Losing a small account may not seem significant to the bottom line of the business. What about if 80% of the business sustainability depends on the top 20% key accounts of yours? To top it off, acquiring new customers is getting more expensive, more time consuming, longer and harder.

Findings have shown that key account management is one of the critical success factors for organizations to keep their strategic customers.  It is a customer-centric approach to building a deeper relationship with your key accounts through understanding their needs, obstacles and challenges they faced, and supporting them with value-added services.   This approach makes it essential for coordination and alignment between the sales and marketing. Read developing long lasting-relationship your clients beyond sales 

What is account-based marketing?

The account-based marketing is not a new concept just heard recently. It was a term defined by ITSMA in 2003 in collaboration with Enterprise organizations including Fujitsu, BT, HP, and Accenture. It is one of the B2B marketing strategies that implement marketing efforts to target prospects of clearly defined key accounts. It supports company's key account management approach.   It is an approach that dedicates marketing resources to a defined set of target accounts and engages them with timely, relevant and personalized campaigns designed to resonate with each account.

How to get started?  

After key accounts/sales teams have identified the key accounts and the specific contacts/decisions makers, they need the support of marketing campaigns to engage the potential decision-makers and influencers of the key accounts more frequently as well as to differentiate the company’s brands and services from the competitors.

It is important that the marketer will work closely with the KAM/sales team to:

• Identify key accounts and define the personas of the individuals within key accounts that would most benefits from the company’s offering.
• Create personalized content on the targeted key accounts to nurture the relationship. For example, content from whitepaper, website, blog, and social media not only present your brands but also send the relevant message that addresses to the client’s industry and business issues.
• Distribute personalized content via key accounts’ preferred channels for engagement. For example, target them via their IP address range/location or keyword in addition to social platforms such as facebook, instagram and Linkedin.
• Continue to dialog with salespeople to get feedback on which content is the most effective at each stage of the customer journey. This helps to identify gaps for content revision to suit the customers
• Set campaign goals and decide on metrics/KPIs to measure the results of the ABM  campaigns
• Continue to align strategy with  KAM and sales team to win a list of highly targeted companies

Findings have shown that ABM can have a direct effect on the company’s results and ROI

For example, according to ITSMA, about 85% of marketers measuring ROI say that ABM outperforms other marketing approaches.

I hope that this sharing will trigger your desire to know more about ABM and read more about it prior to adopting the ABM strategy.