Although account-based marketing has always existed in some form, technology innovation has made it easier to target marketing activities to individual accounts. In this Expert Insight Interview, Mike Maynard discusses the benefits of account-based marketing regarding big sales deals. Mike Maynard is an Owner at Napier, a full-service marketing company, specialized in working with high tech B2B companies ranging from start-ups to enterprises.
The interview discusses:
- What is account-based marketing
- How to prepare for taking larger accounts
- Best way to approach and implement account-based marketing
What is it?
Account-based marketing identifies and focuses on potential clients who would like to spend the most money. Salespeople tend to focus on potential clients who seem to show less resistance. They invest a lot of time in smaller accounts and do not earn enough money. On the other side, focusing on a large account does not take up more time. It requires more strategy and effort but brings a far greater payoff.
Preparation for Bigger Accounts
There are three key things to do to prepare yourself for tackling the sizeable accounts. The first thing to do is to identify your ideal clients. The second thing is to understand who is involved in the decision-making process. Sometimes there is a smaller number of people involved, but sometimes you can find even hundreds of people involved in decision making. It usually depends on the size of a company and on a product or service you sell. And the last thing to do is to work your way to reach those people who are in charge of purchasing decisions. It is essential to understand how things work in reality and not how they should work theoretically. Some people might show genuine interest and care, but they do not have enough authority to help in the sales process.
The Right Approach and Implementation
Nowadays, it is easier than ever to do account-based marketing because now you can scale it. In the past, people were manually addressing targeted companies about new campaigns. But now, you can do account-based campaigns that address thousands of potential clients from once. The key is to understand how to reach those potential clients, get contacts, and build data to put in a CRM. LinkedIn is a helpful tool, for instance, because it can easily reach people with particular job titles in specific industries.
However, job occupations today became so specialized. There are so many new job titles that keep appearing. Thus, properly preparing and understanding which job title you should target is crucial to prevent targeting the wrong people due to lack of research.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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