What’s more, the number of decision-makers can increase for complex deals, and sales cycles are getting longer than ever. But what are we fundamentally doing to adapt? 
 
It’s more important than ever to engage more than just a primary point of contact, most marketing and sales teams aren’t making a concerted effort to multithread their deals.  

What is multithreading in sales?

Multithreading is the sales and marketing strategy of targeting each account from multiple angles. Multithreading is a powerful strategy for B2B sales specifically because B2B deals involve large buying committees. Sales and marketing organizations multithread by targeting diverse personas within each account with tailored advertising and outreach. 

Why aren’t more teams multithreading?

For starters, most teams are not incentivized to multithread deals when their primary KPIs are MQLs, MQAs, or opportunities. If you only get ‘credit’ for driving one lead within an account, you certainly wouldn’t be going out of your way to multithread. I have encountered instances where marketers believe that once an opportunity has been created, the account becomes ‘off limits’ for further marketing efforts. This narrow perspective often limits the opportunities that multithreading could offer. By the same token, if when a second lead within an account is passed to sales, marketing is met with responses like, “We already met with so-and-so from this account”, you’re not likely to practice multithreading. But you should! Here’s why: 

Here’s an example of how multithreading can decrease risk: Sales receives just one MQL from marketing within a target account with 28 people within its buying team. But is the MQL a key decision maker within the buying team? They might not be. They also might have colleagues within their buying group who are meeting with competitors. By ignoring the hidden buying group with single threaded tactics, sales opens themselves up to a lot of risk.����

Benefits of multithreading 

More likely to get buy-in and increase win rates

Multithreading increases win rates by allowing sellers to persuade hidden stakeholders who aren’t bought in. In fact, found that multithreading increased win rates from 5% for single threaded opportunities to 30% when multithreading occurred with 5 stakeholders- a 6X improvement. 

Faster sales cycle – increasing pipeline velocity

One of the biggest barriers to any deal is that the product being sold is not top priority for the buyers. When a product is not top priority, buyers may cancel or reschedule calls, delay moving forward, or wait to bring in other stakeholders. But when you multithread deals you can learn what’s priority for stakeholders across the account, position your product accordingly, and by connecting with different stakeholders, you can push along the account by the FOMO effect – if you meet with more people within the account – others won’t want to be left out and you’ll face less friction.  

Product stickiness and adoption 

We see this all the time in our ABM platform deals: prospects in exploratory calls often say that only one department is getting something out of a product they’re using. When just one department uses a product, the product is easily a risk in case of budget cuts. The goal is for your product to be un-cuttable, and the best way to do that is to get cross-departmental adoption early. By multi-threading deals, you can get a jumpstart on this even before the deal has closed.  

Lower risk of loss due to point of contact leaving 

Sellers have seen this countless times: your deal is progressing well, your POC seems keen to move forward and… they left their job? Now your deal for their previous company is generally dead in the water if you were single threading. But if you were multithreading, you can more easily set next steps with the rest of the buying group, determine who would make the most sense as a new primary point of contact, and see if the deal still has legs.  

Limitations of multithreading 

We don’t report on this well 

Like I mentioned early on, in a world of MQAs and opportunities where the usual expectation is ‘there’s only one of these per account’, marketing and sales teams aren’t incentivized to multithread their deals. If their performance metrics look better to have 3 single threaded deals rather than 1 multithreaded deals, that can be a problem, especially if you reference the stats from – a 6X higher win rate with multithreading, a multithreaded deal should be weighted significantly more heavily than a single threaded deal.  

Requires more persona work 

If you’re going to multi-thread your deals, you can’t expect to use the same talk track with marketers as with sales, as with finance, etc. You have to develop personas and pain points for each, and approach them as the distinct personas that they are. You might even need to determine different channels and tactics that are more effective for each persona such as relying more on cold calls for sales, or advertising for executives, for example.  

Requires more bandwidth   

If you’re going to try to reach 5X more people within each account, you’ll be using more bandwidth. This could mean more marketing support with resources and tactics to reach stakeholders, as well as more sales bandwidth- drafting cadences for more personas within each account, more cold calling, and more social selling touch points.  

Could require more spend 

If you’ll be running additional advertising in your multithreading plays, that could very quickly increase your spend per account. Because of this and requiring additional bandwidth, it’s a good idea to start multithreading with a small target account list of high fit accounts.  
 
Now that we’ve covered the pros and cons of multithreading, let’s jump into some actual multithreading tactics you can deploy in your go-to-market strategy. 

3 Multithreading plays to deploy in your GTM strategy 

Air cover to hidden stakeholders 

When you look at all the contacts associated with a deal after it’s closed-won vs. when it was first created, you’ll likely see more contacts across the account, some of them likely higher level executives who were brought into the deal only once the deal got to a certain point of maturity and they had been sold internally on the importance of purchasing your product or service. 

But there are many reasons why you might never get to closed-won in deals with many stakeholders.You might find that C-suite stakeholders haven’t heard of your business, that a competitor is deeply entrenched, or that they still need to be convinced of the business case for your product.  

If your primary point of contact isn’t absolutely championing your product internally (we love to see it, but that doesn’t make it guaranteed of course), then reasons for deals stalling like the above can be addressed with marketing and sales touches.  

First, let’s start with advertising air cover. Start with your top accounts in pipeline. Identify personas that can make or break your deals but that aren’t the primary points of contact. Now go through your CRM or your sales intelligence to analyze your most common loss reasons that would likely relate to these hidden personas. For example, CFOs not wanting to fund your product, executives having low awareness of your brand, competitors winning more with certain departments, etc. Then based off that information, create ads to target those personas with messaging that addresses the fear, uncertainty, or doubt they might have.  
 
To measure whether your advertising air cover to hidden stakeholders is working, you can run an A/B test comparing the win rate of half of a list of your top accounts pipeline who were exposed to this advertising, vs. half who were not. This way you can decide whether this tactic is worth continuing and expanding for your organization.  

Looping in other team members 

Have you ever received a cold email that mentioned your colleague by name? If you did, you might’ve noticed that it jumped out at you far more than the countless cold emails you receive that contain your own name. By reaching out to multiple members of a team, sellers can increase their response and meeting rates, and people are more likely to reply when there are a couple of them. It goes back to a sort of fear of missing out or fear that they might seem like they’re dropping the ball. This tactic can work well, but you should be careful with it, since it’s much more effective the more personalized it is.  
 
For example, an email mentioning you colleague by name and then referencing a conversation you had with them would be far more likely to receive a response than a spray and pray “Hi {first name}, are you the right person to talk to or is {colleague-first name}?” 
 
However, if you use this tactic dishonestly, your approach may have the opposite effect. For example, don’t say you “talked to their colleague Jane Doe” if you didn’t.  

Cross-team recon 

If you sell to sales and marketing organizations, or if you simply don’t live under a rock, you know that sales and marketing teams are often at odds with each other. This can be due to needing to seemingly argue for credit for revenue,  or whether leads are or are not qualified, difference in opinion over which go-to-market tactics are most effective for their market, or a myriad of other reasons. So when sales and marketing teams both get on board with a product, that’s big. It means your product will be much more likely to be onboarded and adopted across teams and become uncuttable.  

This leads me to a tactic the Foundry ABM team uses to get more information on top accounts and multithread: cross-team recon. Cross team recon is when an SDR cold calls sales team members of an account, as opposed to going straight to marketing, the more typical primary point of contact within their accounts, and asks them exploratory questions about the account. This works because firstly, sales team members are significantly more likely to answer their phone than marketers are. Secondly, because of the idea that sales and marketing are at odds with each other, they may be more willing to share candid information about their pain points around go-to-market tools. And lastly, because the call is from a sales person to another sales person there’s a sense of congeniality, making the sales people being called are more likely to relate to the SDR calling them and want to help them out with information.  

