The higher the management level of the people you are addressing with your sales activities, the more difficult it will be to reach them with simple cold calls. A possible solution could be the interface between sales and marketing: account based marketing.
This involves identifying selected key accounts for your B2B business and reaching them with targeted messages and value-added content. While marketing is responsible for the development of the corresponding content, sales specifies which potential buyers are to be reached at which point of their buyers journey as well as how.
This is how you get to your account based marketing strategy in 5 steps:
Step 1: Define personas
Develop meaningful company profiles and the corresponding buyer personas that you want to address with your account based marketing. Keep in mind that this is not about making as many contacts as possible, but concentrating your efforts on a few promising key accounts. So the more precisely you define your personas, the easier it will be for you to select the concrete contacts later on.
Step 2: Analyze the buyers journey
Account Based Marketing is about reaching your contacts at the right time with the right content and messages and arousing their awareness and interest with useful value-added content. For this you need to know their buyers journey and know which questions and problems are relevant for your contacts at their respective levels. Only if content and timing are ideally suited to each other you will achieve your goal with the appropriate person. So you should match them in detail to the respective buyers journey.
Step 3: Gain contact data
On the basis of your buyer personas, start looking for suitable contacts. The purchase of large address databases is unlikely to pay off due to the high specificity of your personas. Instead, use other sources such as Xing or LinkedIn, job advertisements, news about suitable companies, etc. to find contact details. You can also easily automate this step by entering your company profiles or key accounts into Implisense Pro and the software will immediately provide you with all important up-to-date information and contact details.
Step 4: Develop a story
In addition to the WHO, the HOW of your approach is also decisive for the success of your account based marketing. According to the results of step 2, you develop a narrative that is suitable to arouse the attention of your contact at the respective point in time. Often it makes sense to highlight a possible problem of your contact at this stage of the buyers journey in order to make him aware of it in the first place. Important: The content with which you approach your potential buyers must be of added value. Without value for your contact, account based marketing will fail.
Step 5: Communicate
The operative implementation of your account based marketing depends on your perseverance. Do not want too much right from the start and take it slowly. After all, it’s all about particularly potent key accounts! Start for example with short comments and first contact attempts on a career network – without already pitching your offer. Then start carefully with targeted e-mails and always remember the principle of value added generation. Only when you have the honest attention of your contact slowly move towards your offer.
Account based marketing is not a sprint, but the big success on the long haul. However, if your preparation fits and you have the necessary patience, you will win promising new key accounts in this way. Ultimately, this makes it a very efficient tool between marketing and sales.