What Is Account Based Marketing (ABM)?

Account Based Marketing is a form of marketing that prioritizes marketing and sales focus on the account and their direct needs. Sales approaches are highly personalized and targeted to win over the account. ABM helps you create a really strategic, orchestrated set of activities that allows you to rise above the noise and get people to want to do business with you

Instead of relying on a blanket campaign promoting your product, service, or industry need that may appeal to an entire market, Account Based Marketing treats each account as markets in their own right. ABM is personalized marketing on steroids.

ABM acknowledges that every person is different and has different viewpoints and when selling to an organization there will be multiple people involved in making the final decision. Therefore, customizing various messages to the buying committee will greatly increase your chances of winning the deal and expediting the sales cycle.

Focusing on an account instead of a broad market will lead you to a zero-waste marketing strategy where people you target will be more likely to buy your product. We are flipping the existing sales funnel and putting each account first. If you look at traditional marketing, they first start with attracting as many people as possible, then they send them emails, and identify interested people. ABM does the opposite, first, we identify the target people and buying committees. Then we engage people with personalized messages and build long-lasting relationships that lead to more new opportunities.

By focusing on the individual in the buying committee you are focused on quality outreach and relationship building that generate results. So instead of creating blog posts after blog posts, blasting emails, and buying ads all created for a mass audience, ABM best practices revolve around creating content and crafting journeys for particular people and buying committees.

Account Based Marketing also goes beyond just focusing on lead generation. Marketing and sales teams can focus on the individual and encourage up-selling and cross-selling opportunities to get the most value from sales efforts.

Focusing the attention of your sales and marketing on an account is not new. Successful sales and marketing teams are used to focusing on an account-level for a long time. Teams who have alignment between sales, sales development, marketing, customer success, finance, product, engineering, and executives will with no doubt be more successful than those that do not. ABM's methods are built based upon principles successful companies have used to grow their business and companies who deploy ABM can quickly adapt these best practices and align their organization towards greater success.