Final thoughts

Now more than ever, multithreading just makes sense for B2B. With ballooning buying groups and dragging sales cycles, multithreading is a key strategy that can improve your revenue generation.  

Now that we’ve discussed what multithreading is, why it’s worth your while, and some plays you could try, give some thought to how your reporting is set up, what tactics are incentivized, and how you can approach your metrics in a way that encourages your team to get the most revenue possible.

Enter the latest and greatest tech buyers’ journey road map: – How to Engage IT Decision-Makers. Establishing a strategy that effectively engages IT decision-makers (ITDMs) may start with quality content, but it extends much further. The poster highlights additional aspects, such as the impact strong customer experience and proper engagement has on increasing sales.  Turn to these 5 easy steps to guide your strategy.

Understand the goals of your target audience

It doesn’t matter the company; every organization wants to be considered an innovator in their respective industry. Gaining a stronger understanding of what your customer is currently prioritizing and what they want to focus on in the future is essential to their customer journey.

• 93% of organizations have made digital-first plans
• Why are organizations implementing a digital transformation (DX) strategy?
  • Improve employee productivity/collaboration – 51%
  • Reduce costs/inefficiencies – 50%
  • Create better customer experiences to keep up with expectations – 45%
• Increasing spend in these areas:
  • Cybersecurity
  • BI/analytics tools
  • Data analytics frameworks
  • AI & machine learning
  • Business process management/workflow automation
  • Robotic process automation

Know your customers

Leadership shifts with each stage of the technology purchase process. Once you’ve gotten a grasp on what your target audience is focused on, be sure to know who is involved in which stage of the process so you are actively engaging the correct people at the right times. For example, the CIO leads the way when determining the business need, but IT management and security staff are more involved in the technical stages such as evaluating products and services and determining technical requirements.

Be sure to understand who is involved throughout each stage of the purchase process so your message aligns with the influencer and their needs.

• 61% agree that the purchase process for technology products and services is becoming increasingly complex
• There are more than double the number of influencers involved in enterprise tech purchases – 33 total compared to 15 for SMBs
• 57% will purchase from an existing vendor, while 43% will seek a new vendor

Consider their educational needs

There are so many forms of content available today, but do all of them provide quality, actionable insights to your audience? On average, ITDMs download six assets throughout the tech purchase process, however they state that only 48% of downloaded work-related content has provided them with value in the past 12 months. It’s important to provide them with the content types they most rely upon as well as from the proper sources.

• 91% of ITDMs think it’s challenging to find high-quality content
• Where do they find information?
  • Tech content sites
  • White papers
  • Webcasts/webinars
  • Technology vendors (via phone, email video conference)
  • Technology vendors (via vendor website)
• 96% of tech buyers are interested in custom-tailored content, based on…
  • Industry
  • Tech platform(s) already installed
  • Company size

Make tech buyers your brand advocate

One of the most important aspects to the customer journey is establishing trust and authenticity with your target market. Becoming a dependable and knowledgeable partner is key to retaining your customer base and ultimately having them become an advocate for your brand and product.

• 65% of tech buyers say that they typically spend more time consuming content from known and trusted brands because they’re confident their time will be well spent.
• Vendor awareness impacts tech buyers’ decision to engage with certain content:
  • Product reviews – 71%
  • Case studies – 56%
  • Third-party market research – 44%

Become an integral part of your customers’ research process

To become not just a vendor, but a relied upon resource for your customers, it’s all about knowledge, timing and trust. These strong relationships will help to increase your sales, so be sure to provide a valuable and enjoyable journey for your customers and prospects.

• Knowledge – 96% of tech buyers have responded to outreach from a potential vendor, specifically when they:
  • Shared valuable content or informationWere knowledgeable about business or specific challenges
  • Demonstrated honesty/transparency
• Timing – 16 hours is the average time tech buyers expect follow-up after filling out a contact form
• Trust – 73% of tech buyers say that when a technology brand is known and trusted, it increases the likelihood that they will be added to the short list.

Between this research, our content experts and premium data we can help you identify and engage the world’s most influential tech buyers. Get started by downloading the and partner with Foundry to simplify your marketing with data-driven media and martech solutions.

Marketing efficiency has been a hot topic throughout the last year. With new ideas, technology, and points of view informing marketers what their best bet is to do more with less, how do you anchor your strategy in what drives real results and generates revenue? 

It all comes back to the basics. Market to those who want to be marketed to. Identify active buyers facing a challenge you solve, and make sure they know who you are and how you can help.

Enter: intent data. Intent is championed as a silver bullet for reaching in-market buyers. Some doubt if it really works or if generic ICP-based targeting is still the way to go. So, we set out to find the answer. 

Does intent data improve ad efficiency, and by how much? 

The short answer? Yes. Research shows campaigns using intent-based targeting were 2.5x more efficient than campaigns using standard targeting dimensions. 

The experiment 

We tested intent-based ad audiences across three clients in technology and software spaces to compare standard firmographic and intent-based targeting. The goal was to replicate how ads are typically run, compared to only targeting in-market buyers, to see if intent really does make a difference in campaign performance. 

Control and exposed groups were established to test our hypothesis: focusing ad targeting on audiences that have shown intent improves campaign efficiency. 

Control group: a randomized group based on the clients’ ICP using standard firmographic targeting dimensions such as job title, company size, and industry.  

Exposed (intent-based) group: identified using intent signals such as competitor engagements, content interactions, current job posts, and tech installs across first-, second-, and third-party intent sources, then filtered that audience by the clients’ ICP.  

For the intent-based audiences, it was important to capture prospective buyers across the buying journey, so using data from the multiple sources Foundry collects helped us capture a fuller picture of who’s in-market.

The results 

Compared to the control group campaigns, intent-based ads were 2.5x more efficient. 

Ad platforms like Google prefer to show ads to people likely to click them, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy with intent-based audiences. Since you’re reaching audiences looking for what you’re selling, they’re more likely to engage. And since they’re more likely to engage, Google’s more likely to serve them your ads, increasing impressions and clicks at a lower cost. 

Taking a leap towards intent-based targeting gives marketers the opportunity to drastically improve campaign engagement while keeping costs low.  

The next steps 

The research shows that intent works. But what does it take to put it into practice?  

Step 1: Define what intent means for your business. 

What actions could someone take that would hint they’re in-market to buy or could get value from what you’re offering? It could be visits to your website, reading solution-based content, expanding a certain team, attending relevant events, hiring new leadership, or chatting with peers on public forums. 

Keep in mind most of these signals aren’t happening in a single, standardized place. Make sure you capture intent behavior across the channels they take place: your website, social media, publisher sites, job boards, press releases, and the list goes on. Gaining access to as much of the buyer’s journey as you can means you aren’t just building a bigger audience, but you’re understanding what resonates with who, where, and when it needs to. 

Step 2: Run ads that enable intent-based targeting. 

Select ad vendors and channels that have the ability to meaningfully reach your intent-based audience. It could be built into the platform or managed by the vendor. Meaningfully here means they aren’t simply ingesting the audience but are allowing you to tailor messaging to buying behavior as it ebbs and flows through the funnel. 

The place to start 

Ideally, you run ads on channels that not only use intent data as a targeting dimension, but that also serve ads to your buyers in the places they’re making decisions. Because ultimately, all most people want is to scroll the internet, only seeing what’s interesting and relevant to them in their feeds. 

