From the beginning, a line was drawn between the marketing and sales team. Marketers were disengaged from any sales activities going on inside a company. The target accounts suffered through a fragmented experience as marketing and sales crossed each other on key decision-making. Let just say getting sales and marketing teams working as a cohesive unit was not easy.
Salesforce takes the credit for the sudden rise of account-based marketing strategy in the industry. If it weren’t for Salesforce CRM's ability to integrate with the marketing technology (MarTech), the B2B marketing industry wouldn't have seen the evolution of Martech. This evolution of B2B MarTech tools such as marketing automation platforms (MAPs), content marketing systems, and predictive analytics software made account-based marketing (ABM) platform come into the light.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-Based Marketing is an approach where sales and marketing teams combine their efforts to gain leads and build account relationships. Unlike traditional marketing, where a marketing team creates one campaign that targets a broad audience which results in less personalized leads. Account-based marketing is a step ahead as sales and marketing teams work together to create campaigns that are targeted and customized to drive the highest quality leads.
Why Account-Based Marketing?
ABM is also referred to as targeted marketing for being primarily focused on high-value B2B accounts. The Marketing and the sales department aligns their purposes of landing one big client for the company instead of 100 small ones. This way they can identify, assess, and analyze the high-value accounts to create and deliver personalized content, reports, and offers.
It helps if the sales team adopts an account-based sales strategy, hence the plan is to align their efforts with the marketing team. Engaging earlier in the sales process, aligning marketing initiatives with sales strategies help both teams to maximize Return of Investment (ROI) from marketing campaigns. According to the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), ABM delivers the highest ROI of any strategic B2B marketing approach.
Account-Based Marketing using Salesforce
B2B marketing technology is why account-based marketing is more accessible and efficient. Artificial intelligence is one fast-growing component of a B2B marketing technology stack, particularly for account-based marketing.
With the inclusion of AI to your ABM strategy, identifying potential accounts with a high revenue in the earlier process becomes easy. This is where the Salesforce platform plays its part. Implementing a Salesforce ABM strategy combines all your data into a single AI-powered, Salesforce lightning platform. Using the AI data, marketers can create a campaign that targets prospects who show patterns that match their ideal customer account.
Einstein Account-Based Marketing
Salesforce has been implementing the power of Einstein AI to its various services. They also introduced Einstein Account-Based Marketing, a complete, end-to-end B2B marketing solution powered by artificial intelligence. It combines new and existing Salesforce abilities which allow B2B companies seamlessly link sales and marketing efforts to enhance the customer journey. Through this, companies can effectively prioritize the pipeline and provide prospects with a personalized campaign. In addition, Einstein ABM also enables companies to:
- Identify the right account
- Develop account engagement
- Measure, optimize and alter a campaign
- Align marketing and sales
Tracking account-based marketing in Salesforce
Salesforce can integrate with pretty much anything and everything through its robust API. Having the right technology is important because technology allows you to perform ABM at large scale, to reach a maximum number of desirable accounts. Tracking account-based marketing metrics while completing a successful ABM is what will drive success and revenue for your organization. Using the Salesforce CRM can track this activity for the entire account’s journey, from prospect to customer.
These are the five key metrics to track your account-based marketing strategy in Salesforce.
1. Know your Account Coverage
Account coverage relates to measuring two key items
- How many accounts is an organization reaching?
- Who is being reached?
These key items answer some necessary questions like is the account data complete, are the individuals in the databases enough, and how much account-related content is present there? All this information collectively improves how your account-based marketing strategy is reaching your customers. With that, it's main focus is to align marketing efforts to its actual clients and guarantee the targeted message reaches the correct set of audience.
2. Determine your Engagement level
Once you are done with specific analysis of account coverage and decide on how you are going to target them. The next step is to check whether or not your leads are engaging with the content you created for a specific target audience. For that, you need to determine engagement levels and ensure that the proper tracking mechanisms are being used. It could be Google Analytics, a third-party app, or tools for implementing marketing automation to the platform. Whichever you use, ensure that they are in place and properly functional.
Just launching a campaign to later realize that you cannot track what’s running and what is not is a waste of resources and can harm your ROI. When it comes to tracking account-based marketing metrics it is crucial to know that your prospects are engaged to your efforts so they can successfully adjust to your strategy later.
3. Make sure your reach is relevant to your accounts
When the accounts are targeted and properly engaged, it's important that the targeted accounts are also being successfully reached? Account-based marketing can give a sense of success for a while and generate a lot of activity on your end. However, it is insignificant if you cannot reach the relevant audience that fits your strategy.
Tracking reach can tell whether marketing efforts are resulting in actual success and help in planning future campaigns. It also picks out the channels that are generating the most interaction among set targets so you can track the key from where you are gaining success.
4. Keep tabs of your ABM metrics
If all the above account-based marketing metrics are being tracked successfully. Then you will be able to know which prospects you are reaching, their engagement, and which channels are proving to be most effective. Now find out the activities which had a major role in impacting the buyer's journey. Also, measure how to effectively drive prospects through the sales funnel before you start the campaign. For example, find out if engaged clients are likely to respond to sales or a sign-up process for demo after going through a webinar.
5. Measure your Return of Investment
It’s necessary to estimate the ROI part of the account-based marketing metric to determine if the ABM campaigns in action are worth the effort. Because if campaigns cost you more time and money but not enough leads, then you should consider implementing changes to your plan.
See if things like reducing ad spending would be beneficial? Tracking ROI acknowledges your ABM efforts and proves if they are working to bring growth. So you can utilize the successful parts of your campaigns in future to save both time and efforts.
Implement a smarter marketing strategy
It's true that account-based marketing approaches offer excellent possibilities for organizations to focus on their marketing and sales methods. But to truly reap the benefits of ABM, it is important to keep a record of things that matter. Tracking account-based marketing metrics do that. If your organization follows the above steps to track ABM strategies in Salesforce. You’ll be one step closer to running integrated ABM campaigns that deliver efficient results for your marketing efforts.
Being a Salesforce consulting company and having a team of certified Salesforce professionals, Evon Technologies prepares companies for their next-generation customer needs. We simplify Salesforce for you to develop meaningful customer relationships by providing Salesforce development services in India. When it comes to ABM, we help track and measure the accounts with consistency so you can assess and improve the approach of gaining useful leads. We Integrate marketing automation into the ABM approach to allow you to capture valuable insights on prospect engagement. If you’d like to know more about how we can help you with ABM in Salesforce, contact us or email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..