The Only Marketing Strategy You Need to Supercharge Your Sales (Marketing Series, Part 4)

In our marketing series so far, we’ve talked about the ten marketing mistakes that keep you from growing, the two killer questions to give your marketing focus, and the six most effective marketing channels for promo pros. One critical point we’ve emphasized over and over: marketing is “sales on steroids.” Today, you’ll discover the single most effective marketing strategy for B2B.

“I really wish you wouldn’t talk about it.” 

He said it with a friendly smile but he was serious. “I heard you talk about it on the skucast, we consider it our secret weapon, and I don’t think our competitors know about it … if they do know about it, they don’t actually do it.” 

The guy telling me to keep my mouth shut (in a kind way) is a successful distributor whom I respect immensely. He’s always on the cusp of thinking ridiculously smart about how to do the promo business better, and he implemented a new(ish) marketing strategy to help him do just that, resulting in record growth.

What was he talking about? 

Well, the name itself won’t rock your world. It’s as mundane as they come: Account-Based Marketing (ABM). Now, before you lapse into a fugue state over the boring marketing-speak, consider this: With a small team comprised of sales and marketing pros working together, one company earned $120 million in revenue by revitalizing (basically) dead accounts solely using ABM.

That got your attention? 

Good. Because it’s that powerful. 

(Editor’s note: We write a lot about topics that are near-and-dear to our hearts. Topics we consider of the utmost importance for business success; for me, personally, in my 20+ years of business and with a strong focus on marketing, I think this one subject has the potential to transform your sales and marketing more than any other. If you flatly refuse to read about it, at least scroll to the section, “Almost But Not Quite ABM” because there are some in the industry who think they already do this, but they don’t).  

ABM might not be a sexy name, but if you hang with me for a minute, you’ll find out that it is the single most effective approach to ensure your B2B marketing grows sales.

First, What is ABM? 

According to the ITSMA, the organization that coined the term, (more acronyms, please), ABM is a strategic approach to designing and executing highly-targeted, personalized marketing to drive business growth with specific, named accounts. ABM is treating every single account as a “market of one.”

In other words, instead of relying on a marketing strategy that releases the same tactics (i.e., email, marketing kits, direct mail, etc.), to all clients at once, and sending the same message to all clients, rather, you personalize your marketing to each customer. 

You treat each customer as its own market.

Need some high-powered proof? Hewlett-Packard (yes, they’re still around and $30 billion strong) launched an ABM initiative to target, what they called, “CDH” accounts: Cold, Dead, and Hostile accounts. These accounts were hard to land, due to past relationships, personnel changes, or competitor affiliations. It was a billion-dollar pipeline of opportunities and, thanks to their ABM tactics, they won 12% of those opportunities with a small team of people. That’s $120 million in earned business because of their ABM approach. (And yes, one of those tactics was a timely promotional campaign sent to a CIO that earned them a spot in a RFP opportunity they were previously excluded from).

Why is ABM the Most Effective B2B Marketing Method Ever Created?

It’s personalized. Period. I mean, who doesn’t like to be catered to? Can you imagine if a restaurant created a menu just for you and your dietary needs? 

To have someone carefully craft a custom solution for you, and for your specific needs, is the ultimate in high touch service, which yields an incredible return, plus, it keeps clients for (practically) life. 

It’s also the most effective because it aligns marketing and sales. For most B2B companies, the marketing and sales departments are like the red states and blue states of the business ecosystem. Yes, they commingle together on occasion, but for the most part, they function in silos. It’s an old problem: Marketing fills the funnel, eeks out flimsy leads to sales, who then jettisons most of that hard work by disqualifying or burying the list. Perhaps one or two actually survive, netting a miserable rate of return. Marketing and sales find perfect alignment with an ABM strategy, centering both departments on a mutual strategy that will bring the most profitable accounts to a close, quicker. 

ABM is all about FOCUS, or as one article put it, ABM is the most “customer-obsessed strategy” you can create. 