Foundry Ads opens the door to your audience across the sites they’ve used to make decisions for decades, with intent data built-in. It enables marketers like you to engage buyers with ad placements and messaging that take real-time intent into account. So, you meet your buyers where they’re at, with efficiency that makes your team, stakeholders, and, most importantly, audience happy.

Get started with intent-based ads

“We have an ABM platform but our team doesn’t even use it anymore.” This is a terrifying sentence, but you’d be surprised how true it can be for many sales and marketing teams. This is a costly problem, especially when you consider that many ABM platforms lock buyers into multi-year contracts. In the current economic climate, marketers simply can’t afford to put budget towards software that isn’t fully adopted or driving results.

Lack of adoption can doom your ABM program to fail before it ever gets off the ground.  

So what causes a lack of adoption, and how can you ensure your thoughtfully designed ABM programs and carefully selected ABM tools won’t collect dust on the shelf?

Factors preventing ABM program adoption

• Siloed Systems & Workflows
• Sales and Marketing Don’t Talk
• You’re Still Focused On Leads, Leads, Leads

Siloed systems & workflows

Your account-based marketing cannot work in a vacuum. If you can’t attribute ROI, if you can’t track customer journeys, if you can’t reference the same data between sales and marketing, you can’t succeed.  

“The holy grail of succeeding is following the integration strategy where it’s a holistic ecosystem of every tool integrating with everything else that is around it (think solar system). This is like 90% of your success.”
– Nadia Davis
Director of Revenue Marketing, PayIt

To hear more, watch:

For starters, your ABM platform needs to sync with your CRM- if not, how will you tie your account-based marketing efforts to revenue?

Next, consider where your marketing and sales teams work most on a day-to-day basis. If your sales team works primarily out of the CRM, what data is available at their fingertips?  

If you expect your sales team to use intent data to prioritize accounts or to use account-based landing pages, to improve your likelihood of adoption, you need to make these tools available to your team where they already work. For example, Sales Acceleration brings these two account-based marketing platform features into the CRM so that sales team members can make use of them without disrupting their existing workflows.    

Sales and marketing don’t talk

Ever heard of this scenario? “Yeah, marketing’s going to start doing ABM and then maybe sales will get in on it too if we think it’s worth our time”. This is not a good position for sales or marketing to be in when trying to launch successful ABM programs. Marketing is doomed to fail in their attempt to succeed in an ABM program with no sales involvement.

Much like account-based marketing can’t succeed in a vacuum from a data and platform perspective, account-based marketing can’t succeed without sales team involvement.

To learn more, watch:

You’re still focused on leads, leads, leads

If you’ve transitioned from lead generation to an account-based strategy but haven’t changed your reporting to reflect that… you’re going to have a bad time.  

In account-based marketing, you need to take a broader, longer term view of your marketing’s impact than you would in lead gen.

You need to remember why you chose ABM in the first place: if you focus marketing efforts on your top best-fit accounts rather than ‘spray and pray’ methods, you’ll achieve higher ACV, shorter sales cycle lengths, better LTV, etc. But this premise requires that you actually focus your resources around those top accounts, which will result in your metrics shifting. If you focus on a smaller target list of accounts, you’ll likely have a lower quantity of leads. If your goals demand that you reach a certain number of leads above all else, you might lose focus on the core focus of ABM, and hinder your performance.

For this reason, it’s important to align your metrics around ABM to ensure you’re incentivized to achieve ABM success. Learn more about 
 

Tips to ensure ABM program adoption

1. Integrate your ABM, CRM, and MAP systems

To ensure that your teams can reference the same data, and that you can track activities through the entire buyer’s journey, you should ensure your systems all talk to each other. One way or another, your ABM, CRM, and MAP platforms should be connected. For instance, we have Salesforce as our CRM, HubSpot as our MAP, and Foundry as our ABM. So for us, Salesforce is our single source of truth, syncing data to Foundry and HubSpot. This way, I can leverage Salesforce data on accounts and opportunities within Foundry for use in advertising, targeting, sales activation, and orchestration triggers. At the same time, I can push or pull data to and from Foundry and HubSpot to trigger email campaigns and list building.  

By integrating these three systems together, I’m able to reference the same data as my sales team even though they work primarily in Salesforce and I work primarily in HubSpot. I’m also able to create efficiencies by using these integrations to automate processes.  

2. Choose some sales & SDR team guinea pigs

One of the most effective ways to ensure adoption of any new program, is to pick the right people to spearhead it. Our Chief Customer Officer Andrew shares some great advice on this point that ABM program leaders should pick a couple of champions internally to pilot new programs.

One advantage to picking a few people to pilot your program is that they allow you to create a tight feedback loop and optimize your processes while you’re still figuring them out. Then, once they’ve started to see success with the program they’re piloting, they will be happy to share their success with the broader team, ensuring buy-in and enthusiasm for your program.  

To learn more, watch: ����

3. Create a dialogue around your ABM program

Create feedback loops for  

• Outreach cadences
• Aircover ads
• Content needs
• Account / lead qualification criteria

Unfortunately, go-to-market programs don’t simply launch and succeed. A successful program requires tooling, optimizing, and troubleshooting. But you can’t anticipate all possible needs at the outset of your program. For this reason, it helps to create feedback loops to continuously improve your account-based marketing.  

At a minimum, sales and marketing leaders should meet routinely to maintain alignment on goals, reporting, and tactics. This might also include evaluating target account lists periodically.

Other areas where sales and marketing should create feedback loops are content needs, cadences, and air cover. It helps to have meetings on the books to connect on these items, and even to foster a collaborative environment where your sales team can freely tell marketing the content their prospects would benefit from.  Larger teams might want to create more formal feedback loops with content request forms and libraries in systems such as Seismic to get a sense of what assets are most useful to your sales team.  

Above all else, your sales and marketing alignment should go beyond yearly events liks Sales Kick Off, since without follow up, any ideas and insights from larger meetings like SKO will fall off everyone’s radar.  

4. Ensure everyone’s goals incentivize ABM program success

ABM strategies need to have the right KPIs associated with them. That means don’t maintain the same lead-gen goals while expecting your team to run an account-based program. Do use your current and historic performance as a benchmark, while setting goals based on the metrics account-based marketing should improve if you’re adopting an account-based marketing approach for the first time. For example – if part of the reason you are switching to an ABM strategy is to increase conversion to qualified pipeline, you want to create metrics that incentivize your team to center efforts on the most qualified accounts – leading you to reference metrics such as target accounts reached, target accounts engaged, or marketing qualified accounts. Following these higher funnel level metrics, you would measure conversion rates by stages, sales cycle length, pipeline generated from your ABM program, and revenue generated from your ABM program.  

5. Create personalized content  

Personalization is key to ABM, the whole point of narrowing your marketing’s focus is because your products best fit the narrow audience you select, and that by narrowing your focus, you can personalize and tailor the experience for your top accounts.  

Your personalization strategy should start with content, not merge fields. If you’re just starting out with ABM, or don’t have a clear personalization strategy in place yet, you should index your existing sales and marketing materials such as ebooks, pdfs, blogs, guides, etc. and categorize them. For instance, you might categorize each piece of content by the vertical or persona within your target that the content resonates most with. Then, identify gaps or areas of opportunity where you should dedicate resources to creating relevant content. You should also create feedback loops for this content. What content is resonating the most? Who is it resonating with? Were any sales cycles influenced by content touchpoints? Starting by asking these questions and referencing the data will help you create a strong account-based content strategy.  

