Strongarming your ABM efforts with sales call data

ABM is high in demand because unlike cold outreach and general marketing, ABM is much focused, and thus the probability of conversion increases.

But without the focused data, you are just shooting your arrow in a dark room with a 50-50 probability of either hitting the target or not.
But what kind of data?

If you are thinking about market data, you are partially right. But the more efficient way of sourcing customer and market data is by analyzing your sales, customer support, and customer success call data.

In this blog, we will try to understand what ABM is and how you can make your ABM efforts more focused.
But first, 

What do you mean by ABM?

Account-based marketing, or ABM, is where marketers and sellers combine and personalize their efforts to treat every prospect and industry persona in a single market. In this, the marketers identify the high-value customers and develop a selling and marketing strategy to target them and their needs specifically.

A usual ABM team consists of

• ABM Manager: Who is responsible for creating campaigns and sales playbooks among other things.
• Intent and Research team: They are responsible for capturing, analyzing, and qualifying the intent data. Usually done using AI-powered solutions like conversation intelligence.
• Designer and Creative team: For designing campaigns, landing pages, and other assets.
• SDR: For reaching out to these customers and scheduling a meeting with them for account executives.
• ABM Account Executive: For meeting with prospects and closing the deals.
• Copywriter: Who writes personalized pitches and content for the ABM selling and campaigns.

A detailed structure of their role is given below:

Why is ABM so important?

ABM is crucial for the revenue growth of any business as it is targeted and combines both marketing and sales on the same goal.

“ABM Maturity Corresponds To Better Revenue Results.” - Forrester 

🔹 Sales and marketing alignment

Episode 17: Importance of bridging the gap between sales and marketing

ABM is not just a method of improving business growth. It’s a way of proactively working with accounts from the other departments inside your company to expand your reach and influence in order to grow as much as possible. 

ABM helps align sales and marketing together better than before so that you aren’t getting in-fighting or internal disagreements about who's bringing in what leads because everyone at every level is working together to bring about a common goal - which happens to be expanding the reach of your company by tapping into specific accounts that are more likely to be open to doing business with you.

🔹 Efficient campaigning

ABM is like fishing. Once you have the right bait, you go to the right kind of water, cast your line using a jigging motion, and wait for bites. It is about using platforms for campaigns that customers usually engage on, like social media platforms. Make sure to talk about how you can become their friend by listening to them and understanding what they want in return for opening up their wallet so that you can give it to them. 

That’s how ABM works. The process may feel slow initially, but if done correctly, it will result in the action of many smaller sales on numerous platforms like Snapchat or Instagram rather than one big SERP engine like Google.

🔹 Improve customer experience and acquisition rate

Personalization is the biggest selling point of Account Based Marketing. It comes from understanding your target market’s unique needs and delivering information that helps them identify in what ways your solution will meet these specific needs. And a conversation analytics solution integrated with your customer engagement platforms can surely enable you to get this data.

Personalization results in a personalised, hassle-free experience for your customers — as if you understand exactly what they need because you have thoroughly researched them beforehand.

Now let's get back to the main question:

How can sales call data strongarm ABM process?

By uncovering crucial data like we will discuss now from conversation intelligence you can better understand your customers and sell them more effectively.

Prospect and customer data from sales calls

The very first step to a perfect account based marketing campaign is deciding who your target market is. Before anything else, you have to understand the traits of your ideal customer. 

• Who are they really? 
• What industry do they belong to?
• What do they like and dislike?
• From where they are?
• What is the company size?
• What are their pain points?
• What is their current process and technologies that they use?
• What is their budget?
• Average purchase price of their stack?

This data will aid you in establishing customer-seller relationships. This relationship is essential before you talk about developing your ABM strategy because it drives every decision you make with regards to which accounts you will focus on.

For aligning sales and marketing collateral

Using sales call data, your marketing team can know the stage the customer is at and create content based on the tofu, mofu, and bofu stage of the sales funnel.

Sales and marketing teams can be better aligned on the ABM campaigns if the whole sales process and data pipeline are transparent. And a conversation analytics tool enables this by giving both teams access to:

• Tools that can be integrated into both team process,
• Shared deal reporting,
• And transparent communication.

Sales call data for customer personalization

Like most businesses, the time it takes to bring a product or service to market varies greatly. What’s great about account-based marketing is that you have the option of identifying contacts within your potential customers' businesses who can influence the decision-making process and garner their trust early on in the conceptualization of your product. 

The trick is to discover who within your target companies has all of the power and how you can get them to want to work with you. Some may say this kind of direct messaging sounds like it just brings in more high-quality leads - but, in reality, it does far more than just that! 

It inevitably helps open up new lines of communication and fosters relationships that go beyond what might otherwise be accomplished through simple cold-calling or email campaigns by making your sales and marketing efforts more personalized. Such efforts will ultimately help build a successful foundation for brand awareness and customer acquisition for your business.

Conversation intelligence is a must tool for ABM marketing

Conversation intelligence platform integrates with your current sales and marketing stack for recording, transcribing, and analyzing sales conversations for crucial customer and deal data and lays it out in an easy to understand reports. It even logs the data along with the recording in your CRM, so you can have transparent communication over the deals and have transparent deal pipeline data.

And as we already know, this data is crucial for targeted marketing and strongarming your ABM process and alignment. Forrester's report also reports that 56% time personalized content and 43% time advanced data management are keys to ABM's success.

Parting words

Sales call data is a powerful tool for strengthening your business development efforts. The data can tell you a lot about the effectiveness of your ABM strategy and help you identify issues you need to correct. We hope that this blog has given you some new insights into the power of sales call data and how it can help you strengthen your ABM strategy.