10 Tactics You Need for the Perfect ABM Strategy in 2024

Have you noticed a dip in your inbound sales? Are your sales and marketing strategies out of sync with the ever-changing market? ABM Strategy is the solution to your problems! 

An ABM strategy combines your business’s sales and marketing plans to create efficient business operations. Account Based Marketing tactics target individuals most likely to become high-value clients. Thus, they reduce acquisition costs and increase revenue for your business.

It is the new way of conveying your business’s offerings to those individuals who need and appreciate your services the most. 

Let’s see how an ABM strategy can help your business leverage the most suitable clients and help you thrive.

Account Based Marketing – Essential in 2024

Communication and information are abundant in today’s marketplace. ABM tactics help you decide who to speak with and what to tell them to effectively sell your products. 

According to LinkedIn:

• 87% of Marketers who measure RoI say ABM outperforms other investments,
• 84% of all Marketers claim ABM helps them retain and expand existing relationships,
• 91% of ABM Marketers indicate larger deal sizes because of the strategy. 

The numbers indicate strong faith in the ABM strategy. It brings synergy to operations and integrates different departments within a company. ABM strategies are a must if you want to ensure that all your employees work towards the same goal.

SGE to Disrupt Inbound Sales

Google has recently decided it wants to play the AI game. It has introduced AI-Overviews for Generative Search to create interactive user experience. Search Generative Experience (SGE) is poised to take over our screens in the coming years. 

Signals of disruption are now looming over businesses. SEO strategies that have thus far proven useful for inbound sales are threatened with extinction. Search Engine Journal has found that SGE’s AI-Overview doesn’t even cite the top 10 SERP websites as its sources! 

This change will have repercussions, and inbound sales and marketing are likely to suffer. This change is why you should be prepared to pivot to Account-Based Marketing. It is the most promising tool to ensure your company’s survival and future stability. 

Here’s what ABM has in the locker for you:

• Shortened sales cycles, 
• High-intent leads 
• Better client relationships through personalized nurturing

Thus, if your SEO-based inbound leads are decreasing and SGE-based leads are uncertain, Account Based Marketing is the way to go.

Now More Important Than Ever

LinkedIn says that 60% of its users have an “informational intent,” and the other 40% have a “transactional intent.” LinkedIn thus provides an ideal seller’s market. Even if users don’t end up buying your product, they will definitely look for them. 

SEO and SGE Optimization strategies don’t offer such a uniform, trackable buyers’ list. There, you depend on prospects knowing what to look for and on Google’s AI understanding that you have what the prospects need. 

Leveraging Account Based Marketing meanspotential clients are already within your reach. The only task is to identify the right ones to pursue. And here, too, ABM helps. It tells you how to craft a personalized strategy that caters to the needs of the decision-makers of high-value prospects.

2024 is a turbulent time for businesses. The marketplace is a rough sea where each new wave threatens to upend business cycles. ABM Strategy is a liferaft in such a time that will tide you over to a better tomorrow. Let’s see how below.

What, Exactly, is an ABM Strategy?

LinkedIn is today’s Wild West. Here, not all that glitters is gold. You must have experienced this. Cold calls that lead nowhere, emails that are ignored and messages that are unopened. Account Based Marketing eliminates such fishing expeditions where you come up empty-handed. 

ABM strategy tells you to only dig for the whales – high-value clients that are the right fit for your business. It has three essential elements:

1. Marketing and Sales Alignment

Businesses think of Sales and Marketing teams as separate organs of the same body. After all, they have different functions, right? Account Based Marketing disagrees. 

The first element of an ABM strategy is to think of Marketing and Sales not as separate organs but as two parts of the same organ. According to ABM logic, you can’t sell your product if you don’t market it to the right people. Conversely, it asks “How is marketing effective if not tailored to the ultimate buyer?”

According to LinkedIn, an ABM strategy doesn’t just suggest aligning sales and marketing strategies; it enforces alignment. According to the principles of ABM, marketing your product to an entire village when only ten households need it doesn’t make sense. 

The idea is to identify those ten households that need your product. But it doesn’t stop there – it directs you to work your way to the five that will pay the price at which you are selling it. 
Thus, uniting marketing and sales strategies into one smooth operation is the most important Account-Based Marketing Tactic.

