Focused Account-Based Marketing Strategy Can Transform Your Business 

Why waste resources trying to catch the attention of customers who have no long-term effects on your business? Ensure lasting success and profitability by incorporating strategic sales into focused account-based marketing that addresses the right people. 

With CatchMoby, you can put your business in a prime position to acquire strategic customers and expand the footprint of existing customers. Let our sales team identify, target, and close deals with customers that have a significant impact on your business. 

Start with the Basics: What is Account-based Marketing? 

Account-based marketing (ABM) makes your marketing and sales strategies work together in identifying your high-value accounts, personalizing their customer experience, and establishing a consistent and long-lasting stream of business revenue and profit. It is a highly-targeted strategy that businesses across different industries can implement. 

To further understand how traditional ABM effectively helps you generate higher return on investment in the long run, here’s a breakdown of the ABM framework: 

• It requires a collaborative relationship between strategic sales and marketing. To ensure your customers have a positive and engaging experience, sales and marketing must be aligned on the strategies, activities, and resources for each high-value account and on measurement and key performance indicators for success. 
• It engages your ideal buyer persona so you can pinpoint high-value accounts. Your sales and marketing teams should collaborate in building the ideal customer profile based on your target personas to attract and engage strategic accounts. Once you identify your ICP and target personas, you will have better opportunities for business growth. 
• It establishes an actionable account-based marketing plan based on business goals to drive the sales funnel. This starts with identifying your target accounts, engaging key decision makers, determining their needs and pain points, building an opportunity to help them or solve their problem, and presenting deals and winning business opportunities. 

Account-based marketing places high value in a personalized customer experience. So, it’s important to stay on the lookout for different ways to add value to your accounts and ensure they have an exceptional experience with your team, your solution, and your brand.
 

First Things First: Why Did CatchMoby Coin the Phrase “Focused Account-based Marketing?” 

Account-based marketing has traditionally had the right intention of focusing on accounts and personalizing marketing strategies. This is a level up from generalized marketing tactics with a broad target audience. But most ABM campaigns still target hundreds of accounts at a time. That’s missing the effectiveness and value of focused and targeted account-based marketing.   

At CatchMoby, our approach comes from decades of experience and expertise. To land whale sized accounts, you need to have a deep understanding of a strategic account and build important relationships with a few, select decision makers and influencers in that account. This is true, focused and account-based marketing and sales, instead of a new name for the same old approach and tactics. So, we coined the phrase “focused ABM” to further distinguish and differentiate the accounts that have a long-lasting effect on the relationships, reputation, and revenue for your organization. Focused ABM targets a few very select strategic accounts through hyper-personalized marketing until they are closed and won.
 

What is the Goal of Focused ABM? 

Focused account-based marketing is a hyper-personalized marketing and sales strategy that aims to create a trusting relationship with targeted and strategic accounts. These accounts will provide a significant return of investment with a lasting impact on your business. 

CatchMoby’s focused ABM helps you reach the right individuals in the right companies to land the right deals that are likely to have long-term impact on your business.
 

What are the Benefits of Focused ABM? 

Focused ABM is the purposeful targeting of selected companies and the individual decision makers within those companies who are likely to provide key strategic, financial, and reputational benefits for your business. Being purposefully selective means each connection and communication is hyper-focused on solving the specific challenges for your key accounts, with no wasted efforts or resources spent on non-ideal customers.  

Focused account-based marketing is responsible for aligning marketing and sales, maximizing your relevance to targeted or high-value accounts, delivering consistently positive customer experience, streamlining your sales cycle, measuring your ROI, and growing your account relationships.  