Have you ever hired a sales rep and (basically) said, “Okay! Now, here’s your box of business cards, go sell lots of promo!” and they bring in shitty leads, slowly...and their efforts are scattered and not trackable…and their numbers aren’t climbing? 

It’s because they lack focus. Focus on the right kind of business, focused alignment around goals with their colleagues, and focus on solving problems for customers rather than shilling products.

ABM is ideal for the client because it’s about solving their unique problems, and it’s ideal for you and your team because it’s highly targeted, allowing you to track progress against a specific set of accounts, and therefore a specific set of goals. 

Why ABM is ideal for a promotional products distributor: 

ABM is perfect for our industry. Why? 

In Marketo’s ebook “A Recipe for Lean Account-Based Marketing,” they stated that ABM works best for two primary reasons. For one, you are targeting fewer and typically larger key accounts. The second reason is that groups of accounts share similar characteristics because they are in similar verticals, or industries. Because distributors are tasked to solve specific problems for specific customers, they become knowledgeable about the problems of that unique vertical.

For example, most distributors find success by providing solutions to segments, like camps or schools or banks. Fred Daniels with STS Brands found fast-success with new clients because of his experience selling to the education market. Fred and his team know which specific challenges the education market faces, and they are familiar with the purchasing systems and approval processes. This experience within a specific industry buys credibility in the eyes of prospects and fast-ramps them into a problem-solving conversation with similar accounts, so it makes sense that they would FOCUS on these types of customers. 

In most distributorships, 80% of their revenue comes from 20% of their accounts, in other words, they naturally drift into key account management, making distributors ready-built for this kind of focus.

A second reason ABM is ideal (for our industry) is that we sell a broad spectrum of products. Because of the infinite product possibilities, concentrating our work on one account is easier than providing the same pen to thousands of people (which commoditizes our business). Plus, we serve clients who use our products for specific marketing objectives. 

Lastly, if there’s an ADD of the marketing world, it’s promo. We’re not only selling thousands of wildly diverse products we often make the tragic mistake of selling to everyone. 4Imprint might be able to sell to everyone, but for a distributor to differentiate from the mass of commoditization, they must focus on providing a unique value.

Our Industry Uses Almost-But-Not-Quite ABM Tactics

You do have a Top 20 or Top 50 hit list for prospects, right? You keep it pinned on the wall or somewhere (digitally) where all eyes can see it all the time? You know your top clients by defining profit? You have this list tattooed on your heart and your team knows it, too?

That’s an ABM tactic. 

Distributors get oh-so-close with actual ABM practices, but they (at best) do it haphazardly, or they utilize targeted lists but shot-gun approaches. The “creative quarterly idea kits” are worthwhile, but still, they are a one-to-many tactic and “same-thing-to-everyone” campaigns. It’s close to ABM because it’s usually targeted to a finite group of clients and prospects. 

Email campaigns are typically “same-message-to-everyone,” so it’s not ABM. At best, some distributors will segment their email strategy by specialty or industries, which is closer to ABM but still, not ABM.

All of these are solid marketing tactics, but they are not personalized (i.e., customer-obsessed). Tactics like the kits might be creative and clever, but, as we know, being creative is merely table stakes in this business now. 

In today’s world, engagement marketing that solves a specific problem works, or as Jay Acunzo put it, “grabbing attention is good but holding attention is better.” 

Distributors get close to actual ABM when they occasionally use a few hyper-targeted tactics to land new accounts, but they haven’t codified an ABM strategy into their ecosystem to consistently bring in leads. (Our industry has two chronic pipeline problems, either we have a lot of leads from the wrong kinds of business, or we have too few leads from the right kind; you can solve this problem with ABM).

Distributors also practice some ABM tactics but to one account only, usually their largest account (or two largest accounts), but they really only do this if they have a consultative salesperson involved in the account. In other words, it isn’t a systematic, accepted, and codified practice in their ecosystem for all reps and all accounts.

How to Begin ABM

There are four principles for how to begin an ABM strategy (from Sangram Vajre’s Inc article, “The Biggest B2B Trend You Need Now”): identify, expand, engage, advocate.