Conclusion

There you have it, some reasons why so many teams struggle with ABM adoption, and some ways you can further ensure adoption of your ABM programs. Like we covered above, one key factor in adoption of ABM programs is how your sales and marketing tools talk to one another, whether they integrate and which programs your teams need to access everyday in order to do their job. This factor is highly tied to which platforms you choose for your ABM, CRM, Sales Engagement Tools, and MAP. Foundry ABM integrates with top tools across these categories, and makes it easy to ensure adoption across teams. In fact, G2 highlighted Foundry ABM as Highest User Adoption for  Enterprise, Mid-Market and Small Business teams, and a G2 Grid Leader across categories. Check out our  to see how the Foundry ABM platform and success team ensure client ABM success.

You made it to our final installment of the ABM Crash Course Series! In today’s crash course, we’re going to cover everything you need to know to optimize your ABM program with orchestrated campaigns.

What is orchestration?

Orchestration takes all of your campaign’s moving pieces and creates a more efficient approach to executing ABM campaigns. Orchestration encompasses everything – from building audiences, delivering content, and setting up automatic triggers in your campaigns. 

Why orchestration?

Orchestration streamlines campaign building and execution while significantly outperforming traditional marketing campaigns. The days of parsing through account lists and operating ABM campaigns manually are a distant memory. Sales and marketing teams collaborate more effectively by adjusting to account insights and sharing intelligence in real time. Fully aligned teams can modify messaging by stage, intent, or custom rules. This lays the groundwork for “always on” ABM campaigns that nurture buyers throughout the purchase journey. 

Giving marketers back valuable time

The beauty of orchestrated campaigns is on full display with its ability to execute automatic multi-step, multi-channel cadences that adjust in real-time. This ultimately saves valuable time and helps sales and marketing teams engage with active buyers at the right time with the right messaging. 

Consider this… When evaluating ABM platforms consider a platform with an easy-to-use visual interface like  to build your multi-channel, multi-step campaigns with ease.

Step 1: Building your orchestration

Let’s start from scratch – you can’t build orchestrated ABM campaigns without a platform capable of performing such an advanced task. Orchestration Canvas sets the industry standard for ABM campaign creation. Orchestration Canvas features the first ABM campaign builder, making complex campaign creation simple.

How Orchestration is Driven 

ABM Orchestration is fueled in real-time by intent data from accounts in the funnel. First and third-party intent signals paint a comprehensive picture of a buyer’s purchase journey. 

Integrations

Orchestration requires automatic task triggers which demand seamless integrations with your Ad and CRM platforms to build comprehensive reports. Orchestration Canvas

Step 2: selecting your audience

Prioritizing accounts and selecting a target account list (Audience Selection) are top challenges for ABM practitioners, and these steps are critical to orchestration. Luckily, advances in ai algorithms adapt audience insights in real time and adjust your target accounts as needed. Orchestration is similar to a living document. You can establish dynamic actions within each campaign that automatically fire according to your set rules.  

Audiences for orchestrated campaigns

• Pull directly from your CRM 
• Upload static List
• Create custom filters  

Step 3: Creating automatic triggers

This is where the magic of orchestrated ABM campaigns is on full display. Marketers can build campaigns that automatically nurture accounts based on an action in the buyer’s purchase journey. For example, if an account has over 10 clicks and 1000 impressions on one piece of content, the account will be sent to a specific ad group. While other accounts that don’t meet the predetermined criteria are sent to a separate ad group, a nurture email campaign, or another desired action. 

Consider this… When evaluating ABM platforms for orchestrated campaigns, consider a platform with an easy-to-use visual interface like the Orchestration Canvas to build your multi-channel, multi-step campaigns with ease.  

Step 4: Polishing multi-step, multi-channel campaigns

You’ve selected your audience and created your campaign’s automatic triggers, now it’s time to fine-tune the engine. If you want to edit your campaign, you can add field values that signal which accounts are engaged, and pinpoint an account’s position in the funnel. Intent data signals fuel account scores and allow marketers to adjust a campaigns orchestration in real time. Automating individual changes to existing campaigns is now possible with ABM technology.

Conclusion 

From campaign creation to execution, the future of ABM is fully automated. Orchestration encompasses everything we discussed in our ABM Campaign Crash Course Series parts 1-4, and ties them all together into one finely tuned engine. Ads, personalization, sales activation, and intent data insights are all at marketers’ fingertips.     

We hope you enjoyed our five-part ABM Campaign Crash Course Series. If you would like to chat about getting started with ABM or fine-tuning your current ABM program, let’s chat!

Intent data has been an ABM buzzword for quite some time and is a major player in modern account-based campaigns’ ability to boost results and move the needle on pipeline. Understanding how to get the most out of intent will pay dividends in your overall ABM strategy. According to Foundry research, 95% of marketers use more than one intent data source, and 41% use four or more.

In this ABM Campaign Crash Course, we’re going to introduce intent data and provide a step-by-step guide for B2B marketers with the tools to identify and utilize intent signals that optimize ABM campaigns.

What is intent data?

Intent data is any signal or indication showing a buyer is in the market to purchase your products. In the context of account-based marketing, intent data is based on account activity and whether or not an account is showing purchase intent. This information is extremely valuable because these signals discover the best accounts to target, allowing you to reach them before the competition. Intent data comes from two different sources – 1st party and 3rd party intent. Using both 1st and 3rd party intent data sources is critical to campaign success, otherwise, you’ll be working off of an incomplete picture of account activity.

Why do we need intent data?

57% of the buyer’s journey is anonymous, according to a B2B Buying Journey Report from  research. Meaning prospects are going more than halfway through the buyer’s journey without making contact, prompting the question,

‍How do we as marketers get ahead of the process and engage buyers earlier?

‍This is where intent data comes in, providing valuable insights on anonymous buyers allowing you to position yourself ahead of the competition. Instead of passively waiting for a customer to raise their hand, you can proactively target high-fit accounts with orchestrated campaigns. Why is this important? Because 70% of buyers fully define their needs on their own before engaging with a sales representative, and 44% identify specific solutions before reaching out to a seller.  – showing just how critical it is to be the first one engaging with buyers.

Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data: Understanding the Basics, a study by  Strategy and Research, shows that it’s possible with intent data to determine which companies are in-market to buy a solution or service with up to 91% accuracy, and in good time to engage with them before they progress too far in the buyers journey.

What are the different types of intent data?

‍There are two types of intent data, 1st party, and 3rd party.

1st party intent data

1st party intent data is internal and derived from interactions that happen across all your own sales and marketing tools. Unmasked website activity, leads matched to accounts, and sales engagement in CRM are all examples of 1st party intent. 1st party intent data is highly reliable, and can clearly define who the customers are and if they are showing purchase intent.

‍3rd party intent data

‍While 1st party intent provides reliable insights, using only 1st party data limits you to a small portion of the buyer’s journey. 3rd party intent consists of research and buying activity occurring on channels and properties owned by others, allowing for a broader view of your market. Examples of such places are product review websites, Google searches, analyst white papers, event attendance, video views, and more. In comparison to 1st party signals, 3rd party data signals typically occur earlier in the buyer’s journey, making these signals best for reaching leads early in the decision process. Creating this extensive view of potential buyers allows your team to reach the right accounts at the right time, and earlier than ever before.

Six steps to power your pipeline with intent data

Step 1: Select your intent topics

Selecting your intent topics is a critical first step when operationalizing intent data. Intent topics are the areas your target accounts are researching and can be leveraged by sales and BDR teams to personalize their outreach. When running intent-based campaigns you want to select topics relevant to your target audience by sourcing accounts that fit your ICP and are actively showing intent signals. There are three ways we recommend building out your topic list:

• Select topics by searching the available taxonomy
• Select topics based on your website content
• Select topics based on historical customer behavior

For example, if your business is interested in accounts actively researching and consuming content about the topic “ABM platforms,” your intent module could draw from all content related to that specific topic – without needing to explicitly mention the phrase. This opens up the ability to identify and uncover high-intent accounts based on additional pieces of content.

