3 Keys to Using Data in Account Based Marketing to Accelerate Growth

When your systems and campaigns are loaded with the right kind of data, it’s like driving a new Ferrari on the autobahn—limits are removed and your ability to speed growth and revenue generation is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Conversely, when your systems are loaded with bad data, it’s like rolling up to the autobahn in a Yugo—embarrassing, painfully slow, and destined to be passed by every other marketer out there. Businesses that use quality data typically enjoy an eight percent increase in profits and a 10 percent reduction in marketing costs. Using Benjamin Franklin’s logic of “a penny saved is a penny earned,” that’s like getting an 18 percent budget boost, and who couldn’t use that? In short, using good quality data to create highly personalized ABM campaigns, drives amazing results, like:

• 50% — Average increase in brand awareness
• 67% — Marketers who say it improves speed and accuracy of decisions
• 88% — Marketers who use it to enhance customer understanding
• 23X — Increase in customer acquisition

In today’s blog, we’ll cover the three keys to using high-quality data to execute a great ABM strategy. But first, let’s define what we mean when we say high-quality data.

The 8 Cs of High-Quality Data

If you want to max out the potential of all three ABM components in producing more lucrative campaign results and customer relationships, you need contact information that continuously embodies the characteristics of high-quality data. Your data needs to be:

1. Clean – Old and dirty data has been scrubbed and only fresh, clean data remains. Using inaccurate data leads to misunderstandings, irrelevant communications, and deeply unsatisfying customer relationships, a.k.a. churn.
2. Complete – Data gaps have been identified and filled. Data that’s missing key attributes hinders your ability to understand customers and prospects. It also prevents you from customizing communications effectively.
3. Current — Data is kept perpetually up-to-date. Outdated data makes it impossible to address the current needs of customers and prospects. What’s more, it makes your company and its communications appear out of touch.
4. Conformed — All data complies with the standards you have established.
5. Consistent — Redundant and inconsistent data have been normalized. When data hasn’t been normalized, it leads to wasteful duplicates and confused messaging that damages your brand reputation and customer experience.
6. Comprehensive — Data has been enriched by high-quality, third-party sources.
7. Connected — All data sources are integrated well and able to share data and updates.
8. Controlled — Data is controlled from its point of entry and across all data-using sources. Data that’s spread across multiple systems without centralized control makes it impossible to get a unified view of prospects, or to send personalized communications.

KEY #1: USE DATA TO IDENTIFY HIGH-VALUE ACCOUNTS

According to SiriusDecisions, 91 percent of companies that employ ABM strategies increase their average deal size. This statistic demonstrates the importance and effectiveness of correctly identifying high-value accounts. ABM is not for everyone — literally. With ABM, your focus is not on how many you reach, but who you are reaching. Instead of casting a wide net and seeing who might respond to your campaigns, ABM requires you to think about who your ideal customer is first, and then create a marketing campaign tailored to their interests. In short, you widen the horizons of your sales funnel by narrowing your focus and spending the majority of your time, efforts and budget on a select set of ideal customers.

Be Strategic About Targeting the Right People

Using a dashboard to analyze your organization’s data is the best way to quickly and accurately identify accounts in your database that have the potential to bring in the most revenue. To ensure you choose wisely, look at the historical performance of each account and compare it to your ideal customer profiles to determine who will make the list of accounts upon which your teams will focus their time, energy and resources. A few questions to consider include:

• Which accounts are most profitable now?
• Which accounts have dropped in profitability?
• What data characteristics are good indicators of sales success?
• What attributes are ideal for our products/services?
• What characteristics are best for exempting an account from our ABM campaigns?

Use Data-Driven Customer Personas

Selecting the right accounts to focus on can be intimidating, especially if you have thousands upon thousands of contacts and typically cast a wide net. Creating customer personas before selecting target accounts for ABM can help your marketing teams connect a real person to the segment they are marketing to and develop messages that resonate. However, this is a step that needs to be data-driven in order to have meaning. Yes, a persona has creative elements, but it shouldn’t be wholly woven out of hunches from what sales and marketing leaders think is the right type of customer.

Use Data to Eliminate Account Selection Bias

Whereas all humans are biased, data is not. To ensure you target the right people, search your data dashboard for actionable insights. A few places to look for patterns and similarities in the data are:

• Customers who regularly spend a certain amount
• Sales spikes and dips by location
• Customers who dropped out mid-funnel
• Repeat vs. lapsed customers
• Revenue generated by first time customers

Some marketing dashboards include the ability to identify ideal customers based on current and historical sales and marketing data. This makes it much easier to create segmented lists that are founded on characteristics linked to increases in purchases. Keep in mind ABM is about building personal relationships with your best customers and those who have the potential to become great customers. When you understand who your best customers are, you can use those data insights to target similar people, create campaigns that inspire action, and enjoy all the success ABM promises.

