Account-Based Marketing: How to Execute ABM with HubSpot

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a powerful tool in any marketer's tool belt, especially if your annual contract value (ACV) is high and the relative number of opportunities in your market is low.

Because ABM requires tight cooperation between marketing and sales, all involved must have a common understanding of what it is and the tools and techniques needed to ensure ABM's success. Let's dive in!

Why Does ABM Matter?

• 70% of B2B marketers say ABM is effective or very effective. (Source: HubSpot)

• ABM campaigns generate 10-15 times more revenue than traditional marketing campaigns. (Source: Forrester Research)

• Companies that use ABM see a 100% increase in lead quality. (Source: Demandbase)

• ABM campaigns can reduce the cost of acquiring a new customer by up to 80%. (Source: Oracle)

• Companies that use ABM see a 30% increase in sales. (Source: Gartner)
  
  

First, a bit of ABM history

Where and when the practices of ABM started can be debated, but we know that the term was first introduced by the IT Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) in 2003 and then by a groundbreaking 2004 paper titled Account Based Marketing: The New Frontier.

Despite ABM's enduring presence as a marketing strategy (considering how quickly trends can come and go, at least!), it is still largely misunderstood by the modern marketer.

The Rise of Account Based Marketing - Timeline. Source: itsma.com

Here's what ABM is not

To help us understand what ABM is, let's look at four things that ABM is not. 

1. Account-based marketing is not a stand-alone practice mutually exclusive to other forms of marketing. It is a framework and a philosophy to place your tactics and strategies within. You can run inbound as a part of ABM. Demand generation can be a component of ABM. Webinars, content campaigns, and in-person events can all be a part of your ABM campaign. 

2. ABM is not demand-generation with an account focus. Demand generation can complement your ABM campaign, but the two are different. 

   Demand generation focuses on driving demand rather than leads. It requires sales and marketing to work together on lifecycle stage definitions and handoffs, so while it is a natural fit within the ABM framework, it is not the same. 

3. ABM and using intent data are not the same. You can run ABM without intent data and use intent data without running an ABM play. Intent data helps you gain relevance in any marketing play when appropriately deployed but is not required to be relevant or personalized. Remember, ABM has been around since 2003, long before ZoomInfo, Seamless.ai, and Bomborawere around to tell us our prospect's every move. 

4. Account planning and ABM are not the same things. Does ABM involve account planning? Yes. Does every team doing account planning have to run an ABM campaign? No. Account planning is a sales motion that can happen in a silo or conjunction with marketing to market in line with the account planning done by sales.   

So, what is ABM?

By being hyper-customer-centric, brands become reliable and trusted by their target accounts. 

91% of consumers are more likely to choose brands that provide them with relevant offers and recommendations -Accenture

Since marketing and sales are closely synced, the customer experience is seamless and relevant to their place in the buyer's journey. Marketing and sales are in lockstep from the first impression at the "top of the funnel" (ToFu) to the assets that sales use in the discovery process and beyond.

This alignment and customer obsession – as well as the core ABM components, tactics, and strategies you deploy – make ABM effective in driving increased account engagement.

ABM acronyms and jargon explained

Marketing and sales are two disciplines full of jargon and acronyms. If you're running an ABM play, it's smart to ensure both teams are clear about what is meant when ABM buzzwords inevitably start getting thrown around. Here are seven you'll want to know:

• ICP - This is your ideal customer profile. The ICP is usually created using a combination of firmographic, technographic, and demographic factors and is an essential guide to whether an individual account is one you should target or not. Many companies use ICP tiers to guide marketing and sales tactics & strategies based on tier or how valuable the account is to your business.

• TAL - Target Account List. This is a list of accounts that you have identified as high-value that you will target in your campaigns. Build target account lists by choosing individual accounts or using your ICP to find accounts matching those parameters.

• Buying Committee is the group of stakeholders you seek to influence within your ABM campaigns because they have a seat at the decision-making table. Potential buying committee members include decision makers, influencers, budget holders, blockers, champions, legal, and end users.  

• Air Cover - This is a marketing play where you ensure that the buying committee sees relevant content, publications, and ads throughout the buyer's journey. Air Cover is designed to ensure you are omnipresent and to influence multiple people at your target accounts.

• Surfacing Leads or Handoffs - This is a sales and marketing alignment term that speaks to the timing and mechanisms for putting a lead in front of your sales team. For example, you may put your tier 1 target accounts in front of sales via a task and a Slack notification when the target account has a company score of 100. 

• Thought Leadership - This term applies to other forms of marketing, but it is especially important in ABM. Thought leadership is a demonstration of your expertise on a particular topic. In ABM, this expertise is shared via social media posts, video content, podcasts, guides, and other content assets. Thought leadership helps you position yourself while providing value to your target accounts.