Selecting relevant intent topics and building a strong topic list leverages data that builds marketing campaigns and provides greater insights to drive desired results.

“Across all communications, we’ve found that you get much better response rates if you start with intent data,” says Jessica Garrett, a seasoned ABM practitioner (Learn more about .).

Step 2: Use intent to identify actionable insights (separate data noise)

The intent data pool is large and while we have all the data at our disposal, we need to cut through unwanted noise to get to the actionable insights that matter. One of the biggest challenges for modern B2B marketers is sorting through the data pool and identifying applicable buying signals. So how can marketers sort through and best utilize intent data – especially 3rd party?

Luckily there’s an app for that, just kidding — there’s actually just a really cool feature in the Foundry platform to help score accounts based on purchase signals.

 uses 1st and 3rd party intent paired with website and CRM activity, to identify which accounts should be prioritized for sales outreach. With proprietary AI-based algorithms to provide a single score to prioritize accounts. Smart Score is live and shows baseline activity for accounts and spikes of activity that take into account size and historical data.

Step 3: Automatically segment your target accounts

Intent data allows marketers to monitor selected intent topics across the internet to see when accounts are looking at related content. Accounts are segmented based on what intent topics are being consumed. ABM platforms then automatically manage intent-based audiences by dynamically adding and removing accounts that meet each intent-based criteria.  

Step 4: Identify engaged accounts and prioritize outreach

It’s not easy to know what accounts to prioritize and can be a constant guessing game. Intent data allows you to identify which of your target accounts are showing an increased interest in topics you have identified as relevant to your products or services. Once the intent data is collected, there are many ways to incorporate it into your marketing campaigns and sales processes such as;

• Utilize Foundry Intent to target accounts at a contact level.
• Push intent data into Salesforce to help sales prioritize their outreach based on which accounts are engaged.
• Examine the weekly list of engaged accounts to discover in-market accounts that may not be on your radar.

revealed that by combining intent data with company Surge insights, and sales activation plays, resulted in: 2X more engaged leads per account on the 1:1 landing page compared to the general website, 18% increase in SDR revenue influence, and 28% increase in account executive close rate.

Step 5: Paint the full intent picture – orchestrate multi-step, multi-channel ABM campaigns

Intent is the catalyst for an ABM campaign orchestration engine. Without it, orchestration could not operate seamlessly and automatically place accounts into the proper campaigns.

“Think of orchestration as a data-fueled car engine driven by your buyers. The , sourced from prospective and customer account activity, fuels the engine. The engine takes in this data and subsequently keeps all your campaigns’ moving parts running in sync with each other. The wheels are turning, the gears are shifting and the engine is delivering a pleasantly consistent experience from point A to B”.

There are a handful of ways to operationalize intent, but to get the most out of your data, an orchestration module such as Foundry’s Canvas goes a long way. Once an ABM campaign is created, the orchestration platform can directly activate SDR follow-up. Based on a certain level of detected intent, marketers can trigger email reports or CRM tasks to alert the sales team. With ABM orchestration, you can create outbound campaigns that match your intent-based marketing campaigns so that you’re orchestrating a compelling buying experience for each of your target accounts.

was able to identify accounts showing not only 3rd-party intent but also 1st-party website engagement, marketing automation engagement, and CRM activities. The combination of various signals of interest gave marketing a fuller picture of each target account’s purchase intent, allowing the marketing team to orchestrate multi-channel campaigns that revealed the highest value accounts.

Step 6: Identify upsell & renewal opportunities

Intent data not only targets new accounts but also drives upsells and renewals. Intent data provides powerful insights about existing customers that can often be overlooked. Prevent losing customers by using intent signals to uncover customers that might be researching competitors or other products. By having this information you can step in and re-engage the customer, helping to win renewals and decrease churn rates. You can also use intent topics to determine customer interest in other products you offer – giving you more cross and upsell opportunities.

‍Want to learn more? See how intent data can optimize sales and marketing performance.

Welcome to the third installment of our ABM Crash Course series. In part one we covered launching successful display ad campaigns, and in part two we discussed . In this post, we’re going to dive deeper into ABM campaign success and discuss sales activation. Let’s get right into the conversation and learn how to equip sales and marketing teams with the tools, techniques, and insights to move the needle on pipeline.

What is sales activation?

Sales activation is the who, what, and why insights that sales reps use for a more effective and automated approach to reaching conversions. Think of sales activation as the missing link between seamless sales and marketing alignment, that boosts communication and impacts pipeline. True sales activation is more than just an alert, it’s a comprehensive view of everything you need to know about an account and how to act upon those insights.

Why sales activation?

Sales teams don’t always have the bandwidth to pursue a large total addressable market. Large account lists make it difficult to prioritize which accounts are ready to buy, oftentimes leaving active buyers hidden in the funnel. Missing these opportunities leaves a lot of money on the table that otherwise could have been nurtured into a conversion.

With sales activation, you are equipping the sales team with the information and tools necessary to generate more revenue. These valuable insights create a more cohesive sales and marketing strategy that amplifies conversions and unifies goals and reporting.

‍Consider this when looking for a sales activation tool… find one that allows both sales and marketing teams to work together to plan messaging tracks, agree on intent-based campaign triggers, and reference the same reporting.‍

Step 1: Unify goals and reporting

The first step to sales activation is establishing clear common goals within your sales and marketing teams, in addition to the KPIs you want to report on. Sales and marketing alignment is common ABM jargon, however, its importance is no overstatement when it comes to sales activation. When sales and marketing teams have the same field of view, same goals, and are reporting on the same metrics, execution on sales and marketing initiatives becomes seamless.

‍Create custom CRM dashboards

‍Using an ABM platform, you can set up a dynamic dashboard within your CRM. With Salesforce and Salesloft integrations, you can roll out your ABM analytics module with real-time account insights. This provides a more cohesive strategy by keeping everyone on the same page, even on different platforms.

Step 2: Prioritize and segment your total addressable market (TAM)

What is your TAM?

‍Your total addressable market is all of the accounts you can reach and engage within your pipeline.

‍Account organization

‍You know what your TAM is, but now you need to break down those accounts and segment them into their respective groupings. This sounds like a lot of work, and you’d be right if we did this manually, but with an ABM platform, you can easily parse through and segment accounts automatically. This saves valuable time and gives sales and marketing the same field of view so more time can be spent engaging with the highest-fit accounts in pipeline.

Step 3: Have the rights tools

Sales activation platform

‍With the right ABM platform, sales activation is so much more than just an alert notifying sales about a hot account. It’s the ability to make informative decisions and automatically reach surging accounts with your marketing automation software. By providing your sales team with the tools to properly prioritize accounts and relevant content for outreach, you will create a more efficient and effective sales process.

‍Equip your sales team with

• Intent-based marketing campaigns and sales plays
• 1:1 assets for each account
• Automated Lead-to-Account Matching

Sales activation gets your team ahead of the competition and allows them to reach in-demand buyers with the right messaging at the right time. When leveraged correctly and with a unified approach your sales activation strategy will keep your organization one step ahead of the competition.

Step 4: Activate sales plays

Intent-based sales plays

• Orchestrating account prioritization for sales outbound

If your company has a large total addressable market you may benefit by implementing the FIRE data strategy to boost your SDR team’s efficiency. FIRE stands for Fit, Intent, Recency, and Engagement. With this strategy, you’ll sharpen your focus beyond your ICP and target in-demand accounts throughout the funnel.

