Torrey Dye — November 14, 2019 Congratulations on securing your latest round of funding. You’re on a gravy train with biscuit wheels!
Unfortunately, the day after popping all those champagne bottles tells a very different story…
The only thing more daunting than your hangover is thinking about how you’re going to meet the crazy growth projections you pitched to investors. Don’t worry; every company that gets funding faces the same thing. The best ones find a way to do it. But don’t think you have to reinvent the wheel! The best way for a fast-growing company to drive efficient growth is through an account-based strategy. Here’s what we’ve learned from our fastest-growing customers.
Invest Your Resources Wisely
Just because you got a big check doesn’t mean it’s time to run a SuperBowl ad. You still have to spend your precious resources wisely if you’re going to hit your growth projections. That means you need to identify the accounts that are the most likely to become successful customers.
Luckily for you, that’s what ABM is all about. Whether you’re already a market leader or you’re working on beating out the big players in your market, the best (and fastest) way to gain the biggest market share is to focus in on the accounts that are the most likely to convert right now. ABM helps with that by enabling you to get hyper-targeted on specific market segments and hit them with your brand and value proposition wherever they are.
Snowflake Computing, a data warehousing cloud service provider that grew revenue 237%, doubled their employee count, and quadrupled their customer base last year, gives much of the credit to their account-based strategy.
“We knew that to hit our targets, we were going to have to be laser-focused with the resources that we had available to us.”
– Daniel Day, Director of ABM at Snowflake
Check out their case study to learn how they used 1:1 ABM campaigns to drive 50% of content consumption on their site.
When you’re growing really quickly, you should be:
- Regularly evaluating what your ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like
- Identifying the most valuable segment of accounts in that ICP
- Investing your resources into efforts dedicated to converting that segment of accounts into happy customers
Use Targeted Brand Awareness to Create Demand
Knowing what accounts you should invest your resources in is great, but breaking into those accounts is a whole other story. Traditional lead-based tactics cost a lot and aren’t very effective.
Pramata helps B2B companies eliminate revenue leakage. The challenge is most people were unaware of Pramata or what revenue leakage even is. To make things even more challenging, their ideal customer profile and persona are the C-level contacts at the world’s biggest companies. Those people don’t fill out forms.
“We were spending a good bit of money on content syndication. We were getting a ton of good form fills, but when I went in and looked at the data, it turned out that about 99 percent of the people that filled out the forms weren’t a good-fit.”
– Jeremy Middleton, Senior Director of Digital Marketing at Pramata
Pramata, like many of the fastest-growing companies in the world, used an account-based strategy to engage the entire buying committee at their target accounts. This not only helped them get more customers, it helped them get more customers at a lower customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Check out their case study to learn how they used ABM to lower their customer acquisition costs by 60%.
An account-based strategy enables you to surround your target accounts with personalized messaging without wasting your spend on a bunch of low-quality leads. Just like retargeting lets you follow people that visit your site everywhere they go online, account-based advertising lets you proactively follow the target personas from your target accounts. The only difference is you don’t spend money on everyone that hits your site, you just spend money on the people you care about. And, you know companies and personas are seeing your ads so that you can activate a sales touch at the perfect moment.
ABM also lets you be very surgical with channels such as direct mail. Here at Terminus, we find the most success when we pair multi-channel account-based advertising with email, direct mail, and sales outreach. We often see these multi-channel programs converting 30% of targeted accounts into opportunities.
Keep Sales Efficiency High
Every high growth company I’ve worked with and most that I’ve talked to go through a similar cycle. They have amazing success, get funding that comes with higher revenue goals, hire more sales reps, and then see production fall through the floor.
The more sales reps you have, the harder it is to maintain a high rate of production. Traditional marketing tactics have a difficult time feeding all the reps. Reps have a harder time sourcing their own pipeline as accounts are divided among more reps. And, it gets increasingly more difficult to source good sales talent.
The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter how good your marketing is if sales isn’t able to take action on it. An account-based strategy helps you better enable your sales team, deliver sales actionable insights, and empower your reps to conduct more impactful prioritization and personalization.
Phononic, a company that is changing the way the world cools things, uses ABM to collaborate with sales to identify which accounts they should target and what marketing programs to use.
“Now, it’s easier to say, ‘These are the accounts you wanted me to target, these are the departments at each account you wanted me to target, and here’s how they’re engaging.’ It helps sales understand how marketing is helping them engage those accounts.”
– Daniel Englebretson, Director of Integrated Marketing at Phononic
Measure What Matters
Measuring cost-per-lead and marketing qualified leads through last-touch and first-touch don’t give you the full picture of your marketing efforts. Marketing teams at the fastest-growing companies are also measuring target account pipeline, target account contacts engaged, and marketing influence.
SalesLoft, a platform that enables sales teams to better engage with their customers, uses account-based metrics to measure account engagement by channel and accelerate their enterprise pipeline.
“This different [ABM] way of doing business, this different way of growing was tailor-made for a large company strategy.”
– Eric Martin, Senior Director of Demand Generation at SalesLoft
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility…
… and even greater revenue goals.
But, you’re not alone. Plenty of amazing companies have forged the trail you’re on. There’s an abundance of resources you can rely on to set yourself on the path to success. The ones we included in this blog were just a small sample. Take the time to figure out what mistakes other companies made – and how they overcame them – so you can avoid them altogether. But most of all, this is an exciting time for your company. Enjoy the ride.
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