2. Personalization is Key

Not everyone working at an organization makes buying decisions. While ten employees might need your expensive SaaS to solve communication problems, none can sanction its acquisition. 

Thus, the need for your product is often latent within the organizations you know need it. It needs to be awakened. 

ABM Strategies promises to solve a common B2B sales problem: How do you sell a product when the user is not the purchaser?

ABM can do just this. It tells us, “When purchasing power is scarce, personalization is key.” 

A simple marketing strategy will help you identify the companies that need your product. However, an ABM strategy asks you to reach the people who can actually buy it. 

A product empathizes with its users; an ABM strategy empathizes with its purchaser. 

3. A Unified Business Strategy

So an Account-Based Marketing Strategy is useful for marketing and sales techniques but not much else, right? Not quite! The health of your business depends on the vitality of its organs. If they are out of sync, the entire operation becomes clunky:

• Your product isn’t selling well? Marketing must be the problem! Or is it with the product itself? Or is it the sales department itself that is bleeding money? 
• If the product is selling but the revenue is down, is the problem with pricing? Or do you just lack high-paying customers?
• Should you introduce premium features to generate short-term revenue or slash the price to gain long-term market share? Or should you take the secret third option and cut costs instead?

As a business owner, you face all these questions and more. An ABM Strategy is the helpline number you can call to answer such questions. 

Diagnosing the source of your pain can be difficult when different departments in your organization are chasing different leads rather than working toward the same objective.

However, if all your departments work with each other toward a common result, you can:

• Set up easy-to-follow guidelines for unified functioning,
• Create verifiable and measurable outcomes, 
• Coordinate a step-wise sales timeline,
• Curate a strong customer retention plan and
• Identify where execution is lacking. 

ABM’s focus on high-value clients allows you to concentrate on doing more with less. The idea isn’t to prioritize quality over quantity but to increase quantity by strengthening quality. 

10 Tactics to Help You Build an Account Based Marketing Strategy

Okay, you agree that an Account Based Marketing strategy could benefit your B2B venture. But how exactly should you create one for your business? How can you maximize the value an ABM Strategy can generate? What works, and what doesn’t? What do the stats have to say about building the optimal ABM strategy?

Let’s look at the 10 tactics you can use to build the perfect ABM Strategy for your B2B enterprise. 

1. Start with Alignment Exercises

Sales and marketing teams must be aligned for an ABM strategy to work. If your sales and marketing teams follow different aims and only meet to discuss specific clients now and then, you don’t have an ABM strategy! What you have is occasional collaboration, not alignment. 

Here’s what executives and marketers who aligned their sales and marketing teams say:

• 92% of highly successful marketers have strongly aligned marketing and sales teams,
• When marketing and sales are aligned, marketing-generated revenue increases by 208%,
• Aligning marketing and sales teams results in a 36% higher customer retention rate.

Alignment needs collaboration, but collaboration doesn’t imply alignment. To align your sales and marketing teams:

• Ensure they go after the same clients. 

The sales team should not approach any lead that the marketing team has not warmed up. Marketing must pave the way for sales. Your marketing team will tell a set of targets about your product. It conveys product information and capacity. The sales team then follows up with intent.

• Relaying information is the first step. You tell a company they could benefit from your product. 
• Displaying capacity is the intermediate step. You tell the company they could be a potential client. 
• The last step is conveying intent. You invite the company to form a long-term working relationship with your business. 

Look at sales and marketing as Siamese twins. One can’t work without the other. Unite marketing and sales to inaugurate your ABM strategy. 

2. Follow a Set Timeframe 

Only after your marketing team has understood what a client wants should the sales team approach them. A premature approach could result in the loss of a valuable prospect. You don’t get a second chance at a first pitch. Time is your business’s biggest asset – channel it smartly. 

Work around this issue by following a set timeframe. For this, sales and marketing must have an aligned strategy and a personalized approach for every client. 

• Do you already have an idea of what the prospect requires?
• How desperately does the prospect need the solution you are providing?
• What scale does the prospect expect your company to operate at?
• Does the prospect have prerequisites for the companies with which it works?
• What could the prospect possibly want that could jeopardize the sale?

