Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has been around as long as businesses have been selling to one another, but recently it’s become one of the most talked-about topics in the B2B space — because it works.
Manufacturers can see real results when they utilize ABM tactics and organize their resources in the right ways.
91% of companies that leverage ABM have seen their average deal size increase.
There are three general areas of your manufacturing business that ABM can positively impact:
- Reputation: Improving credibility with named accounts and building relationships with new organizations
- Relationships: Identifying and engaging with key stakeholders within your accounts to develop references and build stronger relationships
- Revenue: Grow and accelerate pipeline to win faster and bigger
Each of these different areas has its own strategies and ways of being influenced by ABM. Additionally, each has its own set of metrics to track to ensure you’re hitting your targets.
Let’s take a deeper dive into these three Rs for manufacturers, how you can track your impact on them, and ways to optimize your performance within those areas.
Reputation Makes it Easier to Get Your Foot in the Door
ABM strategies use personalized messaging and outreach to build your reputation with your most important target accounts.
You want those companies to know you understand their challenges, have solutions, and can provide a better level of service than competitors.
So, how do you start tracking real metrics to measure something as amorphous as a reputation?
ITSMA offers these ways you can use an ABM strategy to start tracking it:
- Sales team satisfaction
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- Brand perception
Use surveys, feedback forms, and focus groups to gather this data and start creating objective benchmarks you can track over time.
Personalized messaging is key. Use audience segments to power advertising efforts and web experiences so that each of your buyer personas is reading something that hits on their personal needs. The right platform makes this easy to do automatically and at scale without needing a huge staff.
Personalized messaging will warm up accounts for your sales team, build your reputation, and make it much easier to engage the accounts you’re targeting with one-to-one conversations.
Build Strong Relationships with the Right Accounts
In the manufacturing industry, relationships are everything. Building long-lasting relationships is key to establishing trust, securing business, and increasing the amount a customer spends with you.
The best way to be effective with ABM isn’t just to pick a target account and start building a relationship with a random contact. You need to be sure you’re only targeting accounts that are a fit for your ideal customer profile (ICP) and are actually in-market for a solution.
The right technology will enhance your ABM strategy by informing you what your ICP is, who your key personas are at each target account, and when those organizations are actually in-market and looking for your services.
You want to focus your budget and energy on buyers. Not everyone is ready to buy today. That’s fine. Focus your energy on the ones who are.
Once you’ve built a reputation with your key accounts, it’s time to start building relationships within those organizations. Winning their business requires a strong rapport, typically with several personas.
The metrics to consider when measuring the strength of those relationships include:
- Level of engagement within the buying group compared to past successes
- The types of engagements (email opens, calls with sales, content downloaded)
- Decision makers and stakeholder roles identified within an account
Building strong relationships is easy when you know exactly who your target audience is, the key personas within those organizations, and the right time to reach out.
Revenue is the Ultimate Goal for ABM
Last, but certainly not least, is the category of revenue. Ultimately, driving revenue is the goal of every manufacture.
ABM is uniquely effective at optimizing your revenue activities and positively impacting the bottom line. Companies that leverage ABM strategies can seen a 208% increase in revenue. 6sense customers have seen an ever bigger impact.
Here are some metrics you should use to track your ABM-powered revenue performance:
- Average deal size
- Deal velocity
- Pipeline size
Your organization may be tracking these statistics already, but when you leverage ABM, your revenue-driving activities are thrown into overdrive because you’re focusing on only the right accounts at the right time.
A quick way to uncover revenue opportunities is to shine a light on what we call the Dark Funnel™. Your top accounts are performing research on the internet, attending industry events, and reading third-party review sites — but you don’t necessarily know about those activities. (If you share a bit of info about your current ICPs, we can show you which accounts are currently researching your solutions.)
When you know where buyers are on their journey and what they care about most, you can:
- Accelerate deal velocity
- Uncover upsell opportunities
- Increase deal size
- Drive more pipeline
Conclusion
ABM strategies are proven to help manufacturers reach the right accounts at the right time, increase average deal size, and win more deals.
Following the three Rs of ABM for manufacturers — Reputation, Relationships, Revenue — and tracking metrics related to those categories will set your teams up for success and make it easier to win more business.
