How Employees Can Amplify Account-Based Marketing at Your Company

Account-Based Marketing, B2B, & Employees

Take your account-based marketing efforts and strategy to the next level by leveraging your company’s workforce.

Over the last few years, the evolution of how B2B marketing and B2B sales work has shifted into new and exciting directions.

One of the biggest challenges for both departments is increasing leads, the lead quality, and being able to close more deals to increase overall company revenue.

According to research done by the Rain Group and ITSMA, “the number one challenge companies face when trying to generate leads is finding a strategy, tactic, or offer that gets the attention of potential leads. Of the 845 B2B services professionals polled, 42.1% said this was extremely or very challenging.”

I’m also willing to bet some of those companies that are comfortable with their process, could actually be improving their overall success with a strategy that includes account-based marketing.

The tactic of account-based marketing (or ABM as it is typically abbreviated) has been a hot topic in the B2B marketing and sales world for the last few years. See Google Trends image below.

For a while though as this strategy started gaining traction, many just saw it as a trend or fad. But it has quickly become more of a common practice and strategy that B2B companies are focusing resources on.

And rightfully so.

Yet, when we think about account-based marketing strategy, we also miss out on a key element that can amplify the effectiveness even further: employees.

Of course, marketing and sales team are typically involved in the ABM process, but for B2B companies, getting other employees (if not all) involved can really drive ROI.

We’ll cover some of the important aspects of ABM and how you can amplify your ABM strategy with your company’s employees.

What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

Although you may be familiar with account-based marketing, it’s always good to define it and re-visit the term.

This strategy is focused primarily in the B2B space, in which marketing and sales teams work together to target their best-fit accounts and turn those accounts into customers.

The standard model in marketing has been the “one-to-many” approach, where now with ABM it’s on a “one-one” basis to provide a more personal touch and one that focuses on individual needs.

Terminus, an ABM SaaS platform, puts it best:

“The traditional B2B sales and marketing funnel is broken. In its current form, B2B marketing takes a broad approach to lead generation with the goal of capturing as many leads as possible. The inherent issue with this approach is that the funnel gets smaller towards the bottom, so the vast majority of B2B leads — over 99%, according to Forrester Research — never become customers.”

Because you’ve identified companies and key personas, your better able to tailor ads specifically to them, create personalized web pages and content, direct mailing, and more that will help your sales team have a better response rate when it comes to making a sale.

So does this tactic work?

• According to Alterra Group, 65% of B2B marketers agreed that ABM provided significant benefits for attracting new clients.
• About 85% of marketers that measure ROI describe account-based marketing as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach (ITSMA)

However, pending the size of your company and number of resources, account-based marketing might not be for you. Typically larger and enterprise level B2B companies benefit from account-based marketing more, but this is not to say smaller companies or businesses in B2C cannot find success either.

Looking for some account-based marketing examples and tactics? Here is an ultimate list of 22 ABM tactics your company can try.

Why All Employees Should be Involved in Your Company’s ABM Strategy

With ABM, your company will tend to leave this to just the marketing and sales teams to implement and be involved in setting up.

However, if your company is utilizing the account-based marketing approach, then your company can benefit from getting all employees involved or at the very least, other various departments.

Getting more employees involved than just the marketing and sales departments can greatly increase the effectiveness of your account-based marketing strategy and help shorten the overall sales cycle.

With any great ABM approach, complimenting it with employee advocacy tactics will amplify your results and ROI.

Employee advocacy is simply getting your company workforce active and engaged in social media consistently, sharing content, and “advocating” on behalf of the company.

Because account-based marketing is about the personal connection and making the marketing and sales efforts more authentic to persons specific needs, employee advocacy is a perfect match.

As marketing runs their specific campaigns, getting employees in the social mix not only draws more traffic and potential conversions but maximizes the impact of the brand name in front companies/people at those companies.

 Here are a few ways employees help account-based marketing tactics:

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