What will be the strategy ? for client's continues business growth

 

Tactics

As organizations grow, investment will shift increasingly to creating the right experience for customers to drive usage, retention, and growth. This shift will cause a significant expansion in the scope of customer marketing leaders in particular, and make them a key stakeholder in the development and execution of account based strategies.

Leading account based organizations use account based orchestration that plays a huge role across all stages of the funnel. The four key areas that have a positive impact from orchestrated accounts are – driving engagement, resulting in new meetings, increasing deal velocity, and expanding footprint in an account.

TOPO’s research noted that a sales development rep or SDR outbound has been the most critical tactic used by account based organizations, with 88% rating it as important. Outreach strategies like direct mail, exec-to-exec, and events are rated as extremely important.

Customized content development is seen as important by 63% of account based organizations, but is only used by 47% of them. Companies that have been found to close larger deals do target more contacts per account on average. Organizations that are piloting their first account based program should develop clear messaging for at least two contact roles. A recommended tactic is to separate messaging and offers for entry-point contact and a decision maker or stakeholder contact. Organizations will be able to develop a broader range of offers and messaging for various buyer personas and scenarios as their account base matures.

Metrics

An ideal account based measurement model should prioritize tracking the engagement across the entire account rather than engaging individual leads. This process should encompass a complete list of target accounts, which stand for the addressable market for account based efforts. These are the conversion points in the funnel:

• Engaged accounts – The number of target accounts that have reached a meaningful level of engagement. (Engaged Account Rate)
• Opportunity accounts – The number of accounts with one or more new opportunities. (Opportunity Rate)
• Closed-win accounts – The number of target accounts with a new closed-won opportunity. (Account Win rate)

When compared to a traditional funnel, which often includes a high volume of unqualified prospects, an account based funnel is extremely efficient. This efficiency allows organizations to focus resources on just a portion of their addressable market, and ultimately deliver a significant pipeline and revenue impact.

Effective account based execution is based on a strategic organizational decision and requires dedicated leadership. An ABM leader will not only oversee planning and execution but also drive the organizational change that’s required to adopt an account based approach and shift the way companies measure their results. Larger companies are more likely to assign an account based leader, whereas companies with more than $500M in revenue are 38% more likely to assign a dedicated account based leader than companies with less than $50M in revenue.

Companies that are starting their account based marketing today are learning from the mistakes of their ancestors. This is seen in 67% of the companies who already have an account based leader in their first year of doing account based marketing. However, most organizations implement a successful account based marketing strategy without needing the additional dedicated reinforcements or resources. In some cases when organizations do add a dedicated resource, they are most likely to add account based SDRs and marketing program managers.

Account based marketing is more than just a marketing initiative as sales and sales development are crucial in the stage of account based execution. In fact, organizational alignment is essential to cross-functional implementation, adoption, execution, and scaling of the account based strategy. While marketing, sales development, and sales participation is universally high, the best performers are 3 times more likely to involve customer success and 96% more likely to involve account management than underperformers. This disparity reveals the broader adoption of account based marketing across the entire customer lifecycle within the best-performing organizations.

Given the limited resource, it is important that organizations establish a process for identifying which accounts to actively target, and switch accounts from active to inactive and vice versa. Account selection allows organizations to be able to focus resources where they are most likely to drive the biggest results, grouping accounts for more efficient execution or identifying accounts that are most likely to convert in a specific period of time. An account selection process typically includes a combination of sales input, company data, and intent data. For lists with more than 5,000 accounts, the most important inputs are intent data and company information like industry and technology.

Some Takeaways

Make sure to invest the time and resources necessary to create a robust ICP as it is one of the key foundations for the development of your target account list and the entire account based strategy. Develop coordinated plays that combine multiple tactics and groups, including SDRs, in order to come up with a highly impactful experience. Identify a leader responsible for establishing the account based strategy and seeing it through to success. Lastly, have an account-centric approach to measurement and stick to provide opportunity, pipeline, and revenue outcomes for 2020.