Based on answers to these questions, sales and marketing teams must create a timeline to approach and convert a prospect. Here’s an example:

• Week One – Marketing targets the prospect with advertised messages. 
• Week Two – Marketing identifies those with purchasing power within the prospect.
• Week Three – Marketing conveys capacity to such individuals within the target. 
• Week Four – Sales shows intent and sets up a meeting with the purchasers.
• Week Five – Sales closes or loses the sale. 

Of course, timelines are dynamic. You may have to modify them depending on the communication with a prospect.

But setting the timeline is essential. It indicates how your expectations measure up against the client’s actual expectations. It also tells you if your strategy has worked. Over time, repeated selling exercises will result in consistent timeframes.

To summarize the first tactic – you can’t win if you don’t come to play. And to play in today’s B2B marketplace with an ABM strategy, you must align your sales and marketing teams.

3. Curate Socially Intelligent Client Lists

LinkedIn offers a huge B2B marketplace. Out of more than 200 million users, 65% are decision-makers. This means that 4 out of 5 users drive business decisions in some capacity. Merkle found that 35% of the surveyed enterprises struggle to choose a B2B supplier. 

Thus, one in three enterprises is a prospect for your business. This number might increase once you have an established brand with a competitive advantage in your segment. 

But as we have seen, targeting all businesses within a segment is like shooting arrows at a target with a blindfold over your eyes. Eventually, you’ll run out of arrows and might not even have hit the target!

To identify the correct target, first remove the blindfold. Survey the marketplace, locate your targets and only then notch an arrow. Curating a socially intelligent client list is an underrated ABM Tactic that ensures long-term, loyal clientele. 

4. The Art of an Ideal Customer Profile

How should you locate your prospects? Start by building an Ideal Customer Profile. This profile does not need a set of names – that can come later. Begin by identifying which category of people is most likely to buy your product.

An ICP will depend on:

• Job Experience 

Who is most likely to understand your product within a target firm? Who will appreciate how it works and recognize why their company needs it? Someone who has been in the industry for five years? Freshers facing difficulties starting out? A veteran who grasps the complex nature of business processes? Squint to sharpen your vision.

• Education

What degree would your ideal customers have? Are they engineers? Business analysts? Data scientists? Or undergraduates with startups? Education is a key filter for LinkedIn profiles. It helps you easily identify with ideal users and purchasers of your products. 

• Demographics

Where are your ideal customers likely to reside? Are they rural farmers with supply chain needs? Urban business owners with internal communication conundrums? Remote workers with organizational problems? 

Further, what age group would they belong to? Is your product for millennials who understand technology? Boomers who want a simple and elegant solution to their supply-monitoring problems? Or GenZ’ers who want a sophisticated tool to innovate with? 

When creating an Ideal Customer Profile, every detail matters. 

• Company

Another variable is the company you’re looking for as a client. Does your product cater most to startups looking to expand? Or are you looking to land a Fortune 500? Alternatively, is it a mid-sized company that your product could help increase efficiency? 

The category of company matters a lot when devising an ICP. Everyone tells LinkedIn who they work for. Once you decide what kind of companies you want as clients, your marketing and sales teams can identify key purchasers with them. 

• Interests

LinkedIn encourages its users to share their interests on their profiles. Shared interests give you a window to understand your prospect. A common interest helps your marketing team understand a prospect’s pain point. It can position your product to empathize with them. A well-positioned product makes it easier for the sales team to convert the lead into a client!

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a template to identify prospects. It is the compass of your Account Based Marketing Strategy. It will guide you in the direction where your prospects gather. From there on, converting prospects is easier – like shooting at fish in a barrel, you can’t miss!

5. Advertise Effectively

Thus far, your marketing and sales teams are aligned to go to battle. You also have a compass and are ready to move in the right direction. But how do you attract your prospects? How should you tell them you are ready to fight for them, with them? 