Here are a few of the benefits of focused ABM: 

• Focused ABM also results in the better alignment of your strategic sales and marketing teams and activities. It emphasizes the importance of relationships, reputation, and revenue. You build stronger relationships with your key accounts because of the personalized engagement you provide to decision makers within those accounts, creating a credible and trusted reputation in the organization. This leads to cross-selling and upselling throughout the company for a more consistent and predictable revenue flow. 
• Another benefit of focused ABM is increased customer retention. By having a hyper-focus on targeted and strategic accounts, you understand your stakeholders better to anticipate their needs and exceed their expectations. 
• Finally, because focused ABM boosts your ROI and stabilizes your profitability, your sales team is happier and your reputation benefits from marquee clients. People like being around other successful people, so you will benefit from a better reputation by attracting even more high value and strategic clients. Focused ABM is a different approach to building a stronger foundation for your business.  

As focused ABM evangelists, CatchMoby can bring the people, the processes, and the tools you need to build a different approach to your sales success.   

 CatchMoby Brings Unique Value to Focused ABM 

Establish a Marketing-Sales Alignment 

Focused ABM begins with a sound strategy you can implement to drive engagement and win business with key accounts. Here’s a step-by-step guide to building a comprehensive and focused strategy: 

Establishing an alignment between your marketing and sales teams must be the first and foremost thing on your agenda if you want to create and implement a successful ABM program. This allows your target accounts to have a seamless transition from a lead into sale. Your marketing and sales teams should agree on your goals and have well defined processes that allow collaboration for moving targets through the customer journey and into the buyer’s journey. 

Additionally, you’ll want to engage with proven systems and repeatable processes that take scalability into account. The right people, processes and tools are always the keys to creating a successful solution. With focused ABM, knowing the roles and responsibilities of each team member and how and when to engage can make the difference between success and wasted efforts. Work with a manageable number of key accounts at one time so you can provide the high level of attention you need to convert these opportunities into high value clients. Then, you can add new accounts as you convert others.  

Conduct Deep Research You Need for Buyer Personas 

One of the biggest mistakes that you can make is to jump into your ABM strategy without having an account persona. It’s one thing to finally achieve alignment of your marketing and sales teams; it’s another to ensure they’re targeting the right audience. You must conduct market research to identify the ideal customer profile and target personas. 

Consider these factors when building your personas: 

• Your ideal customer’s pain points, values, motivations, and objectives 
• Your high-value accounts and how they engage with you 
• Your business revenue model and customers’ spending patterns 
• Your current state of business maturity and growth trajectory 

Build Account Plans to Attract Your Target Accounts 

Once you have identified your target accounts, it’s time for your marketing and sales teams to coordinate in creating personalized account plans to engage with the right people within each key account and convert those accounts into customers. Each plan must be tailored to the pain points and aspirations of individual customers within each account. 

Here, you can use deep research and direct marketing methods to attract the right audience. You may experiment with custom landing pages, specialized and focused content development, email marketing, targeted social media, and other marketing channels that allow you to connect directly with targeted individuals inside your ideal accounts. 

Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams 

Cross-team collaboration isn’t always easy, especially for marketing and sales. But one of the best things about focused ABM is that it streamlines communication between the two teams to make sure they’re on the same page and moving toward the same goal. Focused ABM provides the collaboration and transparency your teams need to work towards the same goal through different means and to stay within an agreed-upon framework. 

Additionally, the alignment between the teams will likely result in consistent communication and interaction across all accounts you handle. In other words, any team member can pick up where others left off, for any reason, resulting in a seamlessly positive customer experience. 

Increase Relevance Among Target Accounts 

Focused Account-based marketing is all about personalization. You customize your campaigns, communications, content, and products or services based on the preferences of each account. By customizing these elements, you increase your relevance among your highly-valued accounts. Personalization also attracts the attention of individuals in targeted accounts and helps them engage with your team. 

But how exactly does focused ABM boost your relevance? A focused ABM strategy tailors your communication and content to show the specific products or services that address your individual target customer’s pain points, solve their issues, or that match their aspirations. It helps you adjust your business in a way that shows you have the capability to meet their wants and needs, therefore making your brand more attractive to target accounts. 

Maintain Consistent Customer Experience 

If you want to target high-value accounts that contribute to your brand’s long-term revenue and profitability, then you have to give them reasons to keep choosing your products or services. Account-based marketing contributes to this by allowing you to maintain a consistently positive experience for your individual accounts. 

