Is B2B Account-Based Marketing Right for Your Company?

Marketing is essential for your business. Without a strategic marketing plan in place, you’ll miss out on potential leads and growth.

With a strategic marketing plan, your business will skyrocket.

B2B account-based marketing (ABM) strategies are optimal for making meaningful connections with your target audience and landing your dream clients. But just because you’re a B2B company, doesn’t mean that ABM is right for you.

Luckily, we’ve put together the ultimate ABM checklist to help you determine if ABM suits your company, plus, 5 key questions you can ask yourself to check for ABM readiness.

Let’s get started!

What Is B2B Account-Based Marketing?

Before we go any further, let’s break down what exactly account-based marketing (ABM) is by taking it back to elementary school lunches.

Remember peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?

For many people, this simple three-ingredient meal was a go-to growing up. 

When you mix creamy peanut butter and jelly on bread, you get a delicious and nutritious combo.

Sure, you could just have a peanut butter sandwich, or just have a jelly sandwich, but when combined, you get the infamous ‘PB&J’ we know and love.

Account-based marketing works the same.

Let me explain:

Normally, a company will have a sales team that’s responsible for converting leads into clients and a marketing team that uses inbound marketing to attract these leads. Inbound marketing typically involves creating educational and engaging content that casts a wide net, reaching many people (not all within the target audience), and driving organic traffic.

While both sales and marketing teams can produce great results on their own, they’re able to make an even BIGGER impact when they work together.

In account-based marketing, sales and marketing teams combine their efforts and work toward the same objective by targeting very specific accounts (e.g., McDonald’s), or individual(s) within the account (e.g., the VP of Operations within McDonald’s).

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Sure, the sales team can do great things without the full support of the marketing team, just like you can make a peanut butter sandwich without the jelly. 

But when you mix the two, you create an iconic combo. In marketing, this combination often translates to landing high-value clients and making significant sales.

Let’s take a closer look at some examples of effective ABM.

Examples of Effective ABM Strategy

With any marketing strategy, your approach will differ depending on the industry, your target audience, budget, and other factors.

But the common denominator among ABM strategies is that you have to get ultra-specific about who you’re targeting, creating specialized content and campaigns to reach a certain company or account.

Examples of effective ABM strategies can look different for each account but may include:

• Sending personalized direct emails
• Implementing strategic ad and product placement targeting a specific account 
• Targeted videos showing how your business can bring value to a specific company
• Creating landing pages for each industry that you serve, with specialized ads leading industry professionals to the page that gives them the highest perceived value

I know what you may be thinking, “Is spending all my time and money targeting a specific company or niche industry worth it?”

Short answer: YES.

Long answer: ABM isn’t for every business, but if it’s right for yours, then having a detailed ABM strategy in place can help your business reap some amazing benefits.

Check out the next section to learn how!

Benefits of B2B Account Based Marketing

While there are an array of benefits to enacting an ABM strategy, here are some of the top benefits for B2B companies:

• Completely customizable 
• More effective in reaching your target audience
• Ability to build strong & lasting client relationships
• Land more high-value clients 
• Decrease in high opportunity costs
• Increase ROI
• Stick out from the competition

Let’s take a look at how Chatter Buzz Media has helped some of our B2B clients thrive with ABM:

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Overall, B2B ABM helps businesses generate revenue more effectively.

Sounds great, right?

Now, it’s time to use our ABM fit checklist to see if your business qualifies for ABM.

ABM Fit Checklist: Is ABM Right for Your B2B Company?

Remember the PB&J analogy we used at the beginning of the article?

Well, PB&J isn’t for everyone—just like ABM isn’t right for every B2B company. 

It’s important to determine if ABM is right for YOUR business before you invest any more thought into this marketing strategy.

If it is a good fit, then your company can benefit significantly and land high-value clients. If it’s not a good fit, then this strategy may do more harm than good, leading to wasted time and money.

Check out this ABM fit checklist to see if this marketing strategy is right for your B2B company:

Let’s take a closer look at each of these qualifications.

1. You Have a Long Sales Cycle (>180 days)

How long is your sales cycle?

If your sales cycle is short and transactional, ABM may not be right for you. Instead, your business should focus on demand-capturing activities such as:

• Ads (digital & print)
• SEO 
• Cold outreach

However, if you have a sales cycle greater than 6 months, then ABM may be a great fit!

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2. Your Average Contract Value Is Over $30k.

How much is your average contract value (ACV)?

We suggest considering ABM if the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio or ACV of your best customers is higher than $30k, and ask yourself the following:

Will it pay off to proactively market and prospect a specific set of accounts?

If your answer is ‘yes,’ then you’ve just checked off another qualification on our ABM fit checklist!

3. You Have Hybrid Sales

ABM is extremely important if you have hybrid sales.

