As the buzz for Account Based Marketing (ABM) continues, it’s important to stay up to date on the terms and practices associated with ABM. Before diving into the gory details, why do people choose to use ABM? Well it’s pretty simple: it works. Demandbase released a study (2015 State of Account-Based Marketing Study) that revealed around 92 percent of companies think it’s a must-have for B2B sales. But what exactly is it doing for the companies that use it? This is where those industry terms come in handy.

“Pipeline Velocity”

What is pipeline velocity? It’s the rate in which you are able to convert a fresh lead into a closed deal. How long are your leads waiting before they get contacted? At which stage are the leads getting stuck most frequently? These are important pipeline questions that directly impact your ability to improve on the overall pipeline velocity.

ABM strategies aim to speed up the process of converting leads to sales by catering specifically to the customer’s needs and investments. How can your product or service fit nicely into their existing infrastructure? Is it going to be easily affordable, or if not, will it pay itself off over time?

“Target Accounts”

There is (almost) always a core set of features that your ideal customer will have. These features are spread across multiple accounts that your sales team had an easy time closing. These core features can be budgets, industry knowledge, size of the company, etc. Identifying these features is an important part of sales analytics, and can allow your sales teams to more efficiently segment leads and ultimately devote time to the accounts that are likely to close.

Read this article on Target Account Marketing to learn more about how it can help your business.

“Account Anatomy”

In ABM the focus is catering to the customer. In order to do this, you must have a way of segmenting your customers based on their interests and intent. Once customers have been identified by their needs, budget, etc. they can be assigned to the corresponding account team. This is imperative, because by organizing your leads you can more specifically control the amount of time and effort invested into certain types of customers.

The account anatomy is the core set of information required for you to efficiently segment your leads. This closely ties into the idea of a buyer persona, but perhaps with less overhead involved. You can think of the account anatomy as the skeleton that supports the buyer persona.

These are some of the most important pieces of information when building an account anatomy:

Priorities – what is the current business strategy of the customer, and how does your product fit into that plan?

Current Priorities – what is the focus of the customer right now, and what does your product have to do with that?

Sales Triggers – what are the things the customer must walk away with in order to make the sale?

Key Players – who are the decision makers? Which ones are most important, and what information do they need to make a well-informed decision?

By following the outline given above, you can start to classify your leads better and begin to distribute more personalized content. This in turn will produce much more meaningful engagement, which at the end of the day is one of the most powerful ways to convince a customer they’re making the right choice.

Target Account Marketing is a collection of protocols and tools that aims to let marketers execute programs against their most profitable accounts. This isn’t something that overrides account based marketing practices, but rather it’s a way for companies to further refine the qualification process in order to target ideal customers for quick and effective engagement.

Ideally, you’ll want your sales and marketing teams to align so that you can identify the key characteristics of a target account. From here you can start to generate relevant content, such as advertisements, and deliver this content specifically to the accounts that want it. Use your website as a tool that delivers content based on the account-type visiting the site. If it’s a target account, or more specifically, a named target account, make sure to place content that’s relevant to their business strategy. If they’re not a target account, get them started in the standard sales pipeline.

By identifying, segmenting, and engaging your accounts based on how well they meet your ideal characteristics, your efforts can be distributed evenly depending on the likeliness of the sale. For those customers that are a 100% match to the target account characteristics, you’ll want to launch campaigns immediately, and make sure the customer knows you’re here to do business. Those that fall lower than 50% can start to be placed within more general sales pipelines that aren’t as resource-heavy and time-sensitive.

You can think of target account marketing as a way to separate the best customers from the rest. It isn’t meant to say they’re better in any sense, other than the fact that their needs can be met effectively by you. Customers that don’t fall neatly into this category of the ideal customer can still be placed into existing account based marketing programs within your company.