Focused ABM helps you build long-term relationships and customer satisfaction by identifying your individual audience members, aligning the marketing and sales aspects of the buyer’s journey, and tailoring strategy based on what each target account wants or needs. Simply put, it allows you to diversify customer experiences without a break or disjoint in communication. 

Get a Higher ROI in a Shorter Time 

Account-based marketing helps you accurately measure your return on investment (ROI) for every high-value account you work with. This type of hyper-focused strategy creates an ROI that differs for each account, but is exceptionally high value, overall. You can use the best-performing ROI activities to determine what works; from there, you can modify your strategy to help you move closer to your goals. 

More importantly, ABM helps you generate higher ROI within selected accounts because it has a laser focus on each targeted account. Focused ABM lets you nurture and win the trust and loyalty of decision makers within key accounts. 

Streamline and Create More Efficient Sales Cycles 

The typical sales cycle goes from connecting with your prospects to presenting your products or services, to closing the deal and delighting them. It’s a generic cycle that businesses across all industries can use. But why settle for something so detached? 

Account-based marketing streamlines the sales cycle to target high-value accounts for building long-term relationships. This cycle starts by identifying target accounts before moving through the sales funnel with them. The difference from the regular sales cycle is that this one uses a specific set of highly focused strategies and tactics that are designed to win over fewer yet higher-value accounts. 

Build Stronger and Deeper Account Relationships 

The best way to expand business is to solidify and deepen your account relationships.  

Focused ABM is all about engaging with and building long term relationships with your carefully chosen and highly valued accounts, rather than taking a broad-based “shotgun” approach to close deals with as many leads as possible. While closed deals are good, focused ABM provides deeper strategic and financial benefits by landing key accounts built on trust and value. Because ABM personalizes the customer experience for each account, they are more likely to be loyal to your products or services.  Loyal customers can be your best brand advocates and advertisers. 

 Why is Outsourcing the Best Approach to Focused ABM? 

Whether you’re looking for new accounts to secure or trying to boost your B2B sales, it might be in your best interest to outsource your focused ABM needs. Here’s why: 

Lower Investment 

How does an outsourced team help you save money? Focused ABM requires a large initial investment because you would need hiring, marketing, research, and additional sales resources. You would also need to pay for expensive tools, platforms, integrations, and configurations to ensure everything is flowing smoothly. Outsourcing to the right provider gives you a fixed, predictable cost that is generally more affordable than paying for all the resources on your own. 

Shorter Time for ROI 

Hiring new resources and paying for new tools and platforms would require a long lead time; you need to set aside time to train or implement them. Specifically, getting new people up to speed and developing a new end-to-end process could take up to a year. When you outsource all of these resources and tools, however, you’re working with a team that is well-versed in focused ABM. You can start seeing results within months. 

To sum it up, you pay only for the tools and resources you need and see ROI faster. 

Access to Best Practices 

By outsourcing to a focused ABM provider, you will instantly gain access to all their tools and processes built on best practices from years of trial and error. Not only does this save you time and money on figuring out what works best for your business; it saves your customer relationship from having to go through the trial and error of determining what works and what doesn’t. An outsourced team already knows the best course of action. 

Don’t waste your resources experimenting when you can hit the ground running with an outsourced team’s best practices, tools, and technologies. Call CatchMoby to get started.
 

What are the Critical Components of Focused ABM? 

Focused account-based marketing has three critical components, namely strategy, marketing, and sales. Let’s delve into these components below. 

Strategy 

This is a critical component because every successful business move must start with a well-thought-out plan. A sound strategy helps you understand your brand value, solidify your intent and messaging, build a brand persona, and select your target accounts.  

Additionally, a comprehensive strategy shows you how to market to your target accounts personally and individually. 

Marketing 

Marketing isn’t as simple as trying to attract an audience and calling it a day.  

In focused ABM, this component pertains to the deep research you need to gain account intelligence, understand your influencers and buyers, be aware of competitors in the accounts, and familiarize yourself with installed technologies. Research also helps you develop a hyper-focused marketing plan and engagement. 