Advertisement is your battle cry! LinkedIn offers several ways to advertise your company, its philosophy and its products. It offers several options:

• Sponsored Content 

You can display sponsored content on LinkedIn to members across desktop, tablet and mobile devices. They can take several forms:

• Single Image Ads: Ideal for empathizing with a client’s pain points.
• Carousel Ads: Perfect to tell the show how a catalog of your products or services. 
• Video Ads: Suited to sharing stories of how your product can solve client needs.
• Event Ads: Invite prospects to a common forum to voice their issues with a CTA. 
• Document Ads: For conveying case studies or performance reports to build trust.

Sponsored content is a time-tested way of signaling your presence to potential clients. 

• Sponsored Messaging 

While sponsored content signals presence, sponsored messaging invites conversations or actions. LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging has two forms:

• Message Ads: These are conversation starters where you show capacity and invite intent from the prospect. Typically, they are short and sweet statements that convey empathy with the prospect and respect for their time. They also offer a solution to a pain point you have identified. 

• Conversation Ads: These take the form of a prompt and offer an opportunity for the receiver to reply via a choreographed answer. They convey capacity for collaboration and intent to collaborate. Answers can take the form of:

• A website address that the receiver can click,
• A “How can this help me?” or
• A “Tell me more about this…” reply. 

Use Sponsored Messages only when you are sure that you have identified a warm prospect that you can convert into a hot lead. A sponsored message could be an encroachment on the prospect’s LinkedIn space. Embark on this journey only when confident that it serves the prospect well.

• Dynamic Ads 

Dynamic ads provide avenues for action. They appear on the side panel and scroll down with their feed. Dynamic ads are unique tools within the LinkedIn armory. They automatically gather and include your audience members’ information from their profiles. Receivers will see their profile pictures and names within the ad. 

Dynamic ads are of three types:

• Spotlight Ads: Personalized ads that take users to a landing page. They are ideal if you know the prospect’s interests, job profile or education. A spotlight ad aims to build awareness, increase website visits or invite job applicants. 
• Follower Ads: They invite users to follow your page. They should be crafted cleverly to ensure a good CTR. This is an opportunity for your business to become part of the prospects’ network. 
• Text Ads: These ads appear on the right tail of LinkedIn desktop pages. They also appear on the homepage, “Profiles” page, “People You May Know Page” and “Who’s Viewed My Profile Page.”

Thus, LinkedIn offers several ways for you to beckon your brand’s presence in the B2B marketplace. After you design and launch your ad campaign, you can monitor its progress on the Ads Dashboard on your LinkedIn page. 

The Dashboard will give you real-time data to see how your campaign is faring at the click of a button. Observe the accounts on which you have based your ABM Strategy, and advance on your brand’s signaling quest!

Now, you have strongly aligned marketing and sales teams watching your flanks. You are primed with a sharp list of targets and a map of their location. You even know how to reach them, the direction is clear. 

Next, let’s understand what you should tell them to leave a lasting impression on your brand.

6. Create Quality Content

It is clear that you are shooting arrows at your prospects. But the aim isn’t to maim them. Rather, inform them that you want to fight alongside them. The arrows aren’t lined with poison or lit with flames. They are tied with messages that heal and information that solves their problems. 

But what should these messages contain? Quality content matters – words and images can convey your understanding of the prospects’ problems. It can show them you care about their pain points, time and resources.

The idea is to tailor content to the medium of the message:

• Use vibrant images to display achievements,
• Include pictures of real people to convey empathy,
• Utilize short messages to communicate big ideas,
• Give them a prompt that prompts!

LinkedIn content is different from inbound advertising via SEO. Instead of being extensive, it should be concise yet comprehensive. Messaging needs to be sharp and provoke recognition from prospects that you have:

• Products they need, 
• Solutions to salve their wounds and
• Ideas that bridge vital gaps. 

LinkedIn has said that B2B transactions depend equally on the professional and the personal. As more people work remotely and from their homes, the tone and conversation of sales pitches need to adapt. 

Shabby delivery can blunt the combined weight of marketing and sales alignment, a strong ICP and well-positioned ads. It can turn a lead into a lost cause. Draft minimal messages for maximum impact. If your Account-Based Marketing Tactics don’t prioritize delivery to “Accounts,” they will not have the desired effect. 

7. Leverage and Expand Contacts

Once you have implemented your ABM strategy, the goal is to expand. Beginning with a small but strong client base should generate increased revenue. Use this revenue to broaden your horizons. 