KEY #2: USE DATA TO PERSONALIZE MESSAGES, CAMPAIGNS AND CONTENT RECOMMENDATIONS

When you make it your department’s mission to understand an account’s business needs, pain points, and decision-making hierarchy, you are able to tailor your communications to meet those specific needs. And when people get a personalized message, it makes them like you and whatever you are selling much more because by all accounts it appears that you are an intuitive listener. To show you just how essential personalized data is to your ABM strategy, check out the latest statistics and results you should be experiencing:

• ~40% more revenue is generated by companies that engage in ABM personalization
• 89% of marketers see a positive ROI when personalizing campaigns
• 9% of marketers say that for every dollar spent on personalization they see a $20+ ROI
• 61% of high-growth companies use first-party data in their personalization strategies

ABM Is All About Automating Data to Personalize Messages

What makes ABM so powerful and effective is the ability to send personalized messages to individual customers. What makes sending personalized content to thousands of customers possible is message automation. A good campaign messaging tool should not only automate personalized messages, but integrate seamlessly with your marketing automation platform and other tools, so that you can use data from all storehouses to send highly personalized marketing campaigns on every channel you use.

When integrated correctly, these tools work together to pull customer-facing marketing content from sources within your organization. Once the content has been pulled and put in a queue, it can be sent as part of marketing’s automated cross-channel campaigns. It can also be used by your sales team, who can instantly select and send pre-screened messages via their favorite sales software.

Leveraging Data for Next Level Personalization

Marketing to every customer in a way that resonates deeply, requires you to be selective in how personal you are with them. There are a variety of levels of personalization, from broad approaches that leverage basic contact data (industry, job-title, geo, etc.) to highly customized content derived from enhanced customer behavior data (order history, habits, social leanings, etc.).

Whether you are creating content for a specific segment of accounts or a single account, the trick is to use your data well as you populate campaigns. It may take some messaging trials and errors to find your sweet spot, but strive to achieve a level of personalization that feels organic and friendly to customers, not invasive. A few ways to leverage data to personalize content include:

• Addressing the recipient by name and noting their title and role
• Using images that reflect the customer’s industry and experience
• Sending case studies specific to the customer’s industry or market
• Adding a personal note to pieces through a sales enablement tool

Benefits of Integrating Martech to Share Data

When you integrate a campaign messaging tool with the other martech tools in your ecosystem, it benefits your ABM strategy in several ways. Integrated tools make it easy to share data and:

• Generate and segment ABM lists
• Coordinate and automate personalized omni-channel campaigns
• Reduce content development costs
• Repurpose content for a variety of channels (SMS, RSS, chat, email, direct mail, voice, etc.)
• Establish a searchable library of content that marketing and sales can use on-demand 

KEY #3: USE DATA TO FOSTER SALES ENABLEMENT AND MAKE ABM MAGIC HAPPEN

When marketing and sales live in world of siloed data, mixed messages and customer confusion happens and ABM becomes completely impossible. However, when these two pillars of modern businesses integrate tools, share data that upholds the 8 C’s (clean, complete, current, conformed, consistent, connected, comprehensive, controlled), and work together to present a unified brand, sales records are set and broken with delightful regularity. According to CSO Insights, companies with a solid sales enablement strategy enjoy a win rate of 47%. Imagine if your company won nearly half of all the deals it pursued. Better yet, stop imagining it and start making it rain by fostering sales enablement.

Aligning Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing are on the same organizational team, so finding common ground should not be too difficult—even if the people standing in the way of a united front are. If you are faced with the challenge of bringing sales and marketing into alignment, there are several “data-driven” steps you can take to speed up the process:

1. Get Leaders to Buy-In. Talk to sales execs and influencers and let them know you are on a mission to better align sales and marketing so everyone can be more successful. Build trust by openly sharing your vision, goals and challenges. Pro Tip: Cultivate desire by sharing data from research giants that underscores the benefits to sales.
2. Form an Action Team Comprised of Members From Both Sides. Work together to identify, target, and nurture high-value accounts. Pro Tip: Use data from both sides (preferably via integrated tools) to mine for insights. Experiment with different segments and levels of personalization.
3. Meet Regularly to Track Progress on Joint Initiatives. Keeps teams in perpetual alignment by assigning action items and holding both sides accountable. Pro Tip: Print reports that share the latest data on leads generated, campaign performance, templates used, etc.
4. Make ABM-Style Personalization Easy for Sales. Use an automated messaging tool to develop a variety of campaigns for different channels that sales can personalize and send to clients and prospects. Make sure the sales enablement tool you use integrates seamlessly with sales software, so that using branded and customizable templates is convenient and easy. Pro Tip: Track data on the success of various templates and honor the sales people who are using them and achieving the best results at every meeting. Consider providing tangible rewards in various categories, i.e. Most Callbacks From a SMS Marketing Campaign, Best Open Rate for a Customized Email, etc.

In short, think of your sales team as customers of your sales enablement efforts. The easier you make it for them to meet you halfway, the greater your alignment, and ultimately your ABM success will be.

Better Data + ABM = Record Speeds in Achieving Goals
While the advantages of ABM are numerous, the success of this approach is wholly dependent on the quality of your data. Poor data, which is characterized by the absence of the 8C’s, greatly hinders ABM success. Sureshot has a long history of helping organizations get and maintain high-quality data that is ideal for enriching ABM strategies. If you are ready to harness the power of accurate data to unlock the full potential of your ABM strategy, start by taking our FREE Martech Assessment.