Sales 

It’s important to understand the needs of your sales team, provide strategic sales enablement, and develop an account plan together with your sales team so you remain on the same page. Make sure you’re aligned on revenue goals, business priorities, and which accounts to go after. This is the key to securing deals with long-lasting benefits. 

It’s worth noting that sales and marketing are traditionally disconnected. Through our focused ABM strategy, we can find a way to make them work together.
 

What Are Focused ABM Best Practices? 

Your account-based marketing tactics depend on the nature of your business and your target accounts. Regardless of these factors, however, here are some of the best practices to optimize the results of your ABM strategy: 

• Use account planning to help you keep track of your key initiatives, account relationship landscape, revenue and profitability, competitor analysis, sales opportunities and risks, and selling points. This unifies your ABM team. 

• Make sure all internal stakeholders who are involved in your account-based marketing strategy are aligned on your KPIs, targets, and goals for each account. You also want them to be aligned to your budget, resources, and differentiators for each high-value account you work with. 
• Emphasize the team alignment between your marketing and sales team members. Ensure that they agree on the type of content to use for engagement and which channels are used to communicate with your targets. The two teams must also be in agreement on how they will support each other throughout the customer journey and the buyer’s journey. 
• Filter your ideal accounts by picking target accounts based on best problem solution fit within your target industry, analyzing demand by tagging qualified leads as ideal customers, and reviewing relevant leads who are already engaging with your inbound marketing content. Focused ABM is about quality over quantity.  
• Personalize content to high-value accounts to boost brand awareness and increase your relevance to the right audience. You can further improve engagement by interacting on social media, building custom landing pages, implementing a content marketing strategy, and creating focused direct and personalized email campaigns. 
• Always measure your ABM results, repeating what works and modifying what doesn’t. Your key performance indicators may include deal creation, deal-to-close time, account engagement, and net-new revenue. The KPIs will ultimately depend on your business goals and objectives reflected by moving contacts through the pipeline stages toward becoming clients.
   

When Do You Need Focused Account-Based Marketing? 

CatchMoby helps you to explore a focused account-based marketing and sales program to grow land strategic accounts. With a successful history of growing businesses through building strong customer relationships and implementing focused marketing, we can help you generate greater return on investment, and land the accounts that will make a difference both today and tomorrow. 

How can we be so sure that focused ABM works? McKinsey says 30% to 50% of a B2B company’s revenue and profit comes from strategic accounts. From our own experience, we know that focused ABM strategies are ideal for growing B2B companies. 

To determine if you are ready for focused ABM ask yourself a few key questions. 

• Do you already have any key accounts that provide consistent revenue or reputational value? 

• Are you ready to commit to a different approach with a part of your sales organization that focuses on large strategic accounts? 
• Are you willing to commit the resources to support a strategic account program for at least a year? 
• Does the price of your average deal range from $50,000 to $100,000 or more?  

If you meet these criteria, you may be ready for focused ABM. FInd out whether it is right for you by talking with CatchMoby. 

 

Get Started with Your Focused ABM Strategy Today 

CatchMoby helps you acquire key strategic accounts when you don’t have the time and resources to do it for yourself. If your sales strategy isn’t performing, your marketing tactics aren’t working, and your customers aren’t growing, we can build a customized, focused ABM program to help you land the strategic customers that generate the high value and long-term relationships you need for transforming your business. 

• Our focused ABM team hits the ground running by providing the tools, staff, and processes you need to acquire or grow strategic accounts. 
• We’re well-versed in connecting B2B companies with strategic customers, therefore establishing higher revenue and rewarding case studies. 
• With decades of best practices and proven processes, we work with you to collaborate on marketing and selling into strategic accounts. Our strategy, marketing, and sales support are tailored to help you grow your business. 

Talk with CatchMoby to find out how you can integrate strategic sales and marketing as a focused account-based marketing approach to grow your relationships, reputation, and revenue, and make a significant impact on your business.