marketo to reap the benefits of an ABM strategy? In this post, we’ll look at four key steps to get you on your way to implementing ABM using Marketo.

1. Select target accounts

ABM centers on knowing and targeting those “perfect fit” customers. Look at your ideal customers and their geographical and behavioral data that you can target. Get finite into industries, technologies, or any other distinct niches. This will help you focus your ABM campaigns with more personalized messages that are likely to convert those leads.

2. Establish effective goals

It’s ok to start small with your ABM strategy, as long as you know where you’re going. Make sure you’re working closely with Sales on what success looks like for your ABM campaigns, what data you’re going to collect to tell you if you’re reaching that success, and setting time constraints around that data.

3. Plan out your campaigns

ABM doesn’t replace all of your marketing channels, it enhances them. So make sure you’re thinking through both the personalized content for your accounts, but also what channels you’ll be using to make sure you have a unified, cohesive message that your prospects can’t ignore!

4. Evaluate success and optimize for the future

Check in with your sales team periodically and see if any of your account lists need to be retooled. Use marketing automation tools like Marketo to build, track, optimize and report on results so you can continue to tweak your strategy as you go!

Interested in implementing an ABM strategy for your business? Join us for our ABM Deep Dish with Marketo Consultant, Freida Bou, on May 15th. Or contact us here and let us lead you to success with ABM!