Sounds familiar with the following challenge? To develop a high level of understanding of an account, you invested time, money and resources and your sales team has successfully hired a customer champion to meet business decision makers. Then it falls apart because your customer champion struggle to articulate the value of your products and services and because you did not know the desires, necessities and objectives of people with real influence and strength in the account, your sales team could not save the day.
In this article we will propose an account-based research approach step-by-step that goes beyond the organisational chart with actionable intelligentsia. Find out how to build the foundations of your Account Based Marketing programme (ABM) and support your products and services throughout the company.
ABM in context
ABM is widely considered one of the hottest trends in marketing and advertising (B2B). If you’re yet to find ABM, a quick Google Search will produce a long list of B2B organisations that successfully have adopted ABM’s definitions and case studies. The consensus appears to be that ABM is a strategic approach to B2B marketing that combines marketing and sales teams with a strong understanding of the account(s) and the target partners to focus on an account or small common accounts groups in the market.
We will concentrate on this profound understanding of account or, as referred to in the ITSMA, client focus and insight, which are described as one of the four ABM principles. We believe it all too often depends on non-qualified third-Party research, which does not go beyond the organisation’s chart, even though client focus is crucial to the success of ABG. It relies heavily on desktop research, which produces annual reports, general trends and professional profiles in many cases.
Consider research as a thought experiment
Research is widely used in an Account Based Marketing approach, but there are often cases in which the account is not fully qualified or personal. Annual reports and organisational charts are useful, but provide no insights for action. Value often ends in the PowerPoint presentation for sales and marketing teams.
The research is not conducting discussions between your teams for two main reasons:
A news, quarterly reports and news releases are the basis for an accounts analysis. It is too abstract to evaluate your value proposals – what help customers achieve with their business requirements by the capabilities of their products and services?
Large accounts do not constitute monolithic entities. Rarely do you sell directly to the CEO and the Management Board but two or three levels of decision-making and influence the organisation. They focus more on particular challenges and initiatives.
A key to understanding the organisation, dynamics, and contribution to the whole organisation between the individuals and teams that form or support the decision-making unit. You can do the following at this level of detail:
Test your team and customer stakeholders’ assumptions, generate constructive discussions and increase information;
Understand the value and fitness of your product or service at a very practical level to help the account achieve its objectives;
Support your content and communication strategy for target persons across your account, e.g. white papers, publicity for social media, webinars, and events.
The mechanism for achieving this is a thought-proof experiment – a way to cut bureaucracy and make your message heard more quickly by decision-makers. Below we’ll tell you how it works.
Create a fantasy steering committee
Large enterprises strive to standardise processes throughout the organisation to improve operations, reduce costs and reduce risk. But the different business lines (LOBs), which are not resolved through a global standard, will have unique challenges. In those cases, isolated solutions are often developed that do not work throughout an organisation.
At the company level, there is a good balance between the global standards and the success of every LOB. However, the economy and the safety and operational risks of point solutions are too great to be ignored. Greenlighting large projects that often take place via steering committees requires consensus.
Steering committees consist of managers, topic experts and stakeholders that provide strategic surveillance and guidance on one or more organisational initiatives. Working groups are established depending on the complexity to examine the details from which a solution can be recommended.
There are six steps to this thought experiment:
- Create a ‘fantasy’ steering committee who would oversee and guide a potential business initiative you can support. It could be based on a key industry trend identified in your higher level ABM strategy (this will become more targeted as you iterate through the process).
- Identify the executives, subject matter experts, and stakeholders that would be on this committee and work to understand their priorities and their interdependencies. This will give you a good sense of who might have the biggest say on potential decisions and the working relationships between stakeholders.
- Map the individuals of the steering committee to your value propositions and detail how they would benefit from your products or services.
The steps above enable your teams to move from abstract to actionable discourse. Assumptions will be made that can be verified or negated by your customer stakeholders, account teams, or customer success groups. From this basis, you will be able to continue into the next three steps of the process:
- Develop a targeted content and outreach strategy that is relevant to the individuals involved in the virtual steering committee.
- Continually iterate this process, leveraging feedback from internal sales and marketing teams as well as the customer directly where possible.
- Create new fantasy steering committees for additional LOBs.
Zelite Solutions is a leading account based marketing service provider company and you can contact them here.