• Activating relevant sales conversations with intent signals

If you want to take advantage of intent signals deeper in the funnel, you can monitor intent topics related to your competitors. From there, flag interest in competitors and prepare appropriate sales plays. This empowers your sales teams to reach in-demand buyers with counter-claims and more appealing offers than the competition.

‍1:1 assets

‍Let’s take a look at some sales plays that your sales rep can reach accounts with following a surging account alert.

• 1:1 Landing Page
• Email
• Social
• Direct Mail
• Phone Call

Sales activation orchestration

‍With lead scoring, sales reps can get notified on surging accounts in your CRM. This gives the sales the information needed to engage with accounts on multiple channels, or pick which channel makes the most sense to engage with the account based on its position in the purchase journey.

Conclusion

Aligning your marketing and sales teams helps streamline sales and sets your ABM program up for successful sales activation. Remember sales activation doesn’t work without equipping sales with the right tools. Once your sales team has the right tools, they’re provided with the insights and content to engage with hot accounts and move the needle on the pipeline. Stay tuned for our next ABM Campaign Crash Course as we dive into the intent data that supercharges successful ABM programs.

Ready to learn more about how ABM equips sales teams with the tools and knowledge for seamless sales activation?

Welcome to the second installment of our ABM Campaign Crash Course series. In our premiere post, we had an in-depth discussion and a step-by-step guide on display ads. Today’s course is going to get personal. Don’t worry, no deep dark secrets, just our in-depth look at ABM content personalization and a few secrets on how to leverage personalization for optimal campaign results.

What is personalization?

Personalization is the practice of creating relevant and customized content that speaks directly to your target audience. Instead of one-size-fits-all content, personalization allows you to make small tweaks to your content unique to the account(s) you’re engaging with. According to a , the most common challenge with ABM is delivering a personalized experience.

Why personalize?

Content personalization helps marketing campaigns by increasing engagement and conversions. According to HubSpot, personalization is the . Another study by Epsilon found that  when companies offer a personalized experience. Foundry found that personalized messaging converts 20% more qualified leads. Consider this… You walk into a gift shop and stumble upon the gift section with magnets, glasses, and other knick-knacks with a plethora of names on them. You stop to try and spot the one with your name on it. When you finally spot it, you pick it up and check it out. Maybe you buy it, maybe you don’t. However, you either did or contemplated making the purchase because it was personalized and unique to you.  Now let’s think big picture. Whether it’s selling gifts in a gift shop or a B2B marketer driving awareness to your company’s financial management software, your audience is more likely to engage when the messaging is unique to their needs.

How to Deliver a Personalized Account-Based Experience

Step 1: Develop an ideal customer profile

What is an ICP?

An ICP is a hypothetical description of the type of buyers in your market that would benefit most from your product or service.   Ideal customer profiles help your marketing team get a picture of exactly who you’re creating content for. This way you can cater messaging to the audience you’re engaging with, giving the content a personalized feel. ICPs are defined by factors including their relative career stage, their familiarity with your service offerings, their pain points, and their motivation. Here’s an example of ICP buyer persona for a SaaS company:

• Tech Newbie
• Software veteran
• Revenue-oriented buyer

Here we might say that the ‘Tech Newbie’ is the earliest in their career, not familiar with your service offerings, and their pain points may be issues like learning the systems they work in, lack of efficiency in their workflows, and more. A Revenue-oriented buyer on the other hand, will be motivated by different pain points and goals– they would likely worry about project ramp time, and the length of time a program will need to show revenue impact.  By defining your ICPs, you are able to tailor your content to who they are and what interests them and in return, they’ll be more likely to engage with your content.

Step 2: Address their pain points

With your ICPs planned out, you can create content pieces that address the pain points of your personas. For example, continuing with the ICP examples we laid out above, let’s address each of our personas.  The first contact you’ve identified isn’t very familiar with the software you’re offering, nor very tech-savvy. In this scenario, you shouldn’t get into the weeds right away. You should start where they are, which is generally that they’ve identified a problem, but don’t yet know how to solve it. You’ll want to create content that discusses problems that they face, and helps to guide them to solutions, and in turn, through the buyer’s journey.  Focus on content that is going to nurture buyers who want to learn more. Let’s hit on three key points when addressing the scenario of the Tech Newbie:

• Briefly explain what your product does
• Keep it simple
• Have a clear message and visuals

Software Veteran contacts are going to want to know the specs, the data, the integrations, and the core of your product. Common pain points for this persona include tech stack compatibility and tech-strategy alignment. When addressing this persona focus on…

• Marketing and sales integrations
• How your product can scale their strategy
• Overall platform performance

Last but not least, the Revenue-oriented buyer wants to see the numbers. Common pain points for this persona include a downward trend in revenue, lack of growth, and a limited budget. When addressing this persona focus on…  

• Cost
• ROI
• Proven success from reputable sources

By defining and using ICPs, you can inform your marketing & sales team strategy for each step of the buyer’s journey.

Step 3: Create content that speaks to them

Now that you have defined buyer personas you can make content focused on who you want to target. When planning and creating content, identify which ICP would benefit most from the piece of content you are creating. Then, personalize the buyer experience.

Personalized content

• Display Ads

Display ads can be personalized to speak directly to the pain points of potential customers. Use display ad targeting to segment accounts and contacts. For example, if an ad speaks most effectively to the pain points of a Revenue-oriented buyer, you can target them by job title / level, or by contact-based targeting.  For more on this, check out our  blog with everything you need to know about account-based display ads.

• Blogs

Blogs give marketers a lot of freedom to address pain points and can be widely shared. With blogs, try picking one or two pain points from one of your personas and address the unique pain points thoroughly. Blogs can then be valuable pieces of content for use in segmented email marketing, outbound prospecting, and more.

• Case Studies

Although the content of customer stories aren’t personalized, you can use them most effectively by personalizing your buyer’s journey with customer stories that best speaks to each persona. Match personas to the case studies using pain points, by company industry, by job title, or service offering.

• 1:1 Landing Pages

 are a great way to curate content in a digestible form for your ICP. Webpages give you a lot of freedom in the content you upload and the specific messaging you want to use. Once you’ve done the hard work of creating all this content that speaks directly to your target audiences, all you need to do is make sure it gets in front of them. A 1:1 landing page is a way to mix and match content for your ICPs in a way that feels personal and high-value.

• Website Personalization

Apart from 1:1 landing pages, it can help to personalize existing elements of your website. To ensure a seamless experience, it can help to personalize your website to match the messaging you are employing for a targeted audience. Learn more about  on our blog.

Step 4: Segment your accounts

One of the biggest advantages of personalized content is the ability to reach buyers with content aimed at their position in the purchase journey. If you know accounts in pipeline respond best to certain pieces of content, you can set up fully automated and orchestrated ABM campaigns that will nurture buyers depending on their position in the purchase journey.    Let’s break the purchase journey into three sections you can segment content into.

• Awareness stage

The awareness stage is full of top-of-funnel content addressing early pain points your potential buyers may have. At this stage, education is key.  

• Consideration Stage

Your customer is evaluating options at this stage. The best content at this point in the purchase journey is content illustrating what separates you from your competitors.

• Decision Stage

The decision stage needs to show a proven track record. This is where customer stories can be the icing on the cake. Think of customer stories as a form of word-of-mouth marketing. Customers can hear from sources in a similar position as themselves explain their experience with a product and that can be powerful.  (Here’s a great resource to learn how to plan and create content for every stage of the funnel – , HubSpot.) Over time you will have accumulated a ton of valuable content that can be curated for certain audiences and repurposed for new audiences.  When you segment and personalize the content you show to your audience, your accounts have more meaningful experiences.

