Account Based Marketing is a zero waste approach when you're targeting the right accounts. President and Cofounder of EverStirng, J.J. Kardwell explains account selection, the critical first step to implementing an ABM strategy, and how to use predictive marketing to optimize this step.
The title slide should be used as background for your opening conversation. During this beginning conversation you should establish a few things in order to gauge the conversation and determine focus throughout your presentation/discussion. Being effective here will open up the remainder of your meeting to be conversational.
Intro EverStringUse this time to let them know we are a start up in the emerging predictive marketing space. We are well funded with over 70 employees and dozens of customers. The point here is to validate that we are viable and reliable company.
Perform some discoveryThere are two key characteristics that you need to identify in this initial conversation, the maturity of the marketing organization and the volumes they are dealing with. Some great questions to ask include:
What are the typical volumes of incoming leads are you seeing every month?
Can you also help me understand the nature of your opportunities? How big is your ASP and what is the average deal cycle length?
The reason I ask these questions is they are typical indicators for success of Predictive Marketing. We often see a significant decrease in deal cycle and higher ASP after an implementation and would love to get a baseline so we can help you determine your success metric.
So what is Predictive Marketing? Ultimately, it can be boiled down to a fairly simple concept. Use your historical internal data combined with the universe of external data to predict who your next customer should be.
The value of Predictive Marketing starts with Audience Selection, which is the process of not only understanding your model or best fit customer, but ultimately looking at every potential customer in your market to choose your audience. Predictive Marketing enables you to have a point of view one every single potential account in your market, and we then help you prioritize and select your optimal audience.
This is a critical concept and is the baseline for Predictive Marketing. At EverString, our entire focus is driven by this single concept. We hire the best data scientists and collect and curate massive amounts of data in order to make sure that your models and ultimately, the accounts and leads we deliver to you are the best in the business. This is our singular focus.
Before we get into the ”how”, it’s important to grasp some key concepts that define how models are built and how audiences are selected. There are three characteristics of every account and lead that will help you gauge how well they fit your model, how much they are already engaged with you and whether or not they display intent to buy.
Let’s start with fit. Fit determines how much an account or lead looks like your best customers (e.g., firmographics, industry, and tech stack are just a few examples). This is where your model is applied.
Next is engagement. This score indicates how much an account or lead is interacting with you. Typically, this is information captured by your marketing automation tools, but with predictive this extends beyond this resource into additional resources such as your social audience.
Finally, there is Intent. This is the most difficult to identify because it correlates anonymous and seemingly random behavior on the internet to your business. Intent is really the beginning of the buyers journey and is not something you capture in your current marketing systems. It is the digital footprint we leave behind as we casually browse the web and lives outside your four walls. It is basically any behavior that indicates intent to purchase. With intent, the customer lifecycle actually starts well before they are ever engaged with you.
While all three signals are important for Predictive Marketing, the key to being successful is combining all three into a clear and clean approach to building an effective pipeline and a more efficient conversion process. For instance, the goal is to convert Intent into engagement. And then once engaged, intent can provide further detail about a prospect beyond engagement.
Most of all, you need to consider using fit throughout the entire funnel. You don’t want to waste time and money marketing to a prospect who is just not the right fit