Once your compass has taken you to your short-term destination, the trick is to rework it. Enhance your reach, and tweak the magnets. Based on your product’s current performance, who else can it serve? 

Interest-based enhancement of potential clients is key. One strategy is to look for lateral interests. If data scientists have benefited from your product, can professional academics? What about think tanks? Police-makers? 

The possibilities don’t end there. Integrate the supply chain—how can you reach those who provide your clients’ bare bones? Once you have established trust in your product, targets will increase. 

The goal of Account Based Marketing is to market to specific accounts. Expanding the marketing network is easy once you have a strong framework for identifying key accounts.

8. Invite Conversations to Sell

Account Based Marketing depends on who you converse with and how you drive those conversations. As we have seen, your product’s utility doesn’t drive sales. Displaying that utility to the right stakeholders is key. 

LinkedIn tells us that only 39% of buying decisions are made by the IT department, down from 75% in 2014. The change in buying networks calls for a concurrent reworking of marketing and selling strategies. 

Twice as many people are involved in buying decisions, and emotion and humor are now very important features. 

So, market to the users but sell to the decision-makers. To do this, build long-term relationships with those who hold purchasing power. Identify the buyer’s journey. When you identify a prospect, 

• Identify the users: who within the target company will the product help and how?
• Empathize with pain points: how can you best market your product visually?
• Market to influence: who can convey the product’s utility to the purchasers?
• Sell with intent: who is most likely to respond to a pitch or product demo?

You know your product is a winner. An Account Based Marketing Strategy aims to convince the buyer to participate in the victory. The goal is to make the pitch alluring to the prospect. Then, you can shine your product and show its luster. 

9. Re-Orient, Re-Target

ABM Strategies can help when working toward efficiency and prioritizing quality over quantity. But they are not silver bullets. Re-orientation is necessary when expanding across segments because buying networks will be different. 

You must change your ABM Strategy to accommodate a moving target: 

• F&B companies want quality and compliance, but e-commerce startups need quick results. 
• Agricultural companies focus on safety, whereas florists care about inventory. 
• Healthcare will care about ethical growth, but sporting apps work with open-source data.

Your product can provide solutions to every one of these segments. But will the factors that underpin decisions and decision-makers remain the same? Not likely. Understanding the segment will tell you what drives different prospects. Your ABM strategy should follow the direction in which they drive.

10. Monitor Outcomes

Account-based Marketing provides precise results so you can easily monitor your progress. LinkedIn provides several analytical tools to measure your progress. Some of these tools include:

• Measuring Conversions
• Analyzing Ad Performance
• Understanding Audience Data
• Weighing Prospect Opportunities 

You can gain insights into specific parts of your strategy. You can pinpoint:

• Gaps in delivery: Have you framed your content poorly? How many people are clicking away even after reading your content?
• Lack of execution: Has the sales team spoken with the prospect warmed up by marketing? Have they followed the timeframe you have set out?
• Imprecise targeting: Has marketing followed your carefully crafted ICP? Have they utilized the proper channels of communication?
• Ad-prospect mismatch: Have you shown a message ad to the wrong audience? Is your spotlight ad not personalized enough?

You want to solve problems in marketing and sales processes. For that, you must identify them accurately. LinkedIn also provides you with tools like A/B testing ads and messages. Use such tools to see how your ABM Strategy performs. Then, you can rework specific parts for a maximum return on investment.

With these tactics, you can now curate your ABM Strategy, ready to serve your business. Remember to envision an end goal before strategizing. The process may change the goal by achieving and measuring it, but your business will become lean and efficient. You will gain a well-calibrated team, a long-term strategy and nourishing clients.

Benefits to Look for When Using an ABM Strategy

Before crafting your ABM Strategy, let’s look at some of the benefits you should watch out for. After all, the goal of a strategy is to enjoy the fruits of its success.

1. Interdepartmental Collaboration

An Account-Based Marketing Strategy enforces collaboration between marketing and sales teams. They work together to generate prospects, convert leads and follow set timeframes. This:

• Fosters collective problem-solving,
• Boosts company morale and 

Drives esprit de corps.