• Sales & Marketing Alignment - Necessary for running ABM plays, sales and marketing alignment involves collaborating on accounts to target when to hand off those accounts based on ICP tier, lifecycle stage definitions, what content sales should use for various target accounts, and more. Sales and marketing alignment is about breaking down silos and making your revenue team more effective by working together. 

So you're sold on ABM… how do you start?

While ABM campaigns can be complex, setting up a solid foundation for your campaign is pretty simple if you follow the steps below:

• Identify your ICP, create your TAL, & segment your TAL into tiers - Any good marketing strategy starts with the audience. Who are you targeting? Whether you start with a hand-selected list of accounts or use your ICP parameters to pull a matched list from a 3rd party tool, the first step is to identify who you are targeting and to segment that list as necessary.  

• Plan touchpoints and triggers per tier and buying role - Now that you know who you are targeting, you must build out the buyer's journey for each ICP tier, buying role, job function, etc. We recommend doing this with a tool like LucidChart or Miro. 

  Remember, you will want to plan your triggers, conditions, exclusions, lifecycle stage qualifications, etc. Make your schematic or roadmap as complete and thoughtful as possible. You are better off keeping your campaign simple than incomplete. Consider your team's bandwidth when deciding how segmented and personalized to be in your campaigns. 

• Align sales and marketing on the handoff - Handoffs are everything regarding your ABM campaign. Sales and marketing need to be on the same page about when sales get involved, how marketing shifts when that happens, and if the handoff is the same for every ICP tier and buying role. Once these handoffs are agreed upon, they should be set up in your CRM & marketing automation platform. 

• Deploy your complete strategy & schedule ongoing alignment check-ins. Before you launch your campaign, double-check your segmenting workflows, lead surfacing conditions, and asset delivery settings. Once you have tested the setup and pushed your campaign out into the wild,  you will want to keep an eye on your dashboards and ensure you have regularly scheduled meetings between sales and marketing to stay aligned. 

• Iterate and experiment to boost relevance - After you have launched, you will need to analyze your performance and optimize like you would for any other marketing campaign. In addition to the standard KPIs, you will also want to monitor how your campaigns perform across entire accounts rather than with the individuals who comprise accounts. Keep track of which assets are hitting with which buying roles, job functions, and ICP tiers. Evaluate what handoff patterns deliver the best closed-won opportunities. And, as always, collect customer and sales team feedback to gather insights that your dashboards don't tell you.  

What tools are needed to run an effective ABM campaign?

There are dozens of tools that enable ABM - here's a look at a few:

HubSpot - CRM, Marketing Automation, Reporting

HubSpot allows you to run your ABM campaigns end-to-end right inside your CRM. The fact that you can keep your data clean, ensure account visibility across marketing and sales, and scale your campaign with exceptional automation, makes maintaining your CRM database easy and makes a HubSpot Marketing Hub Implementation a great choice to be the backbone of your ABM campaigns. 

RollWorks - Customer Intent Data, Marketing Automation, Reporting, Ad Delivery, AI Optimization

RollWorks can be a stand-alone platform but is best used with a CRM like HubSpot. RollWorks provides customer intent data and a bevy of firmographic, demographic, and technographic data points for building your ICPs and TALs. It then allows you to deploy those audiences through multiple channels, ensuring your messaging is relevant for buyers regardless of their journey.

Terminus - Customer Intent Data, Marketing Automation, Reporting, Ad Delivery, AI Optimization

Terminus, like RollWorks, aims to cover the complete ABM cycle in one platform and conveniently plugs into a CRM like HubSpot. When you combine Terminus' omnichannel personalization capabilities and intent data with your HubSpot record activity, segmented lists via automation, and other CRM data, you empower your marketing team to deliver customized account-based experiences at scale. 

DemandBase - Customer Intent Data, Marketing Automation, Reporting, Ad Delivery, AI Optimization

DemandBase was built with B2B and ABM in mind. Seeking to unite account-based motions across the entire flywheel (a practice known as ABX), DemandBase provides an easy-to-use tool that assists with account selection, targeting, ad delivery, and omnichannel optimization for better ABM outcomes. With a hefty list of integrations, DemandBase is well-positioned to partner with your CRM to deliver highly relevant content and campaigns.

Powerful Integrations for Elevated ABM Campaigns

Why HubSpot is one of the best platforms to get started with ABM

HubSpot was built around the same customer-obsessed ethos from which ABM was born, so it makes sense that it's a natural fit for ABM campaigns.

