If you’ve been paying careful attention to HubSpot for the last few years, we’ve been talking about ABM a little bit. We’ve partnered with Terminus and others and we’ve done some webinars and blog posts. However, the main feedback we’ve gotten is that we’re not doing enough or being clear enough and you want more. So 2020 is the year of ABM where you’ll find more content and see more tools from us.
Let’s start with the basics.
What do we mean when we say ABM? ABM is an acronym for account-based marketing. It’s a B2B – business to business – a strategy where HubSpot marketing and sales work together to close big complex deals at a discreet number of target accounts. In this context, ABM is just a subset of B2B since there are a lot of different strategies out there with ABM just being one of many that you could choose.
Most B2B strategies have some basic best practices and ABM is no different. What determines whether ABM is a good fit for you is the volume of high-touch, high-value deals you make.
If you engage in a lot of big deals with a lot of people involved and a high-priced product, then ABM is most likely going to bring a lot of value for you and your company. On the other hand, if you’re light touch, especially if you’re a touchless e-commerce type of shop, ABM is most likely not the right solution for you – it would probably be overkill.
ABM is a good fit if you’re selling high-value B2B products or services that have to be B2B and account-based – where the focus is on accounts. This works well if you’re selling to a finite number of prospects – for instance, if you’re hunting the biggest companies in the world and there are only a handful of those that are big enough to get value out of your product, or if you’re operating in a really niche sort of industry where there aren’t that many prospects.
Now, the multi-person buying committee: a lot of what you’re going to be doing is focusing on assembling people around the table to get this deal across, because for these big complex deals, it’s rarely just one person buying your product. They don’t just whip out their credit card and pay for it.
You’ve got to get cross-department approval, figure out who the key people are, and bring them together – ABM is great for that. And then that requires ongoing personalised engagement. ABM allows you to get deeply personalised because you're so focused on a select number of accounts.
When we talk about the sort of companies that are good for ABM, we use this archetype of the customer that has a finite number of prospects and a really good buying committee. But it's worth pointing out that that is a lot of businesses.
You don't have to be selling to Coca-Cola to use ABM. It's just that people who are selling to Coca-Cola should use it, but if you're selling a product where you know there are multiple buyers – more than three or four – this is impactful for you.
And we'd just like to say that so we understand it's a spectrum.
It’s not an all-or-nothing sort of thing either: at HubSpot, we pride ourselves on focusing on small and mid-size businesses, but we do sell to companies that have up to 2000 employees. For that, we use a much more ABM sort of model as compared to the little two-person companies we sell to that just sort of self-service. You can use a mix of this to meet your needs, but if you use ABM, you're going to see three main benefits.
This is HubSpot's newest official definition of what inbound is. Inbound marketing is a method for growing an organisation by building lasting relationships with people and helping them reach their goals. The whole idea here is that you succeed most when your customers succeed – when you help them succeed.
And when you take inbound in as this sort of broad philosophical idea, there's nothing about it that's at odds with ABM. As long as this is your mindset, right?
Just like you can do volume-based marketing in a good way or a bad way, you can do ABM in a good way or a bad way. If you've heard HubSpot talking about inbound in the last couple of years, you've probably heard us speak of it in terms of a flywheel where you attract people to your company and you engage with them and then you delight them so much that they go out and attract other people to your company. Either by referring people to you directly or by writing positive reviews online. In one way or another: they're positive.
Word of mouth becomes a driving force for your company's growth and that becomes a virtuous cycle that accelerates your growth over time. You can do this with volume-based marketing. That's mostly the reputation HubSpot has. We are a big fan of this and we always will be, but you can also do it with account-based marketing. The same rules apply.
The main difference is that instead of targeting every single person in the world who matches your persona, you are going after a few discreet accounts, but you're still looking to delight everyone. Regardless of whether you're doing volume-based or account-based marketing and sales, you want every single one of your customers to be happy.
So here is the five-step process that we've come up with.
So you have one marketer, you have one salesperson, and you team them up with a list of no more than 25 accounts, but as you add more salespeople, you can increase that. Just keep it to no more than 25 accounts per salesperson. Once you expand it beyond that, then you start to really dilute the personalisation and the power of ABM which is this focus on a short list of accounts.