Say you sell cutting-edge medical machinery, and you just made a sale to a hospital. Does your new customer know how to use this fancy new machine?

If the answer is no, then they’re going to need your expertise to overcome this challenge. 

For companies with hybrid sales, you may also offer…

• Product training
• Consulting alongside implementation
• Training on best practices

ABM can help you create customized campaigns and strategies targeting the specific audience that would benefit most from each product or service you offer.

 4. Your Total Addressable Market Includes Less Than 1,000 Companies

If your total addressable market is limited to 500-1,000 companies across the globe, then you have no other choice than ABM.

Since you don’t have a large pool of prospective customers to pull from, you’re going to need to have a marketing approach that will draw in as many of these customers as possible.

And if you have tough competition, ABM is a great way to position yourself as the best option with specialized campaigns that focus on how exactly your business will benefit a specific company.

5. There Are Multiple Buyers Involved In the Buying Process

ABM is all about building relationships and fostering trust. You and your team will have constant communication with your target company to discuss strategy and updates.

If you usually deal with multiple people who influence the buying decision, then ABM is perfect for you.

With this approach, you’ll have the opportunity to maintain a direct line of communication with potential buyers and guide them through the buying process, personalizing the experience to meet their company’s unique needs.

5 Key Questions to Check Readiness for B2B Account-Based Marketing

So, what’s the verdict? Does your business qualify for ABM marketing?

If so, ask yourself these 5 questions to check if your business is ready for ABM:

1. Have we created a clear ICP and account qualification criteria to begin building a list of companies to target?

An ideal customer profile is a hypothetical analysis of your target audience. 

The first step to check if you’re ready for AGM is to create a detailed ICP based on a variety of data and analytics related to your target client.

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ICP should be created for a specific vertical, taking into account…

• Firmographics
• Buying committee
• Account qualification and disqualification criteria
• Account segmentation
• Account enrichment

If you have a clear ICP, you can effectively target companies that will benefit from your product or service, and lead to an increase in conversions.

2. Have we created a unique value proposition for our ICP?

Does your company’s elevator pitch tell your buyers how your product or service benefits their business?

Just like with an ICP, your value proposition needs to be clear.

A value proposition (VP) tells your business what your company does, but most importantly how it can benefit the client’s business.

Here are some dos and don’ts you should keep in mind when crafting a value proposition:

• DON’T make your VP about how “successful” your business is
• DON’T create a VP that takes longer than 30 seconds to read/hear
• DON’T craft a VP that’s vague and confuses your audience 
• DO tailor your VP to specific verticals and individual buyers
• DO tell your buyers how your product solves their challenges
• DO tell your buyer how your product will help them to hit their objectives and key results 

3. Can we create a detailed playbook to effectively target our ICP and turn leads into conversions? 

Think about it: 

You wouldn’t expect to go on the best vacation of your life, and then show up to the airport without plane tickets or a packed bag, right?

The same is true about marketing. You NEED a game plan if you want your campaign to succeed.

To create a clear playbook that generates awareness and demand, manual account development is required: 

• Connect and engage with multiple buying committee members
• Identify their needs and educate them on different ways to solve their challenges
• Come up with personalized solutions

4. Do we have the time, manpower, and skills necessary to build a team that can follow through on your ABM plan?

You know the saying, ‘You’re only as strong as your weakest link?’

This applies to your ABM team.

Having a dedicated team that can commit at least 70% of their time to running the program for the next 3–6 months is a must.

With strong dedication from all members of the ABM team, your campaign(s) will stay strong and save time and money.

5. Are our team’s strategy and objectives aligned? Can we accurately measure the campaign’s progress and performance?

Marketing, sales, and company leadership need to be on the same page for ABM to work.

Don’t worry–executives don’t need to spend the same amount of time on the campaign as the marketing team, nor does the sales team have to use as much manpower as the marketing team.

The beauty of ABM is that you can adjust your strategy based on your business operations and the target account(s). 

Some companies combine sales and marketing to a 20:80 ratio. While others may find that a 50:50 approach works better for them.

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The key is to make sure that each team has a defined role that aligns with the ABM campaign’s overall goals. Only then can you define leading and lagging indicators to measure campaign progress, and get approval from executives and sales to move forward.

If you answered ‘yes,’ to any of the above ABM questions, then we have good news for you:

Account-based marketing is perfect for your B2B company!

Launch Your ABM Campaign With Chatter Buzz

Want to launch an effective ABM campaign but not sure where to start?

We can help.

At Chatter Buzz Media, we’ll work with your B2B company to create strategic ABM campaigns that boost conversions and increase ROI.

Reach out to our team of marketing strategists to schedule a consultation and learn more about how we can help your business enact an effective ABM strategy and land high-value clients!