TLDR:
Many current business development trends are slanting in favor of themes in Account-Based Marketing, directly and indirectly.
Here’s the thing: business development is not selling to or closing deals. It isn’t decreasing the rate at which customers are lost. It isn’t even getting referrals from satisfied customers, which tends to be an end goal of Account-Based Marketing.
In short, business development is not any one of these things—it’s all of them.
But even if all of these practices are successfully adopted, and they’re working, it’s always a smart idea to try new ones. Nobody knows when something will be the next best concept.
Now, personalization is not a new thing. Lots of businesses practice it, and personalized content is the quickest way to grab the attention of prospects. And yet, 88% of marketers aren’t fans of their personalization strategy.
This is because they suffer difficulty collecting data. The answer to this pain point is to use relationship intelligence technology. These types of techs keep prospect and client communication all organized.
Keeping communications consistent and sharp is key to making customers a priority. It’s also a key tenant of ABM. By sending personalized content specific to the individual during each stage of the B2B buyer’s journey, it says a lot about the amount of care a business shows its clients.
A business is often acutely aware of an individual’s place in the buyer’s journey through interpretation of data. Speaking of which, data-driven firms are 23 times more likely to get customers than those who don’t. It’s all about how technology is automated to save time and generate higher returns.
One of those techs can be a CRM system. CRMs tend to provide the bedrock on which businesses relationships are built and maintained. Done right, and using a variety of other methods coupled with CRM, customers should give you a referral. This is when they become advocates of your brand. This is the end-goal of ABM.
And it’s all the more reason to use it. After all, what’s better at a focused approach that cuts through the noise and focuses on the accounts that matter than ABM? More specifically, ABM takes the traditional marketing funnel that narrows gradually—wasting opportunities—and flips it over. Where the old funnel got narrower at the bottom, the ABM funnel gets broader, maximizing the chances to sell.
Of course, this all depends on how well marketing and sales teams collaborate and share insights with each other. If they can do this, and do it well, they just may be ABM-qualified.
Original article from Business 2 Community on 18 February 2019.
