Approach
RIGHT
APPROACH
GIVING AN EDGE
HIT THE ABM HIGHWAY.
There has been a significant shift in marketing momentum from a volume-based lead strategy toward account-based marketing (ABM). It’s a move that allows organisations to focus their resources in an efficient, purposeful way to expand business with current customers and develop relationships with ideal new ones. In fact, according to Sirius Decisions, 70% of B2B organisations plan to invest “more” or “significantly more” in ABM (across technology, people, programs and agencies) during the next 12 months.
ABM isn’t new to us — we’ve been running ABM or “key account” programs for years to help fill our clients’ pipelines with quality leads and new opportunities. And now we’re utilising modern strategies, tools and technologies in our ABM programs.
While interest and financial investment in ABM continue to grow, in reality, very few companies are truly operationalizing account-based strategies and tactics successfully.
97%. MARKETERS REPORT HIGHER ROI WITH ABM THAN WITH ANY OTHER MARKETING APPROACH
BUT
41% OF ENTERPRISE COMPANIES AREN’T FAMILIAR WITH WHAT ABM MEANS FOR THEIR COMPANY.
There are many factors to consider, and we’ve created the ABM Roadmap to help you succeed. It reviews in detail the seven key categories to consider when developing and running ABM initiatives, from the most basic (crawl) to the more involved (walk) to the advanced (run).
4 WAYS TO USE OUR ROADMAP
- Learn about the range of ABM activities that can be activated and share them with your team to set goals.
- Assess which ABM-related strategies and tactics you have already engaged in and how satisfied you are with your work in these areas. Clarify your “state of the state” to shorten discovery cycles later.
- Prioritise the next ABM-related activities you’re not yet engaging in, based on how important they are to your organisation.
- Share the ABM Roadmap with your sales and marketing team members to develop a common understanding of priority activities and needs.
After reviewing this guide, you’ll know if you have the resources to successfully tackle ABM internally, or if you need outside expertise. If you decide it’s the latter, get in touch.
BRAND IDENTITY
Do your buyers love you? Do you make them feel happy? Do your products and services make them relaxed and confident? You’d better hope so. Buyers’ emotions have a huge impact on the purchase process. CEB reports that when B2B companies connect with buyers emotionally, they have twice the impact of brands that just sell on business or functional value. A successful brand strategy nurtures an emotional connection with buyers. It recognises their needs, speaks their language and gets them excited about what you offer. From there, it’s easy to guide them from awareness to conversion. Yes, that takes work. It takes commitment. But if your brand connects with buyers, draws them in and keeps them there, it’s more than worth the effort.
POSITIONING
A brand is your buyers’ idea of who you are. It’s their split-second gut reaction to your company. That reaction isn’t logical. It lives in the emotional part of the brain. It’s the most powerful decision-making force there is. And it’s in buyers’ control — but the right branding approach and positioning can guide and influence it.
To claim that valuable, emotional brain space, your brand positioning needs to be:
- Differentiated: It creates a difference of kind, not of degree, so you can resist commodification and sell on value.
- Simple: It distils a company’s value down to what makes it matter.
- Resonant: It makes the buyer the centre of the universe, and it keeps its messaging tightly aligned.
HOW WE GET THERE
To make your brand positioning differentiated, simple and resonant, we follow a framework called the Persuasive Process. This tried-and-true method for developing a branding strategy gets to the heart of what buyers expect from a company — and what strategic execution will deliver it.
Phase 1: Insight Gathering
To deepen our understanding of the market’s needs, we take a three-pronged approach to research. We interview internal stakeholders to crystallise your unique industry knowledge. We perform competitive research to understand the forces at play in the market. And we interview buyers in person and online, getting a valuable look into their mindset.
Phase 2: Strategy
We use those insights to decide which aspects of your company will resonate best in the market. Then, we build a brand definition around those key aspects. The brand definition spells out what your company will represent in the marketplace. It’s our flag on the horizon, and it will guide all branding work moving forward.
Phase 3: Creative Execution
Our team goes further than defining your brand strategy — we bring it to life, too. We’ll give you distinct, realised creative concepts based on your brand definition. Together, we’ll discuss and refine the direction, then roll out the chosen concept into the marketplace.
We help companies master branding strategy, including brand identity and positioning, but we don’t build brands. That’s because companies don’t create brands. Buyers do.
Today’s B2B buyers have high expectations for their purchase experience, and it’s not always easy to deliver on those expectations. A huge percentage of buyers complete their purchase research process online, without Sales. And often, they won’t reach out until they’re already confident a company can meet their needs.
Marketing success hinges on really getting to know your buyers through buyer research and persona creation, then using those insights to create an engaging, educational buying experience tailored to their needs.
PERSONAS
With buyers doing so much self-serve research these days, you need to convince them that you’re the right choice — before you even speak to them. How? One way is to create and utilise buyer personas to understand their challenges better than your competition does. B2B buyer personas provide deep, actionable insight into customers’ wants, needs and preferences. And if you structure your programs and content to resonate with buyers and meet their expectations, you’ll move them more easily toward engagement and sales.
THE MODEL THAT WORKS
Our marketing strategists will work with you to create buyer personas that reveal how top-of-funnel prospects think about and move through the by-cycle. These personas are full of information about customers’ priorities, challenges and decision-making criteria. And they work: According to Cintell, 71% of B2B companies that exceed their lead and revenue goals have documented and used buyer personas.
To build your personas, we follow the Buyer Persona Institute’s model. Why? It dives deep into the factors that motivate buyers to make a change in the first place. It results in personas that capture buyers’ mindsets as they decide to make a purchase — revealing what it takes to capture and keep their attention.