The HubSpot CRM foundation connects all the data from your sales and marketing efforts while allowing for robust, customer-centric automation and personalization. With an ABM campaign powered by HubSpot's powerful CRM platform, you can use data to segment and target your accounts and automation to nurture your buying committee and hand warm leads over to sales. But that's not all – check out the following HubSpot features that align with the tenants of successful ABM:

Single Source of Truth

• Shared view of all object records 

• ABM tools 

• Default ABM properties 

• Target accounts home

• AI-powered Target Account recommendations 

• Account overview page 

• Operations Hub for data cleanliness and consistency 

Streamlined Campaign Deployment

• Ads – company targeting 

• Forms – company properties

• Smart content 

• Landing pages

• Campaigns

• Email

• Workflow automation 

• Company lists 

Integrations Galore

• Slack or Google Chat for account-based collaboration 

• Postal.com for offline marketing & gifting 

• ZoomInfo or Seamless.ai for contact enrichment 

• Bombora for intent data 

• Zoom for webinars 

• Clearbit for account enrichment. Clearbit is a HubSpot company.

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator for account planning & building

• Enhanced Salesforce sync for ABM

Seamless Handoffs = Seamless Customer Experience

• Advanced sequences

• Company scoring

• Marketing automation: lifecycle stage and lead status management 

• Lead rotation 

• Tasks and notifications 

• Custom behavioral events

• Lead scoring

• Chatbots/live chat

• Default workflows

• Quotes

• Tasks

• Meetings

• Documents

• HubSpot video 

Reporting and Revenue Attribution

• Custom reports 

• Sales and marketing analytics 

• Dashboards for ABM, sales, and marketing 

• Conversational intelligence 

• Ad conversion events 

• Web, ad & social media analytics

Executing ABM campaigns in HubSpot

We have covered a lot of ground at this point, so let's jump into the deep end and take a look at some specific ways you can leverage HubSpot Sales Hub or HubSpot Marketing Hub (on the Professional or Enterprise level) to power your ABM plays: 

• Create a target account list by adding AI-suggested target accounts, viewing prospects in the prospecting tool, or importing target accounts using integration with a third-party tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, Bombora, Terminus, or RollWorks

• Track & view account activity in the account overview panel to view all touches and interactions across the entire buying committee in one place, ensuring both sales and marketing have a clear understanding of the state of each target account 

• Use workflows to label your ICP tiers and buying roles, and use company lists to group your target accounts and buying committee to leverage with company-targeting in your campaigns. 

• Use the campaigns tool to plan and deploy all the touches and asset iterations for your AMB play. Social media, ads, landing pages, forms, emails, and much more can be added to a campaign to roll up reporting & results into one view across multiple assets.

• Use HubSpot Marketing Hub for content marketing,  smart content, and A/B testing on your landing pages to give a personalized experience, and leverage chatbots to ensure your prospects can find what they need. 

• Use workflows and 3rd party integrations to continuously segment your lists and update an account's ad and other targeting based on engagement, intent, scoring, etc.

• Update the lifecycle stage and lead status based on behavior or custom events and sync your lifecycle stages with external ad platforms for better AI optimization for your ad campaigns.

• Automatically update marketing plays based on buying role, ICP tier, buying stage, and more using workflows.

• Use workflows and company scoring to surface accounts to sales at the right time and keep sales in the know, moment by moment, of account activity using the Slack integration.

• Use Operations Hub data quality features to ensure all data syncing between tools is clean and consistent. 

• Automate the work of your sales team by leveraging workflows to assign tasks and send notifications.

• Research active prospects and accounts with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration right inside of HubSpot and make your outreach timely and relevant 

• Enroll buying committee members into sequences automatically based on any of over a thousand trigger options. Essentially, any information about the account can be utilized to determine the right time to enroll an account into a sequence.

• Suggest content for sales to use in the buying process based on prospect’s consumption history using workflows and user behavior data to personalize the journey.

• Use HubSpot videos in your sales outreach for personalization 

• Use workflows and offline marketing integrations like postal.io to automatically send gifts to your buying committee based on deal size, ICP tier, lifecycle stage, deal stage, and more

• Analyze data across the entire buyer's journey in one place with reports and dashboards, collaborate on changes with the campaign tool, and implement iterations and optimizations into your campaigns, all from HubSpot.
  
  

Expand the HubSpot platform with integrations to fuel your ABM campaigns.

Intent Signals 

Seamless.ai

Identify, prioritize, and engage with the hottest, ready-to-buy accounts at the perfect time using Buyer Intent Data by Seamless.AI. With 12,000+ intent signals to choose from and the world's best sales leads, scale your sales insanely fast and empower your sales team to become unstoppable.

