How To Use ABM and Enrichment For Sales Teams

If you are in any type of B2B Revenue role, you probably know about Account Based Marketing (ABM). It's an increasingly valuable solution set for marketers and business developers... But ABM has a home deeper in the sales cycle too.

Out of all the tools available for revenue teams, ABM has perhaps the most universal application across the customer journey. Account Executives and Account Managers are equally likely to find value in the output of ABM technology. That is... If there is a cohesive end-point for that output.

In other words... Can an AE or AM see and take action on the ABM data, without leaving their HQ inside CRM? Are the "sales intelligence" solutions currently provided by ABM technologies put into the right hands, in the right place, at the right time?

Enter Account Based Selling (ABS) technology... the end-game to truly enrich an Enterprise level revenue team's capabilities, using the massive value of ABM.

Call it Account Based Sales (ABS)?

At the end of the day, in B2B... It's the Sales and Service teams that make deals happen. No offense to marketing or BizDev, or anyone else... but big deals need closing and big customers need service before contracts get signed.

So if your CRM is not able to house essential market intelligence like ABM data, you could be missing something huge. That something is otherwise known as ABS, the overlay on top of your CRM that makes ABM work across the customer journey and beyond.

White Space and The Home for ABM In CRM

If you are part of an account management, sales or customer success team, you may know of "Sales Gap Analysis". Also known as "white space" analysis, this exercise is essentially laying out your deals, open and won, on a graph or a table. Place Product Type on the X axis and Customers on the Y Axis (for example).

Next you can use this table to mark off open deals, closed won deals (open or expired contracts). Any spaces that are blank are considered whitespace and it's this whitespace that might just be your next big move.

However, most tables such as the one here below, are very open... Too much white space to matter. It's here, and perhaps no where else that ABM data is most effective for more stakeholder internally.

In this example above, we have a small portfolio of customers with a 5-wide set of offerings. Where's the sales gaps? In the white-spaces of course!

Now, where exactly should your sales team be aiming, given this table?

Roll a die?

Flip a coin?

Why not figure out where the high-impact whitespace exists? Why not use ABM data to help?

For example, if we knew which gap was high-impact (more likely to provide value to a customer with propensity to procure your valuable solutions...) then your sellers could easily understand exactly which customers to focus on (and how to navigate that customer relationship).

In order to figure out which whitespace here is high-impact white space, we can and should, use Account Intelligence metrics in order to produce scores and targets. For example, what if the same table looked more like this:

Is this table more effective? We have a big-yellow highlight on the coalescence of a Target Customer (Customer 4) and a target Solution (Service 2) which indicates clearly that this Customer has intent and propensity to purchase Solution Service 2... ABM is a great provider of such data, but ABS is the home of your operators... Your Sellers and Revenue team who will actually execute on your plans.

Of course, we could just throw spaghetti at the wall of whitespace in image #1.

OR....

We could target the right account and match them with the right product and work for the betterment of their business!

We could and should use as much data as we trust to be true with regards to these accounts and the people underlying them, to help highlight whitespace and guide our Revenue team (NPS, CSAT, Propensity, Intent, Lead Score Aggregates, Wallet-Share and TAM, Competitor Footprint, etc...).

And what do we get from this, not so difficult integration with ABM and ABS (CRM)...?

Literally a bull's eye target on your sales teams' next high-impact effort, objectively backed by unquestionably true data.

Do you know what your revenue team's next High-Impact pursuit will be?

Time to get targeting

- Chef Matt

P.S. If your answer is "no" to my last question, Altify is specifically designed for this purpose... Reach Out Any Time!