Discover the essential steps to implement a successful Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy for SaaS companies. Learn how to effectively target high-value accounts.
Welcome to our deep dive into account based marketing for SaaS, where we explore the essential steps to implement a successful ABM strategy. In this blog, we'll guide you through ten fundamental steps that can help your SaaS company scale efficiently and effectively.
Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach that focuses on targeting high-value accounts with personalized marketing strategies. Unlike traditional marketing strategies that cast a wide net, ABM identifies specific companies and tailors marketing efforts to engage them directly. This method is particularly effective for SaaS companies, where understanding the unique needs of each target account can lead to more meaningful engagements and higher conversion rates. ABM should be the main strategy for companies selling high-ticket solutions (above $20K ARR).
In the competitive landscape of SaaS, adopting an ABM strategy can significantly enhance your marketing efforts. By aligning sales and marketing teams, you can create a cohesive approach that drives better results. This synergy allows for more precise targeting and messaging, ultimately leading to an efficient sales pipeline.
Setting clear growth goals is the foundation of any successful ABM strategy. Without specific targets, your marketing efforts can become unfocused and ineffective. Start by defining what you want to achieve in terms of revenue and customer acquisition.
For example, if your goal is to generate $10 million in new Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), reverse engineer that target to understand the number of customers you need to acquire. If your average deal size is $120K, you’ll need to close approximately 10 new customers. This means you should aim to generate around 40 new opportunities, considering an average win rate of 25%.
Understanding your conversion rates at each stage of the funnel is crucial. Knowing how many accounts you need to engage at the top of the funnel can help allocate your resources effectively. For instance, if you determine that you need to target 886 accounts over a six-month period, you can begin to devise a detailed plan to engage these accounts. Visualizing the funnel from cold accounts to customers will also help you allocate a realistic budget, considering the different engagement steps, conversion rates, and budget allocated per account. You can use FunnelTap to create funnel simulations and growth scenarios like the one below.
Collaboration between marketing and sales teams is vital for the success of your ABM strategy. Regular communication ensures that both teams are aligned on goals and target accounts. Begin this collaboration early, even when setting your initial growth goals.
Engage your sales team in discussions about which accounts should be prioritized. Understand their experiences and insights regarding potential customers. Sales teams often have valuable qualitative data that can inform your targeting strategies. For instance, they might identify specific characteristics of accounts that lead to faster sales cycles or higher conversion rates. One of our clients was able to determine that companies with more than 10% of employees located abroad were a bad fit, even though every other attribute was a perfect match with their ICP. This was discovered by interviewing their sales team and analyzing the post-mortem from their lost opportunities (their platform was missing a few crucial functionalities for international employees).
By fostering a strong partnership between marketing and sales, you can develop a more effective target account list, ensuring that both teams are working towards the same objectives.
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is another crucial component of your ABM strategy. It defines the characteristics of the companies that are most likely to benefit from your product, that will have higher conversion rate, lower churn, and will pay the most for your solution. Creating a super specific ICP based on actual data will ensure that your marketing efforts are focused on the right accounts.
To build an effective ICP, analyze your existing customer base and open opportunities, and identify the common traits among your best customers. Look for patterns in industry, company size, geographic location, recent funding rounds, open job positions, and even specific technologies they might be using. This data will help you create a detailed profile that guides your targeting efforts.
Keep in mind that your ICP should reflect your current customer base, not aspirational targets. For instance, if you’ve never closed a deal with a Fortune 500 company, it might not be realistic to target them heavily in your ABM campaigns. Instead, focus on the types of companies that have already successfully engaged with your product.
Segmenting your target accounts enables you to create more relevant campaigns for each group of companies. By creating segments based on various criteria, you can deliver more personalized messaging.
Consider segmenting your target accounts by industry, company size, or product usage. Additionally, you can sub-segment these groups based on their position in the sales funnel. For example, warm leads who have previously engaged with your content may require different messaging compared to cold leads who have never interacted with your company.
Furthermore, tier your accounts based on their potential value. Allocate more resources to high-value accounts while still nurturing lower-tier segments. This strategic approach ensures that your marketing budget is utilized effectively, maximizing your return on investment.
Once you’ve defined your segments, the next step is to build your target account list. This list should consist of all the companies that fit your ICP and belong to your defined segments.
Start by identifying the total number of accounts that match your criteria. This could be thousands of companies, so it’s essential to prioritize your efforts. Break down your list into smaller segments based on attributes like engagement level, company size, and industry. You should also tcreate "tiers" of accounts, so that you'll be able to allocate more budget to those with higher revenue potential.
For the contact list you need to map each account with the relevant titles that will be involved in the sales process, from the person who will attend the initial demo, to those who will be in charge of the technical evaluation, to the ultimate decision maker and budget owner. These roles and titles should match those found in closed-won opportunities. The goal is to reverse-engineer the sales motion from first demo to close, and to make sure to include each single role for every account. When compiling your contact list, don't include only C-suite executives or VPs, but also other influential roles within the organization. Very often your "champion" could be someone more junior and without budget authority. Analyzing your historical sales data can help identify which titles have previously engaged successfully with your sales team. This will enable you to replicate successful outreach strategies and build a more comprehensive contact list.
Now that you have your target account and contact lists ready, it's essential to engage these companies effectively. Engagement plays are the strategies you implement to connect with your prospects and nurture relationships.
One effective play is the "Open the Door" play. This is designed for "cold"accounts where you have no prior relationship or engagement. The strategy can begin with a warm-up phase through emails, followed by targeted LinkedIn ads. After establishing some familiarity, you can send a direct mail package introducing your company and the contact person, then follow-up with more emails and with relevant content. This multi-step approach helps break the ice and opens the door for further communication.
