As business starts to open up, you will need to begin re-engaging your indirect sales channel. With seventy-five percent of all the world’s goods selling through indirect channels (Source: Forrester Research), it is critical that you keep engaged with your channel partners.
Account-based marketing is a strategic approach for B2B marketers where each account (or sales partner) is considered a market of one. You are creating targeted and personalized buying experiences for individuals in a set of high-value accounts, in this case your channel partners.
However, due to the shutdown, there are a several challenges. There have been layoffs, furloughs, and job changes. Without the right contacts, your sales team can’t make the sale. In addition, you are competing with other vendors for attention.
Here is how account-based marketing can help.
ABM to Engage New Contacts
Unfortunately, many of your contacts may no longer work at your channel partner and you will need to rebuild your contact base for each key account. ABM is designed to help uncover new contacts.
The first thing you need to do is clean your database. You could develop a personalized “Welcome Back” email to re-engage and see how many of your contacts bounce. This way, you can judge how much personnel movement there has been in each key account.
Channel partners may be big with multiple locations and it may be difficult to identify all of the contacts that could influence a buying decision for your products and services. First, you need to identify who influences the buying decision within your partners and create a campaign to target them. This buying process will be different than your end user buying process. Paid media for ABM, such as a LinkedIn campaign, helps you with attracting new and unknown contacts and mapping them to key personas within target accounts. With LinkedIn you can target a specific company and specific titles and offer them premium content for their email address.
Once you identify them and capture their contact info, you will need to continue to nurture and engage these contacts with a content marketing campaign.
ABM to Find New Partners
You may need to find new channel partners since some businesses are no longer in business or are going to be slowly ramping back to normal business levels.
Develop a profile with the criteria for your ideal customer. You may find companies in our current database that fit the criteria. We recently uncovered a number potential OEMs for one of our manufacturing clients. Our client defined what an ideal OEM would look like and we found that a a number of contacts working at about a dozen right fit companies already in their database. Using a combination of content marketing and lead scoring, eight of these became sales qualified. It was like uncovering buried treasure!
You Need a Platform for ABM Orchestration
A multi-faceted marketing automation solution is the key to maximizing the success of your efforts for your ABM strategy. Hubspot recently introduced new ABM functionality in their MarketingPro and Enterprise packages. HubSpot's ABM software is an easy-to-use solution that unites and enables teams to run cohesive ABM strategies. It is really strong at orchestrating and reporting on all the activities in an ABM solution.
With HubSpot ABM, you get an all-on-one platform that makes complex sales processes easier than ever.
- Define your ideal key account profile and identify target accounts. Using HubSpot’s workflow template, spot common traits that can be used to classify companies in your database by how well they match your ideal customer profile.
- Attract the attention of key stakeholders with personalized ads and nurturing flows. Build audiences for your ABM ad campaigns using HubSpot’s out-of-the-box lists. Create and serve personalized ads to influencers within your target accounts on popular platforms like LinkedIn — right from inside your HubSpot account.
- Tailor outreach, turn target accounts into customers or channel partners, and measure. Company scoring helps them understand and track engagement across their target accounts. And with HubSpot’s account-based sales playbook template, they’ll be fully equipped with best practices for closing big deals efficiently and effectively.