• Fuel Your Strategy - Align marketing and sales efforts to drive revenue. And reduce churn by identifying cross-sell opportunities when clients start looking at similar solutions.

• Prospect Smarter - Get ready-to-buy accounts before your competition does with targeted prospecting lists of the world's best sales leads.

• Sell Insanely Fast - Speed up sales cycles and close accounts FAST using comprehensive insights and the actionable data you need on active buyers.

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ZoomInfo (Elite) 

ZoomInfo gives you a few tools to make your ABM campaigns better than ever! First, you can enrich contact data with emails and phone numbers for your buying committee. This allows your sales team to begin outreach before a contact submits their information to your CRM, which is helpful for outbound sales motions. 

The true power for ABM comes from the intent data that ZoomInfo has. You can add Target Accounts showing intent to specific lists using ZoomInfo workflows and the HubSpot integration. With those lists, you can leverage HubSpot's powerful workflow automation to update the marketing mix for those in-market accounts. This means that you can be more personalized and relevant in your efforts.

Bombora (Ads or CRM product) 

Bombora offers you the same functionality as ZoomInfo but without contact enrichment. This solution can be a more affordable option for companies looking for intent data without contact enrichment features. Bombora is the original platform when it comes to buyer intent data and has a large number of platform partnerships to collect first-party intent-targeting data. 

Bombora also has an ad solution that allows you to deploy your B2B audiences on display networks that don't connect to HubSpot.

G2/Gartner Media

G2 and Gartner are software review companies with platforms allowing people to review and compare software options. This tool is powerful for SaaS companies or service providers whose services center on specific software products. 

While Gartner Media's platforms present software options based on who bids for the top spot, G2's rankings are only driven by reviews of the software products.  

Both companies allow you to pipe data from their platform into your CRM for marketing and sales initiatives. G2 even allows you to layer on Bombora intent topics on top of their intent data for hyper-targeted campaigns. The data provided to you by G2 allows you to target those who have looked at your product, your category, and your competitors. Gartner's data is similar. 

Better Campaigns

Postal.io 

Have you ever wished you could send a gift to a prospect automatically when they reached a specific lifecycle or deal stage? You can do that and much more with postal.io!  

Customize the gifts you send based on deal size, buying role, ICP tier, and more. You can even send a collection of gift options for your prospect to choose their preference.

Strategically put your brand in the hands of your target accounts at the right moments throughout the buying process.

Postalytics 

Like Postal.io, Postalytics allows you to deploy direct mail based on whatever triggers you set up in HubSpot workflows. This can be a potent tool to use top-of-funnel when building awareness and making your buyer aware of the problems you can help them fix.  

Easy to set up and well-integrated with HubSpot, Postalytics is an excellent complement to your inbound & ABM campaigns.

HubSpot as your one-stop shop when running ABM.

The benefits of using HubSpot for account-based marketing plays are plentiful. It's the best-in-class platform for ABM for the following reasons:

• Keep your team in one reliable, trusted tool with a shared view of company, contact, and deal records

• Transparency from start to finish to keep teams aligned 

• A set of powerful workflow automation tools to give your customers a seamless experience

• Plentiful integrations to add functionality and customer data to your campaigns

• Personalize the buyer's journey, account by account, and buying role by buying role  

• Build out your entire strategy in HubSpot for smooth handoffs using native ABM tools

• Analyze and iterate on the spot for increased success over time with reporting and analytics

• Attribute your results to your marketing efforts with omnichannel activity tracking 

Ever thought about combining your inbound strategy with ABM?

What makes these two approaches so complementary? Think about it: 

Inbound focuses on giving the customer what they want and need at each step of the buyer's journey – it is buyer-centric. 

ABM uses deep account knowledge to personalize the buyer's journey at scale, focusing on an entire account/buying committee. 

ABM requires sales and marketing alignment, allowing sales to spend more time on the best leads. 

Combining these two practices delivers an experience that delights prospects whenever interacting with your brand. 

HubSpot users have seen impressive results when they combine the Marketing Hub and Sales Hub features for sales and marketing alignment: 

They also see their customers engage more, their pipelines grow faster, and their sales team spends more time building revenue-growing relationships with their prospects.

Sales is saving 60% of its time due to better leads
(Map My Customers case study)  (Binary Stream achieved 90% sales funnel automation and 5X customer engagement)

ABM is a powerful practice, especially when paired with inbound marketing and deployed in a single, streamlined system that delivers a seamless customer experience. ABM with HubSpot allows you to do just that with ease and outstanding outcomes.  

This post was created with the support and published with the permission of HubSpot.