Conclusion

Delivering a personalized experience is paramount to a successful ABM program. Speaking directly to your audience and addressing their pain points can make that initial contact with sales come much sooner. Defining your organization’s ICPs makes content personalization more purposeful, and eventually, you’ll have enough content curated to nurture buyers throughout the entire purchase journey. Stay tuned for our next ABM Campaign Crash Course tackling intent data and see how these valuable insights can supercharge your sales and marketing efforts.  

Ready to personalize? Learn more about .

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is one of the most widely mentioned terms in the world of B2B marketing. Although you might be familiar with the term ABM, you might not know the nitty gritty. If you’re looking to fill your pipeline with high-fit accounts and prove your ROI, you might want to keep reading.

So what exactly is Account-Based Marketing? Why do you need it? And how do you get started? We’re answering everything you need to know in our ABM for beginners guide, plus a few tips from B2B industry experts! 

What is account-based marketing?

Account-Based Marketing is a B2B marketing strategy in which sales and marketing teams work closely together to target, reach, and close deals with high-fit accounts.

ABM prioritizes quality over quantity, so in an account-based strategy, sales and marketing teams allocate more resources and time towards high-value, high-intent target accounts. When high-value buyers show interest in your product early in their purchase journey, account-based technology can put these signals right at the fingertips of your marketing and sales organizations. No longer just a buzzword, enthusiasm for ABM is evident among tech marketers with 91% of businesses running programs for at least six months.��

ABM vs. traditional selling 

What makes ABM different from other demand generation strategies?

Traditional selling takes a much broader approach to qualifying accounts. Often this consists of qualifying as many accounts as possible (fit or unfit) into your pipeline. Without an account-based strategy, marketing teams are often focused on lead volume over quality, which can create friction with the sales team. 

While other demand generation strategies aren’t necessarily “ineffective”, you won’t have the same account-level engagement as you see within ABM, or the strong alignment of your sales and marketing teams around the same goals.

Compared to traditional selling, ABM takes a different approach to targeting accounts. Rather than focusing on the quantity of accounts in pipeline, ABM prioritizes the quality of accounts – so teams can focus their efforts on providing high-fit accounts with relevant content and personalized messaging. The idea behind ABM is to start out the buyer’s journey by identifying your target accounts and engaging them with personalized campaigns to build strong relationships that will have a higher chance of converting into closed-won deals for your business!

Why you should consider ABM for your marketing strategy

There is a lot to consider before making the jump into ABM. Having questions is normal, and in fact welcomed. Some  we hear from B2B marketers before getting started are:

• How do I influence buyers early?
• How do I measure the most valuable deals in the pipeline?
• How do I guide the entire purchase group towards reaching a consensus?

The good news is (if you keep reading) we’ve got all these answers and more in this guide.

There’s no shortage of benefits from an account-based strategy. There are many reasons why you should consider ABM for your business. Just to name a few:

• Focuses your resources on high-fit accounts
• Reaches prospects earlier in the buyer’s journey
• Aligns marketing and sales teams
• Shortens long sales cycles
• Identifies high-fit accounts more likely to purchase and drive new opportunities for sales
•  and accelerates pipeline
• Keeps your brand top of mind among prospects

We could go on, but by the end of this guide, we hope you’ll have more than a few reasons for implementing your own ABM strategy.

What model of ABM is right for you?

When asking, “What model of ABM is right for me?”, consider what your goal is for your ABM program. Let’s examine each model and why it might be a good fit for your organization’s goals.

Large account

Large account ABM models are used to target just a few very large customers. 

If you’re looking to land your first enterprise accounts, move up market, or expand an existing keystone account you have because there is a lot more revenue potential there – this model might be for you. In a large account model, there should be heavy focus on developing content and programs that allow you to introduce those new opportunities to key decision makers in that account. 

Learn more about 

Named account

Named account ABM models are primarily used to target hundreds or even thousands of accounts (depending on the size of your sales team).

If your sales team is targeting a large number of accounts, you can use the named account ABM model to better convert those accounts. This model is especially useful when your company has introduced new products or is entering a new market.

Focused demand gen

Focused demand generation ABM is when you take account-based tactics and apply them to your existing marketing channels. 

For example, say you don’t feel the accounts you’re going after fit your ICP, you can use an account-based approach to start segmenting and spending your resources on accounts that best fit your ICP. This model is about improving the efficiency of your go-to-market strategy by prioritizing and segmenting accounts. If you are looking to focus your resources and reduce spend, this might be for you!

Learn more about the .

Elements of a successful ABM strategy

What are the elements of a successful ABM strategy? Let’s look at a few pieces that are key to having a killer ABM strategy.

Intent data

 is a hot topic in the B2B space, and for good reason. Today’s B2B buyer is better informed than ever before, with 87% of B2B buyers who would prefer to self-serve all or part of their buying journey. Why should you care? Because by the time a buyer fills out a contact form from your website, they are likely in the final stages of their buyer’s journey. Rather than waiting on buyers to raise their hands through form-fills, integrating intent data into your ABM strategy allows you to understand your engaged audience early in their buyer’s journey and gives you insight into what content they are interested in as well as what messages will best resonate with them.

Here are just a few places you can find top tier intent data for your ABM strategy:

•  – Sourced from the world’s largest software marketplace
•  – Identify accounts surging on relevant topics with Bombora Company Surge®
• LeadSift – Take the guesswork out of prospecting with contact level intent data
• KickFire – Tap into intent data across your website and enhance your account-based strategies

(Quick plug, Foundry ABM has integrations for all of the above.)

Learn how to .

Personalization

Including  in your account-based strategy allows you to serve relevant and customized content that speaks directly to your target audience. In fact, here at Foundry we found that accounts with personalized web experience are:

• 20% more likely to convert
• 50% more likely to visit your site again
• 150% more engaged

To better engage your target audience, create dynamic web experiences by serving relevant messaging, offers, imagery, and content. Here are a few ways you can deliver personalized content within your ABM strategy: 

• Display Ads – Display ads can be personalized to speak directly to the pain points of potential customers.

• CTAs – Overlay custom cards, headers, footers with embedded offers, videos or forms targeted to specific website visitors. Use CTAs to create an action that aligns with the website and display advertising personalizations.
• 1:1 Landing Pages – Web pages give you a lot of freedom in the content you upload and the specific messaging you want to use. A 1:1 landing page is a way to mix and match content for your ICPs in a way that feels personal and high-value.

Learn more about .

Sales activation

Every company would like to shorten their sales cycle if they could. Account-based marketing has been shown to shorten sales cycles– but how? ABM identifies accounts earlier in the buyer’s journey, enabling your sales outreach to be extremely personalized with catered messaging and content even before a prospect fills out a form. Sales teams become more productive because their TAM (total addressable market) is being prioritized with data, and marketers dedicate time to warming up high-value accounts before activating sales plays. This visibility into key account insights allows marketing and sales to tightly align on messaging. 

Orchestration

Once you have a well defined audience and tactics to engage them, the most significant hurdle in your way is time. To set up campaigns with ads, personalization, and sales activation to reach the right accounts at the right time would be a hugely manual and time-intensive process. In comes orchestration. Orchestration allows you to combine your account-based audience with dynamic criteria such as intent data signals to trigger multi-channel ABM tactics automatically. As such, predictive orchestration is a powerful tool for scaling account-based marketing programs.

Learn more about the .

How do you get started with ABM?

Now that we’ve covered the basics, ready to get started with your own ABM program? 

Don’t worry, we’ll walk you through the setup and let you in on a few of our best practices.

Define your ideal customer profile

Without an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), ABM becomes quite impossible.

What is an ICP? – Simply put, identifying your high-fit customers. 

