B2B Articles - July 25, 2018 - By Ironpaper
The road to success in account-based marketing (ABM) can be fraught with challenges and obstacles that each agency has to overcome.
While some of these issues may be specific to the agency and its method of operating, some recurring problems have a tendency to take hold in any organization that practices ABM. Recognizing these issues and acting swiftly to solve them can help your team stay focused on successes instead of allowing failures to fester and weigh on team morale.
Be attentive to the signs of these six common challenges and prepare to make changes to stop them:
Nurturing prospects out of the awareness stage requires understanding and responding to business problems and obstacles they currently experience. Creating content that responds to these obstacles and challenges is vital. A prospect must understand the value of solving this problem for their organization or within the context of their job function. It’s important to keep in mind that there may be factors beyond your control that prevent leads and prospects from moving into the decision stage. Lead nurturing involves educating and inspiring prospects over time, as some of them may become evangelists for your brand (2), and inspiring these prospects to turn the tide within their organization--pushing the sales opportunity down the funnel.
With ABM, all of your communication should highlight how you can bring value to businesses in specific situations (4) and provide context on how this value will be generated. A common mistake organizations make is to drive to demo too early. Creating more varied content appropriate to each stage of the process is vital. Full demonstrations should be reserved for a moment that a prospect has enough context to 1. Appreciate the value highlighted in the demo, 2. Understand the value of solving their current obstacles, and 3. Have internal buy-in (to eliminate dry runs).
One of the most common mistakes organizations make is trying to drive to demo too early.
Creating a dialogue with prospective buyers that is centered around your content can be a challenging process, particularly if you’re hoping to drive these prospects towards a sales conversation. Many prospective buyers may be wary of speaking with any sales team until they are on the verge of making a decision. Buyers hate to be pushed into a decision where they lack context, a sense of being informed, and insights.
One potential way to encourage prospects to interact with sales is to train your salespeople to become experts on your prospects’ pain points, business opportunities, and market insights. Your sales team cannot enter a conversation expecting to immediately ink a deal. We need to kill the mindset, “if they aren’t ready to sign, then they’re no good.” Sales team members must begin the conversation expecting to act as an educational resource and to help prospects at different stages of the buying process.
A misalignment between marketing and sales is a fundamental growth issue for many companies. These misalignments may result in in-fighting, blame games, and competing agendas that drive little to no value for the enterprise. One of the common issues that we see is sales blaming marketing for "bad leads" and then "walking away" to prospect their own. Sales and marketing teams must commit to each others' success. Insights, research, learnings, testing data, and knowledge must flow both ways. Sales teams need to be restricted in their prospecting efforts, and they must be focused on nurturing consideration-stage leads. Account-based marketing is a team effort.
Differentiation is critical in a crowded marketplace. Developing interesting and engaging content isn’t enough. Your marketing and messaging must speak to your points of differentiation and your unique brand promise. Your content offers, demo/pitch, sales approach, and messaging strategy must outline a clear value proposition that is framed around the buyer’s perspective. Even your marketing, sales, and customer experience team needs to be capable of verbally explaining your differentiated value proposition without consulting a script.
Differentiation is critical to your organization’s survival. A stellar reputation or cheapest price is not a strong foundation for differentiating your brand.
With a global clientele comes the responsibility to keep up with the issues and regulations that affect these people. The General Data Protection Regulation, passed by the EU’s parliament and effective this year, is one such law poised to change the way businesses operate with regards to data protection. Even businesses headquartered outside of the EU need to be concerned about GDPR, for several important reasons:
Ineffective cold outreach is not only a waste of time, it can lead to larger problems like grey mail issues that hurt all of your email marketing and sales efforts. Measuring response rates to each campaign will help you determine which campaigns should go forward as they are and which need to be discontinued.
Some of the tactics that may be more effective than cold outreach might include:
As your team grows more experienced with the principles of ABM and how to successfully apply them, new ways to overcome these and other obstacles will become more apparent.
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Grow your B2B business boldly. Ironpaper is a B2B marketing agency. We build growth engines for marketing and sales success. We drive demand generation campaigns, ABM programs, B2B content, sales enablement, qualified leads, and B2B marketing efforts.