Another play is the "Top Account Nurturing" strategy. This is tailored for your highest priority accounts, where the goal is to keep your solution top of mind. Even if these accounts are not currently in a buying cycle, maintaining engagement ensures that when they are ready to make a decision, your solution is the first they think of. This long-term strategy can include regular check-ins, valuable content, and invitations to exclusive events.
With the "Conversion Uplift" play you are targeting top-of-funnel leads that have engaged with your content or your website, and that are part of target accounts. The goal is to push them down the funnel and convert a higher percentage of them to opportunities ("MQL to SQL ratio").
The "Event Boost" play is designed to increase the ROI from your tradeshow investments and retarget prospects and companies that have visited your booth of have engaged with your team. Emails and direct mails are typically the best channels to drive results in the short term with this strategy.
Other specific ABM plays include "Pipeline Acceleration" and "Lost Opportunities". With the former, you are looking to increase your close rate from existing pipeline by adding extra marketing touches to prospects who are starting to "drifting out" from the sales cycle, or to those who are very close to sign the agreement. With the "Lost Opportunities" play, you are looking to retarget closed-lost deals with a custom campaign. The idea is to re-engage them with what is new with your solution and resume the conversation.
Finally, the "Customer Upselling", Customer Appreciation" and "Churned Customers" are all ABM plays designed to build more values from your existing customer portfolio and reduce churn.
Creating a playbook for these engagement strategies is crucial. You might have multiple plays running in parallel, depending on your company’s growth stage and specific challenges. For example, if you identify a bottleneck in your sales pipeline, you might run a campaign to accelerate movement through the funnel. This could involve specific email flows, direct mail, ads, or even hosting VIP dinners to discuss solutions with potential clients.
Forecasting and budget planning are critical components of your account based marketing for SaaS strategy. To create an accurate forecast, segment your target accounts and analyze their varying conversion rates. For instance, a cold outreach campaign will probably yield a lower conversion rate compared to re-engaging lost opportunities.
Understanding these metrics allows you to allocate your budget effectively. For example, if your healthcare segment has a higher average deal size than your hospitality segment, you may want to allocate more resources toward healthcare accounts. As you gather more data over time, your forecasts will become increasingly precise, enabling you to make informed decisions about budget allocation across different plays.
Ultimately, in ABM you will need to allocate a specific budget for each account that you want to target, then distribute that budget across the relevant channels in your strategy. For example, you might allocate $300 per account per quarter for your cold segment. You could allocate $100 for LinkedIn Ads, $50 for targeted display ads, and $150 for direct mails. You can use FunnelTap to create these funnel scenarios and forecasts.
Account based marketing thrives on multichannel campaigns. This means utilizing various channels to reach your target accounts effectively. Each campaign should be tailored to the specific engagement play you're executing.
For example, if you are re-engaging lost opportunities, consider using a combination of email, direct mail, and ads. You might send a personalized email, followed by a direct mail package that includes a compelling offer, and then support it with targeted ads on platforms where your audience is active.
The key is consistency across all channels. Ensure that your messaging, branding, and offers are aligned. This cohesive approach not only strengthens your brand presence but also reinforces your message, making it more likely to resonate with your target accounts. Below you can see an example of our recent "Secret Sauce" campaign, which targeted 500 cold accounts with emails, ads, direct mails, and hyper-selected industry events.
Personalization is a crucial aspect of account based marketing for SaaS. However, many companies make the mistake of over-personalizing at the single account or contact level, which can lead to wasted resources and ineffective campaigns. Very rarely it makes sense to invest weeks or months and significant budget to try to engage one single company. Instead, focus on personalizing by segment. This means understanding the common challenges and needs of the accounts within a specific segment and crafting your messaging around those insights. By doing this, you can create relevant content that speaks to the entire group while still ensuring it resonates with individual accounts.
Leave the one-to-one personalization for your sales team during discovery calls. Marketing should aim for efficiency and effectiveness by reaching out to multiple accounts with targeted messaging that addresses their shared pain points.
Finally, measuring and optimizing your campaigns is vital for long-term success. Establish clear KPIs to track the performance of each segment within your account based marketing strategy. Metrics to consider include new Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) generated, the number of new opportunities, and engagement rates.
By analyzing this data, you can identify what's working and what isn't. For instance, if a particular segment shows high engagement but low conversion rates, you may need to adjust your approach for that group. Tracking these metrics allows for ongoing optimization and scaling of successful strategies.
As you refine your campaigns, remember to allocate a realistic budget based on your goals and historical data. This will enable you to scale your efforts effectively, maximizing the impact of your account based marketing initiatives.
Account based marketing for SaaS is a targeted approach that focuses on engaging high-value accounts through personalized marketing strategies. It aligns sales and marketing efforts to drive better results in the SaaS industry.
Begin by defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), building a target account list, and creating segments for targeting. From there, develop engagement plays and multichannel campaigns tailored to your audience.
Utilize a mix of channels including email, direct mail, LinkedIn ads, and events. The key is to create a cohesive strategy that reinforces your messaging across all platforms.
Track key metrics such as new ARR, number of opportunities generated, and account engagement levels. Analyzing this data will help you optimize your campaigns and allocate resources effectively.
Personalization helps to create relevant messaging that resonates with your target accounts, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion. However, focus on segment-level personalization rather than individual-level to maximize efficiency.
By implementing these strategies and continuously refining your approach, your SaaS company can effectively leverage account based marketing to drive growth and build lasting relationships with your target accounts.
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