Your ABM strategy will fail in the absence of 'marketing'

Sounds obvious but really, this is happening and in all the businesses you wouldn't expect it to. Still businesses aren't keen to move away from the tried and tested approach. Fail to maintain relevance and engage the up and coming audiences and you will continue to see lacklustre revenue as a result. The facts are simple. If your business is not known for a particular service, or product at all, then you really have to educate your customers / clients. The way you need to do this is through marketing and that can be through a broad number of activities. You need to define your funnel first. Customers are doing their own research before the decision making process. If you aren't featuring on that research, you aren't making sure that they are really aware of all the products or services that you offer, you won't be getting on the shortlist, no matter how good a job you have delivered for them. Now this isn't such an issue for smaller businesses, as if you are selling into the smaller sized businesses you are likely to have crossed paths with most of C-Suite. However when it comes to some of the largest multinationals, the challenge becomes much more apparent.

Marketing is the key to survival

Remember that whilst selling new products and services into businesses that you have already worked with is fine, as long as you have created this awareness of the full breadth of your services and continued to build and develop your presence in the market as a thought leader. As people follow people, not businesses you need to ensure that your key people are building awareness and driving that thought leadership.

ABM means account based marketing

The most successful ABM strategies involve experience. How you deliver that depends on your product or services. You'll want to look at building communities, use tools such as webinars, roundtables to boost idea sharing, as well as workshops to help identify how you can help build a solution for that client. If you think that a series of meetings with internal stake holders who are responsible for each account is going to deliver business, you've got to understand why it won't. Your brand might be huge, but if you aren't educating and building awareness about what you can do, you aren't going to deliver results. You'll waste a lot of time, most likely years, before you get in front of the right people.

Nurture sequences are important, even for internal stakeholders

You've got to ensure that you continue to keep your leads warm and that also includes your internal account managers. Let them know what is new, what is hot and why they should take your solution, service or product to the account. They might need to deal with a side of the business that they haven't engaged with yet, so you have to help them to find the right people. Give them to tools to engage those accounts. That means a white paper, or something useful that resonates with the business and helps to move the conversation.

Timing is everything, but marketing will get you on the shortlist

Sales is all about timing and without any form of marketing and account development, sheer luck will mean that you happen to show up at the right time you need to be there. So make sure you prioritise marketing in your ABM strategy that enables those accounts to experience what you can do and deliver. You need them to buy into your brand and capabilities and build that trust. Simply put, customers need to know, like and trust you, to buy anything additional from you. If your CXO has no idea who you are and you're not generating awareness, you'll find it harder to break down the door to sell in your solution. Or worse still, turn up too late.

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