To get the most useful buy-cycle information, we base our buyer persona interviews on the Buyer Persona Institute’s Five Rings of Insight.
OUR APPROACH
Gathering Data
We perform comprehensive research to find out how your customers buy, and which buyer types are the best fit for your company. We use e-surveys, in-person interviews, phone interviews and data analysis to gather these insights — speaking with current, lost and prospective customers as well as internal company stakeholders.
The Five Rings of Insight
We conduct persona interviews based on the Buyer Persona Institute’s Five Rings of Insight framework to identify what drives buyers’ decisions. This method highlights buyers’ challenges, the roadblocks holding them back, and the reasons they ultimately choose one solution over another. By the end of our interviews, we’ll have deep insights into the real reasons people do or don’t do business with you.
The Final Product
We distil the information from our research and interviews into actionable personas that go beyond surface-level demographics. We provide insight into buyers’ strategic priorities, their role in the decision-making process, and their pain points — along with resonant messaging, customer journey and industry insights, and more. You’ll be armed with everything you need to shape marketing content, structure demand generation efforts, and connect with buyers.
ADDITIONAL SERVICES
In addition to creating buyer personas, we are specialists in a wide range of strategic B2B buyer research services, including:
- Buyer’s journey mapping: Determine your buyers’ needs and the questions they’re asking at each stage of their journey.
- Voice-of-customer research: Generate in-depth insights for marketing, branding or product development.
- Market mapping: Identify and prioritise market segments for demand generation or ABM.
- Lost customer analysis: Reveal actionable strategies for retention.
- Product launch research: Gain the information you need to help identify messaging strategies and gain awareness and velocity for your launch.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Once you’ve put in the time to create personas and tackle other key research to gain new insights, you’ll likely find that it’s time to start or accelerate digitally transforming your marketing plans and other areas of your business operations. We work with all types of organisations to help create plans to modify their processes, culture and customer experiences to meet the needs of today’s buyers in a changing marketplace.
Ultimately, sales and marketing teams have the same goal: to generate business growth. But just because they share a common mission, that doesn’t mean they’re automatically on the same page. All too often, marketing and Sales work in silos, without any idea of what the other team is up to. They don’t collaborate. They don’t agree on definitions or tactics. And these disconnects can cause serious pipeline problems.
Marketing Profs report that, on average, Sales don’t follow up on 80% of marketing-generated leads … and misalignment is often to blame. So isn’t it time you made sales and marketing alignment a priority? Aligning your sales and marketing efforts will empower both teams, maximise resources and improve marketing-generated revenue by 208% on average, according to Marketing Profs.
WHAT MISALIGNMENT SOUNDS LIKE
What do alignment issues look like in the real world? If you took a walk through a company with misaligned sales and marketing teams, you’d probably hear something like this:
Why doesn’t Sales just follow up on the leads we send them?
Marketing leads are no good!
What’s supposed to happen next with these leads anyway?
In other words, misalignment often sounds like frustration and finger-pointing. But the problem isn’t that Marketing and Sales are slacking off. It’s that they don’t share common goals or processes. And when your teams don’t have the same vision or shared tactics, they can’t work together to generate leads or drive revenue. So if any of these frustrations sound familiar, you could have an alignment issue on your hands.
ACCELERATING REVENUE GROWTH THROUGH SALES & MARKETING ALIGNMENT
Check out our proven tactics for getting your marketing and sales teams aligned to create a profitable demand-generation machine
Market Definition & Sizing
Want to know exactly whom to sell to? Our market definition, segmentation, sizing and mapping services will uncover your addressable market. From there, we’ll help ensure your goals are achievable and realistic and develop a market penetration strategy for the specific buyer types you sell to.
Demand Forecasting
A steady flow of qualified leads is one of every marketer’s biggest responsibilities, and to help you get there, we’ll start with the end goal in mind. Our B2B marketing strategy experts will map your revenue goal onto the Sirius Decisions Demand Waterfall, and then calculate how many leads are needed at every stage to reach that goal.
Baseline Assessments
The first step toward sales and marketing alignment is simple: find out where you stand. We determine both teams’ alignment baseline using our Marketing and Sales Maturity Diagnostic Assessment, along with qualitative measures like interviews and focus groups.
Sales & Marketing Alignment Workshops
No two businesses define a lead the same way — because “lead” isn’t a catch-all term. It’s a set of criteria that determines whether a prospect is buy-ready, and both teams have to agree on what that means. What makes a marketing-qualified lead? A sales-qualified lead? We’ll run a workshop to discuss these definitions and ensure both teams are speaking the same language.
Service-level Agreement (SLA) Development and Implementation
After defining a lead, it’s time to determine what Marketing and Sales should do with those leads. We’ll help you draft an SLA — a document defining expectations for both teams. This holds Marketing accountable for lead generation, Sales accountable for follow-up … and both teams accountable for revenue.
Additional Alignment Services
Even after setting up an SLA, Marketing will continue working with Sales for the long haul. We can help you create sales enablement tools that empower Sales, engage buyers and streamline the selling process, including…
- Territory play-books: searchable tools that filter prospect data based on criteria you select, so reps can quickly find top opportunities
- Sales portals: all-in-one online hubs hosting the resources Sales needs to engage buyers
- Quote and proposal generators: interactive tools that produce customer-facing proposals or quotes in seconds, eliminating manual effort
- Collateral: engaging assets — direct mail, PowerPoint, product sheets, pricing guides and more — that give buyers the confidence to purchase