You may be familiar with the idea of an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – many companies have something like this – which is just like a persona except for companies instead of people. It's just a list of basic attributes that a company needs to have to be successful as your customer.
So if you have an ideal customer profile, that can be a great place to start in generating a list of target accounts. You're not going to take every single company in the world that matches your ideal customer profile and put them on a target account list. Remember, you want to keep that list short and focused, but that can be a good starting point.
If you don't have an ideal customer profile: it's not necessarily a prerequisite to getting started with ABM. There are lots of other ways to identify target accounts.
So those are just a few ideas. The great thing about ABM is you can experiment, and come up with what works best for you, for your product, and for your customers. You can get creative and that's fine -- it's encouraged.
The point of all this is to assemble that buying committee we mentioned. This is not to say that all deals you're working on will have these eight people on it:
Some might have less, and some might have more, but you need to identify particular roles that, at this target account, are likely to be involved in deciding whether or not they're going to buy from you. You need to figure out what these people's problems are that you can help solve.
How can you empower them and what do they need to champion your cause within the wider organisation?
We’ve put together this table based on the sales enablement playbook. The idea here is you can identify those buyer roles, think about the job titles who might fill those roles, and the pains people might have that your product or service solves or concerns they might have with buying your products or service.
Connected to that, you can come up with features that address those things – content that helps communicate that – and so you can have an organised collection of content that you can then hyper-personalise to the individual people you're sending it to. This can make sure you're tailoring the story appropriately to people based on their roles.
There are lots of different channels you can use. Some of them are industry-specific and there might be specific forums or meetups that you want to utilise. The important thing is to make sure that you're using channels that the people you're reaching out to want you to use. This is all about them. You're trying to delight them, remember. If they don't want you reaching out on Facebook, don't reach out on Facebook. But if they like Facebook, go ahead and do it. Whatever works best for them – whatever you get the best response from – that's the right thing to do.
So that’s the spiel and that's the five steps we've come up with. You create your team (that little task force we talked about – one marketer, one salesperson), you give them a list of target accounts (no more than 25 per salesperson), and you can identify those and define them however you'd like. Then you come up with a personalised content strategy that's specific to the account or accounts you’re reaching out to. You orchestrate your outreach to make sure you're using the channels that are most relevant and helpful to the people you're reaching out to. And finally, you're constantly measuring your success and iterating and improving.
Now we’re going to take you through some examples of some successful ABM campaigns that we've seen customers run. They’re pretty high-level and that was intentional – we want to show you some of the tools they've used, some of the channels they use, and some of the reasons why they were taking these approaches.
Target Accounts: 12
Tools Used: HubSpot, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Conferences, Mike’s Pastries
Key Metrics: 58% meetings booked rate
The first campaign is one of the most successful campaigns that we’ve ever run despite the relatively small number of target accounts that we were going after. We’re closing great deals from this campaign and we’re still friends with some of the people that we met through this campaign. We chat regularly with the VP of sales from Panasonic Healthcare and met him through this campaign.
We were selling enterprise account management software primarily to companies that had a large account management team or large field sales team, so we're targeting mostly companies that were in life sciences and manufacturing.
We identified 12 target events in the Boston area that we wanted to close, then we picked two to three people at each one of those companies that we wanted to meet with and we dropped off a box of Mike's pastries which – if you're familiar with Boston – is a famous pastry shop in the Boston area. We dropped off some printed, nicely bound content and a handwritten note that also included a handwritten version of a testimonial that was from a company that was similar to theirs – in the same industry.
We didn't need anybody's email or something at least for this stage of the process because we were just dropping them off at the front desk at the headquarters of these companies, addressed to the people that we want it to reach.
However, for the people we did have emails for, we just met in conferences because we had sponsored it, we then followed up with a sequence which included some follow-ups in the content that we had sent them and we sent them a LinkedIn connection request.
It was an incredible campaign. As we mentioned, we had a 58% meetings booked rated. We closed quite a bit of revenue from that, so it was awesome. It was a great campaign.