1. Identify: Create a list of target industries or accounts that are an ideal fit for your business. These are, usually, similar client types you’ve shown success with (often called an ICP, Ideal Customer Profile). For example: When I ran a distributorship, we sold to the energy sector and became well-versed at solving problems for the oil and gas industry; targeting prospects in that industry made sense to capitalize on our knowledge. We were familiar with all of the buying cycles, the infrastructure, and could navigate ourselves to the solutions table quicker than our competitors. Or, maybe you can segment potential clients by the titles that you’ve sold to, we looked at our top ten accounts and discovered that every title was in the communications and marketing departments, this focused where we spent our future sales and marketing energy. Now, number your list: is it a Top 100 Hit List? A Top 50 List? (Some of you might be thinking: that’s pretty basic, but read on).

2. Expand: Now, it’s time to do some research. Begin to do your homework on these brands but make it simple by letting the web do the work for you: create google alerts for all of these clients to pick up on recent news or developments. Example: If you’re monitoring a client and they announce they are filling a hundred jobs, you know they might need to create or revamp an onboarding kit with all of their new hires. Google alerts (you do have google alerts for your clients now, right?) or tools like Hootsuite, and Brandwatch can bring relevant news to you. And follow these top accounts on all of the social channels (particularly LinkedIn). Use reading tools like Feedly to aggregate articles they share from their marketing. Sell like a solutions-provider but research like a reporter. You want to be the expert at knowing and solving your customer’s problems. “Expanding” is also expanding your list of contacts within the company. In our industry, for example, we know that the top four departments that utilize branded products are marketing, sales, operations, and research. Create your target list, set-up listening channels, and expand your list of contacts.

3. Engage: This is where our industry shines, our medium ignites engagement with prospects. Obviously, you’ll be crafting compelling promotional campaigns for each of these customers for specific objectives. But marketing means moving beyond promo by also creating content specifically for clients or industries, blogposts, ebooks, email campaigns, social media campaigns, and more. Measuring engagement is important here as well, use Google Analytics to measure visits by specific organizations to your site (multiple visits from the same people or multiple visitors from the same organization, etc).  

4. Advocate: In an interview with Heinz Marketing, Vajre stated that ABM is a strategy for the entire lifecycle of your customers. In other words, ABM is also CRM in that regard: you are constantly going through the cycle of identifying more problems within specific accounts, targeting a wider group of buyers, and engaging new opportunities along the way. If you are on commonsku, tagging is an essential tool for this type of work. But the advocate stage is about the benefits of a customer-obsessed focus: finding problems, solving problems in an ingenious way, and thereby cultivating advocates. It’s a never-ending cycle that results in faster sales with existing clients and consistent referrals. 

I’d like to add one more that is important for our industry, and it’s baked into the steps above but needs a specific call-out: Tracking and Celebration. Marketo’s ebook (Recipe for Lean Account Based Marketing) includes a scorecard for tracking your progress as you begin your journey with ABM. Wouldn’t it be fun to turn your weekly sales meeting from a “where are the leads?” convo into discovery on exactly which next steps will help move a prospect closer to you? And it becomes a weekly, positive charge and celebration when you can actually see and track progress together.  Or, as Vajre says in his book, ABM allows you to stop measuring and reporting vanity metrics (total hits on your website, total number of sales calls, for example) and embrace new ones focused on business outcomes. 

The biggest benefit of ABM for you and your team is what Forrester renamed it, ABE: Account Based Engagement. Rather than thinking it as a strategy and tactics, it really is about getting closer to the prospect and customer so that you can become a real-time problem solver using tactile solutions (and not just the “one they call when they need some pens”). 

At the time of this writing, the corona-virus is impacting travel, global markets, and more. Being close to your client in this way helps you pivot toward problems as their needs change because their needs will change. 

It’s not about the acronym or some new-fangled system, it’s simply a hyper-target, hyper-focused, and customer-obsessed strategy that gets everyone on the team activated to seeking and providing solutions over product, a win-win for everyone involved.