How to Align Sales and Marketing for ABM

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is considered a game-changer to many organizations. However, there is a chance that you may lose a bit of sales when you implement this new strategy. 

Truthfully, many sales teams are missing by not getting on board with ABM. They are holding themselves back from necessary evolution that can help grow a company. Using account-based strategies will help improve your entire organization. In this article, we’ll talk about how to align sales and marketing for ABM.

Why Do You Need ABM and Why Is Sales and Marketing Alignment Important? 

Based on a survey conducted by ITSMA and the ABM Leadership Alliance, 87% of account-based marketers say that ABM initiatives outperform other marketing investments. Moreover, 97% of marketers agree that ABM has a much higher ROI than other marketing initiatives. So, if you want to improve your marketing strategies, you need to adopt an ABM strategy.

In fact, Account Based Marketing is not new. If you’re part of the sales team, you also need to think about implementing it. It is basically the evolution of sales, marketing, customer service, and so on. It will only work if the whole organization works together.

How is it related to alignment, and why is it important to sales and marketing?

Alignment between sales and marketing is beneficial for any organization. ABM brings the two teams together. Here are some of the data to prove that aligning sales and marketing is beneficial:

• Companies with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams experience 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates.
• Conversion rates improve when sales and marketing share ownership of lead nurturing and incubation.
• Leads are 67% more likely to become clients.

How Does Alignment Work?

1. Identify Target Accounts—Sales teams list big clients and accounts they wish to close deals with. 
2. Develop Personas— The sales rep understands the clients and gives insights into the development of really robust personas.
3. Find the Right Content—The marketing team uses the information from the previous steps.
4. Integrate ABM into Your Multi-Channel Strategy— Based on the insights from the first two steps, marketing and sales will both execute this step in different ways and on different channels.
5. Measure and Optimize—The sales reps help the marketing team identify the metrics to optimize an account-based strategy. Furthermore, the ABM model allows the sales team to identify the KPIs.

How Do You Get People on Board? 

As a sales team leader, you need to convince the team to be on board. The best way to start is to make the team understand the benefit of using ABM in their lives. Then, show how a successful ABM strategy helps them. 

ABM starts with selecting target accounts which are your qualifying leads at the beginning. After selecting target accounts, Account Based Marketing uses the personalized content that the marketing team develops for specific personas, accounts, and individuals. It may take a bit of time before they start seeing new ABM-generated leads, but there is a high percentage of qualified leads with bigger accounts. 

Conclusion

ABM is not a new marketing strategy that your sales team should be afraid of. But, to properly implement it, you need to work as a team. If you’re still not implementing it, then you should start proposing it to your team.