Target Accounts: 150 (segmented by industry)
Tools Used: LinkedIn Ads, HubSpot, LinkedIn Sales Navigator
One thing we should say about these campaigns: each one's going to be different because we want to expose you to the different tactics that you could use and some of the tools that you would use in HubSpot to do these things.
This campaign came to us from a partner who provides ADM services to a company that sells logistics management software to really big retail brands (so think Reebok and Nike). In this particular campaign, they targeted 150 brands. They then segmented those brands by industry (e.g. beauty, auto, homeware, etc.), and they created content that was very unique to those particular industries.
Those segments had groups of three or four customers in each one of those segments. For some of the largest accounts – think top 10 – they even created content that was unique to each brand itself, and that worked for them. They had an effective campaign, but one of the interesting things to note in this particular campaign is that it was really expensive for them.
They continue to do that today. They've also experimented in Europe with doing geographically targeted ads at the headquarters of certain sorts of companies to stay GDPR-compliant. They love the approach. It's just really expensive; it costs them about $75 per click to do this. So it works great for them but for other people that might not be the best fit.
Target Accounts: 60
Tools Used: LinkedIn Ads, HubSpot, In-Person Events
Key Metrics: 33% increase in engagement with target accounts
This last campaign we want to show comes from a HubSpot customer who is a Quebec-based SaaS company that provides solutions for the home care industry, so people who are helping the elderly at home. They sell pretty broadly to thousands of mid-size companies.
So they don't only sell to big brands – they sell to thousands and thousands of companies – but they did pick 60 target accounts that were very large operators in this space that they wanted to close. And so this customer, for these 60 target accounts, they ran LinkedIn ads.
They did a few in-person events over the arc of the year that were targeting those target accounts. But the thinking that I want to draw your attention to is their use of playbooks, which is a tool inside HubSpot because it's a great example of how marketing and sales can get together and drive not only more deals but also faster deal velocity.
They used the playbook tool basically to offer guidance to each one of their sales reps for specific moments or particular campaigns as they came up in the sales process. So maybe the decision maker joins and they have a playbook that covers the content that they want to provide to this particular sort of decision maker.
The playbook also had some questions that they wanted the rep to ask that collected key pieces of information from discovery calls and stuff like that was then written back to the company record for that particular target account.
The reason that that's cool is that it creates a feedback loop where the salesperson is collecting information that is then able to be used by the marketing team to tailor things like e-mail, ads, and the content and the live chat that they're seeing.
It’s a really good example of how sales can collect data, which can then be used by marketing to create content that reinforces the same messages that the salesperson might be saying in the meeting. For instance, the rep is saying one thing and then the customer leaves the meeting and then they see ads that reinforce the same message.
They've seen a pretty significant bump in engagement with their target accounts when they look at the web tracker, which is one of the core ways that they measure success.
Are ads typically a part of ABM efforts? For a lot of customers, it is. We talked about choosing distribution channels that are accessible to you and your customers. If ads are not accessible to you, that's fine – there are plenty of other ways to distribute content to your customers.
However, a lot of customers do lean on ads as a distribution channel for their content. It just comes down to how much budget you have and what you think is the best way to reach your customers.
HubSpot has native tools to help with ads, and there are other providers that we can look at like Terminus and Roadworks, so there are a lot of tools that you can use to work with that as well.
What's the line where it starts to feel sleazy or like a bribe? Gifting is one of those things where the goal is to communicate value differently. For us, when we were dropping off those pastries, we didn't think that anybody was bribed by our cookies to meet with us. It was showing them that we took the time to do something that would have them pay attention to us, but the thing that we were offering was the content and the testimony that was unique to them.
If you feel like you're bribing your customer to talk to you, then it's probably a drag. The best gifts in particular are the ones that are meaningful and help you communicate what's unique to you.
Let's talk about the properties. When we were thinking about how to build the ABM tools of HubSpot, one of the things we realised is we have so many tools that are already available to you natively. We need a way for you to use these tools in a new way. And so we have three different properties that are sitting at the foundation of doing ABM and HubSpot:
There's value for sales but there's also value for marketing because you want to make sure that the people you're attracting are the right people. This was a great way for sales and marketing to work together to help marketers understand whether the things they’re doing are attracting more people and what their buying process looks like. So excellent.