An ICP is a hypothetical description of the type of buyers in your market that would benefit most from your product or service. Your product won’t be the perfect fit for everyone, and that’s okay. At the end of the day, you want to make sure your customers will be successful with your product. Organizations with a strong Ideal Customer Profile . 

Ideal customer profiles help your marketing team get a picture of exactly who you’re creating content for. The better you understand your customer, the more you can cater messaging to the audience you’re engaging with. 

ICPs are defined by factors including their relative career stage, their familiarity with your service offerings, their pain points, and their motivation. For example, an ICP buyer persona for a SaaS company might be a Tech Newbie. Here we might say that the ‘Tech Newbie’ is the earliest in their career, not familiar with your service offerings, and their pain points may be issues like learning the systems they work in, lack of efficiency in their workflows, and more. Knowing your customer fits into this ‘Tech Newbie’ ICP, you can now place relevant content in front of them, increasing the chances of engagement and keeping your brand top of mind.

Select your accounts

Once you’ve identified your ICP, it’s time to select which target accounts you should go after. Audiences are the most important piece to a well-thought-out ABM strategy. The best source for target accounts depends on your specific business objectives and marketing goals.

Consider these tips when selecting your audience:

• When targeting prospects, begin with a list created by sales and then obtain a sign-off from the strategy team.
• When targeting existing customers, ask client success for a list of strategic accounts for upsell, cross-sell, and advocacy.
• If ABM aims to improve existing demand generation campaigns, start with account lists from marketing automation.
• Still struggling to put together a list? Find accounts based on a  of customers or hire a vendor for propensity modeling

Build your audience segments

Once you’ve selected your accounts, you can start building your audience segments. This is a crucial step to getting any ABM program off the ground. A best practice in segmenting your audience is to segment by account size and purchase stage.

Segmenting by account size

Different account sizes need different levels of attention. Instead of the average 6.8 stakeholders per purchase, enterprise sales can involve 20+ stakeholders, according to Foundry. The larger the account, the higher the expectation and need for personalization.

• Large Accounts – require the most one-on-one attention. Large accounts typically have lots of buying centers with many stakeholders. Large accounts raise unique problems that require customized solutions, requiring hyper-targeted campaigns.
• Small Accounts – can be targeted in segments. Small accounts will have fewer stakeholders involved and tend to require less attention. Marketers often scale one set of messaging and CTAs to reach tens of thousands of small accounts with similar needs.
• Midsize Accounts – aren’t large or small. They have some custom needs but move quickly with fewer stakeholders.

Segmenting by purchase stage

Not all prospects are in the same stage of the buyer’s journey and should be treated according to the stage they are currently in.

• Prospects – early in the buyer’s journey. Prospects are still defining their problems and what solutions they need. During this stage spreading brand awareness and winning share of mind is important.
• In Pipeline – in pipeline accounts have a clearly defined set of problems, and are researching a specific set of solutions. 
• Customers – customers may have already signed a contract with you, but are in essence, your most valuable segment – customer value can be expanded with retention year-to-year, upsell / cross sell opportunities, and with providing references. Customers should be provided with opportunities for continuous education, kept informed about new product updates, and should be consulted for their personal experiences with your product. 

Measure and optimize

The best way to really have an understanding of your company’s ABM success is knowing which  to track and report on. ABM isn’t about counting the number of leads you have but rather, assessing their value to your pipeline. By shifting your measurements of success to KPIs more associated with actual revenue impact, account-based marketing teams are more likely to have a positive impact on revenue.

According to Foundry Chief Customer Officer, Andrew Mahr, “The most important thing about ABM metrics is that sales and marketing need to be tied to the same KPIs — not fighting different battles with different definitions of success. When it comes to picking that metric, there are two I think work best — opportunity rate in target accounts & revenue per target account.”

Here’s a couple more key ABM metrics that we recommend tracking:

• Demand Gen by Account: Measure lift in target account engagement with channels such as email, web, and display-ads 
• Pipeline Creation: Measure growth in the percent of in-target opportunities created 
• Pipeline Influence: ​​Measure growth in the percent of in-target deals closed

Best practices for launching a successful ABM program

Congratulations, you’re ready to get started with ABM! To really help you get your program off the ground, here are a couple of tips from industry experts with years of experience under their belt and thousands of successful ABM campaigns.

What’s your advice to those just starting out with ABM?
“Start with customer expansion campaigns. It removes some of the challenges that new logo campaigns have (e.g. lack of account insights, trouble mapping the account) and so lets marketing and sales teams focus on collaborative campaign design and probably benefit from shorter sales cycles.” – Andrew Mahr, Foundry Chief Customer Officer

What’s the biggest challenge you see people face with ABM programs?
“The biggest challenge I see people face with ABM programs is when there’s no buy-in from the sales team or the marketing team is getting lost in ads and forgetting the other channels and tools critical to ABM program success.” – Customer Success Manager, Foundry

See more about best practices from our .

How to select the right ABM platform for your business

Selecting the right ABM platform for your business is a large commitment, and requires company-wide input and backing. Before you select your vendor, here are a few tips to help you , and select your martech stack.

• Have a plan, know your goals, and how ABM will fit into your existing strategy.
• Ask yourself, does this software integrate well with your existing tech stack?
• Talk to other teams! ABM is for sales just as much as it is for marketing.

Is ABM software right for you? Check out the  designed for senior marketing professionals who are assessing the suitability of ABM platforms for their organization.

Conclusion

As a maturing field, the account-based marketing landscape can be quite overwhelming for beginners. Above all else, account-based marketing is about getting sales and marketing teams on the same page about who to target, and what success looks like. Beginners can dip a toe in the ABM waters by starting with sales and marketing alignment and a target account list, before diving into the deep end with account-based marketing software. 

If you think it’s time you learned more about account-based marketing software, check out the Foundry ABM platform with one of our ABM experts.

Marketers know the struggle of trying to do it all on a shoestring budget, especially post-pandemic. If you’re a marketer keen on ABM for your company, here are some tips for how to convince your executive team that it’s worth the investment. 

1. Have a clear plan – know how ABM will fit into your overarching strategy 

One of the most important ways to prepare to sell your executive team on ABM is to have a clear plan. You should be able to speak with confidence on how ABM will fit into your overarching marketing strategy, and how it can benefit the existing martech programs already in use. There’s nothing more embarrassing than selling your team on a solution only to backtrack later when it doesn’t work out as you had hoped.

2. Tailor your pitch to the people you’re talking to

Your message should be different based on who you’re talking to. Ask yourself:

• What’s their level of ABM knowledge?
• What’s their key concern / goal?
• What’s their communication style?

Don’t assume one has existing knowledge on ABM. Start with a brief overview to keep everyone along for the ride while you give your pitch. As you plan your pitch, speak to your audience’s concerns, and how ABM aligns with their goals. Stay mindful of your audience’s communication style, incorporating media such as ebooks, case studies, videos, or blogs when you think they’ll engage with it and find the information valuable. 

3. Anticipate roadblocks

You likely can guess what roadblocks may crop up along your path. Perhaps there are often many stakeholders and projects get passed back and forth until they’re dead in the water; maybe your budget is tight, maybe your team is short-staffed and it just doesn’t seem like the right time. Ask yourself how to bypass these roadblocks. If there are many stakeholders, whose buy-in should you go after first? If the budget is tight, can you promise a specified ROI? If your team is short staffed, can ABM implementation help your team become more efficient? Think these things through ahead of time and you’ll shine when it comes time to get down to brass tacks.

4. Get cross-departmental buy-in. 

ABM is as much for sales as it is for marketing, so securing buy-in from your sales department thought leaders sets you up for success when  selling to your executive team.