2. Lasting Relationships

An ABM Strategy is successful because it builds close relationships with prospects. Your marketing and sales teams will be in close contact with the buying committees of the client company. Your people will come to understand how the client’s organization functions. You will be able to anticipate problems within the client’s operations and provide solutions before they need them. This will reduce your churn rate. 

3. Technology’s Bounty

We have seen that ABM Strategies focus on monitoring results. You have to use innovative tools that deliver sharp insights into business operations. Apart from helping you reiterate, these tools keep you updated with technological trends you would otherwise have missed. An ABM Strategy forces renewal and wards off decay.

4. Focused Engagement

Account Based Marketing doesn’t guarantee 100% conversation of prospects into leads. But it makes you focus on the process through which you achieve results. It focuses on:

• Narrowing client profiles, 
• Delivering sharp content,
• Identifying pain points
• Personalizing offerings and
• Choosing effective channels of communication.

Even if a prospect isn’t converted, it won’t be because of a lack of unified effort. It might be because of a sour situation on the client’s end or market situations. Even then, ABM will tell you how to reorient your product to sell it to clients who can afford and use it!

5. Measurable Outcomes

Executing an ABM Strategy is only half the battle. The rest is observing casualties. Failure within ABM Strategies is always tactical, never strategic. The strategy will tell you how to reorient because measuring outcomes is vital to its process. You will always have a numerical grasp of your company’s road to success through the Ads Dashboard or Campaign Analytics. 

When Should You Use ABM Tactics?

1. You Aren’t Happy with Marketing ROI

Have you been spending money on marketing your best solutions? Are you not getting enough returns for your marketing buck? Start developing an ABM Strategy right away! Your marketing may be great, with vibrant visuals and empathetic tags. But the people it is reaching cannot buy your product! 

On the other hand, maybe it is reaching the right people, but you aren’t concentrating your sales team to turn prospects into leads and leads into customers. Again, an ABM Strategy is the antidote to a clunky sales operation.

2. Sales-Marketing Misalignment

Are your marketing and sales teams a chasm apart? And we’re not speaking metaphorically. Maybe marketing and sales VPs in your company sit next to each other. But they work on different timelines. They look at different data. They envision different goals. They have different ideas.

Differences between marketing and sales can split your company. The best way to seamlessly integrate them is to adopt Account-Based Marketing Tactics. Ask them to work together to develop a culture of collaboration. Ensure they follow similar aims and work toward the same objectives. 

3. Slow Sales Cycles

So, your product is reaching the right customers and even selling well. But it’s not selling well enough. Inbound sales are slow, and outbound marketing is weak. This is the best time for your company to pivot to an ABM Strategy. 

With a high marketing RoI and focus on quantity via quality, you can even save on your marketing budget! The winds of change are blowing in the direction of outbound conversions. You cannot turn to ABM Strategies soon enough!

4. Your Churn Rate is Too High 

Your product is great, and people are purchasing it. But no sooner are they buying it than you lose an old client. Retention is tough in the age of competition, especially when products and their features differ. 

As we have seen, adopting an Account Based Marketing Strategy increases customer retention rate by at least 30%. If you aren’t using an ABM Strategy, your competition might be! Don’t let the process be your competitors’ advantage over you. This is the ideal time to adopt an ABM Strategy. 

Account Based Marketing can save you money while retaining loyal clients with whom you can maintain lasting relationships. It will keep you up to date with the latest trends in marketing and sales while uniting the workforce for turbulent times. 

ABM Tactics – Sell Today in the Market of Tomorrow

The way people are looking for B2B supplies is changing. No longer are they Googling how to acquire suppliers. Even if they did, you can no longer be sure whether you will show up on the SERP! The way of the future is to reach them via outbound marketing. 

Account-based Marketing is the silver lining over the dark cloud of a rumbling marketplace. Adopt an ABM strategy today to change your outlook for a brighter tomorrow! 

We understand your anxiety about pivoting to a new marketing and sales strategy. That’s why Lean Summits offers you the best way to leap to ABM Strategies. 

Don’t wait till it’s too late! Reach out to us for a free consultation and grab your opportunity to modernize business operations and gain high-value clients.