There are two streams of work that we're doing when we think about building the best ABM platform at HubSpot.
There are three major themes that we're building towards as part of our ABM product. There is helping marketing and sales collaborate around their target accounts, which we think is crucial. We want to help you provide a more personalised buying experience for these customers.
And then we also want to give you effective reporting so you can answer the questions that you need to answer about, again, what's working, what's not, how do we iterate.
So three big features are going to pay that off:
One thing we wanted to cover too is omissions because there are many things that we aren't building. We have partners in the ecosystem who solve all of these omissions, but we wanted to let you know so you know what we are and what we aren't building.
The answer is no, we're going to be making them relatively available – that’s our intention. We hope that as many people as possible can get access to this – that's one of the ways we want to differentiate ourselves. We don't think ABM should be hard or expensive to start. We think that it should be easy and it should make sense to you, so we want it to be as accessible as possible.
Is there any access to sample email workflows that have worked well?
That’s something that we'll look at providing to customers. We want to empower you guys with as many examples case studies and content as we can to help you get started. You’ll see some of that, whether it's email workflows, but we'll work on that.
Do you use personalised video?HubSpot uses personalised video. We haven't seen a lot of customers that have talked to us using personalised videos, but we've heard many customers using personalised videos and they like it a lot. Some partners specialise in personalised videos – it’s a cool channel.
Are the properties live today?
Properties are live today. Much of the stuff that we've talked about today is already live and in open beta that we launched on January 9th. If you want to get access to that, just talk to your customer success manager and they can help you get ungated to that.
How do you build a list with a company known but missing a contact name or email?
One of the things that we want to do in the future is give you the ability to create company lists so that you'll be able to create lists that have only companies in them, but no known contacts or emails.
Will we have access to a lot of these things at the pro level or when we need to have an enterprise-level HubSpot account?
We want these things to be very accessible. We’re planning on scoping as much of this as we can to the pro level so that thousands of customers will have access to it.
On the roadmap, what are you or what are you most excited about?
We talked to dozens and dozens of customers and the thing that we’re personally most excited about are our collaboration features. We have awesome partners to deliver on many different aspects of ABM. The platform itself, with a few tweaks, is going to be an incredible ABM platform, and the thing that you are going to see that's new is the ability to see data across marketing and sales that you weren't able to do before. We want to get good at making your sales and marketing teams work together better than they've ever worked together before. That’s something unique and we’re excited to build those features and have you guys use those features.
Engagement Scoring
This is a really important thing as we think about engaging accounts – we want to make sure that we’re able to accurately understand whether or not this company is engaging with us and whether or not our marketing activities are working. The short answer is:
If Sales Navigator is a tool that you provide to your sales team, that's awesome. HubSpot does have a Sales Navigator integration, so you can bring some of that kind of UI into HubSpot. When we were doing account-based marketing campaigns, we used Sales Navigator. It was one of the ways that we personalised what we were going to say to a customer, using LinkedIn to understand who this person was and look at a company to understand whether they were hiring more people or what sort of people they were hiring. Sales Navigator is an awesome tool. If you feel like it's something you want to offer to your reps, that's awesome.
The collaboration feature is useful to companies where both marketing and sales are used. Our sales team uses Salesforce.
We see our customers who use Salesforce as first-class citizens. We want to make sure that we provide an awesome experience to you and many of our collaboration features, we are designing so that you can use with Salesforce. We want to use the Salesforce sync to bring in some of that data from Salesforce so that we can use it to provide you with the features that we need to provide you. We also want to help you collaborate outside of HubSpot too, because you're already doing it. We want to give you the ability to collaborate in Slack and maybe in Microsoft Teams or Asana. We want to make sure that you have as many avenues to put stuff into HubSpot as possible and we want to make sure you have as many avenues to pull stuff out of HubSpot as possible, so definitely you're going to get them to use those collaboration features even if you use Salesforce.