Drop your anonymity and show your customers the face behind the brand if you want to be successful with ABM.
That’s the advice of Sprinklr CMO Grad Conn, who suggests two alternative approaches for convincing your team to implement ABM. The suggestions feature in B2B Marketing’s report, How US marketers can kick-start their ABM journey, written in conjunction with marketing agency Point To Point.
Grad advocates building personal relationships through social media platforms such as LinkedIn, sending personal messages from named individuals to prospects, rather than a broadcast approach from your brand. He also uses social networks to identify buying committees rather than organisation charts, a move that allowed him to completely rethink who he talked to for any account.
“At Sprinklr, inside sales is part of marketing so our output is not MQL, it’s new business meetings set up in line with sales. That’s a meeting with a decision-maker in the room with a proposal with dollars attached to it,” he said.
In the report he also explained how ABM is a way of selling career success to your customers, and doing so will generate loyalty. “If a customer feels your product is combating career failure, they’ll remain loyal,” he added.
When implementing ABM at Microsoft, Grad started with a pilot that included 50 sales people in its first year, growing to 5000 by the fourth year. He puts this down to involving sales in early discussions and setting realistic targets.
The report also features ABM insights from Matthew Webster, CMO at Molex, Lynsay Russell, marketing operations manager at Medtronic, and Jim Hopkins, senior product marketing manager at Salesforce, into how they successfully implemented ABM pilots and got their company on board.
