This article originates from Marquis' presentation at the Revenue Marketing Summit in New York, 2022.
Before we dive into account-based marketing (ABM), I'll briefly introduce myself. I’m Marquis Green, Senior Manager of Account-Based Marketing within the Marketing Strategy department at LSEG. LSEG stands for London Stock Exchange Group.
It's a new brand that we're growing, but at the base of it is the London Stock Exchange – a 300-year-old entity focused on global financial markets.
Essentially, we provide data, analytics, tools, and technology for banks and other financial institutions – government entities, pension funds, you name it – within the financial services ecosystem.
They're our clients, they're our customers, and so account-based marketing has become more and more relevant for us over time. Because of the breadth of accounts and the geographic coverage that we have, we need to be able to prioritize certain accounts.
In this article, I’ll be covering:
- The nuances of account-based marketing
- Why businesses today need to pay attention to ABM
- How we do ABM at LSEG
- ABM partners with strategic account program teams
- Our partnership with sales
- How to build a customer and data-led ABM strategy in six steps
- How we align our ABM success with the three R’s
The nuances of account-based marketing
Account-based marketing is a pretty nuanced strategy, and what it looks like depends on what your goals are. If your firm’s goal is to retain at-risk accounts, you may build your ABM program around those accounts.
Or, it may be that certain accounts have such a market share within an industry space that if you cover 10 of them, that can account for 50, 60, or even 70% of a customer or client segment.
Whenever you think about ABM, you want to ask yourself what your priorities are, where the greatest advantage is, and what the sales team’s most concerned about.
ABM is all about putting the account at the center of your ecosystem, so we look at the account almost as a person. Let’s take one of our accounts, Goldman Sachs, as an example.
- What problems is Goldman Sachs encountering?
- What are its goals?
- What’s its mission statement?
- What’s in the press about it?
- How does it market itself?
We can take a holistic approach to the account to best understand how to approach it and promote our solutions and products.
Why businesses today need to pay attention to ABM
I want to share a couple of stats that are very relevant to our topic today. First, in 2021, the global ABM market was worth $750 million – and that was a pandemic year. In 2027, it’ll be more than double that. It’ll be worth $1.6 billion.
A lot of salespeople are learning about ABM, and they're thirsting for it because it forms a great partnership between marketing and sales. It hones in on a more specific customer account profile, allowing us to build a campaign around that account.
The second stat I want to share is that when sales and marketing are closely aligned, overall marketing revenue goes up by 208% – more than double. In other words, if you’re not already driving alignment through account-based marketing, it’s time to start.
How we do ABM at LSEG
Below, you can see a simplified version of our ABM model. We decided to build our program around our 52 top accounts, which we’ve divided into two categories: one-to-one and one-to-few.
A one-to-one approach essentially means tailoring an entire marketing campaign specifically to an account. We let the account know that we're inviting them into this program.
In fact, a very important part of ABM is letting the client know that they’re getting a personalized approach.
Another set of very high-priority accounts gets the one-to-few treatment. They’re clustered because we have to scale our human resources and budget and we yet don't have the people power to cover every account on a one-to-one basis.
This can be a challenge with ABM. Even if you only have 20 accounts to look after, that can be a lot, as we all have other things to do outside of our primary roles.
In the one-to-one approach, we focus on the priorities of the accounts we’re targeting and get familiar with their mission statements and goals, and then we partner with the Group Strategic Relationship Director (GSRD), who could be considered the most senior salesperson for an account.
Our team works with the GSRD to define the priorities we want to focus on from a marketing perspective.
In the one-to-few approach, we look at similarities between sets of accounts. We cluster them together, identify their pain points and needs, and market to those sets of accounts.
However, visually, the account is receiving a personalized approach. So, if it's LinkedIn ads, email marketing, or an event, the account appears to be the only one receiving this TLC. It's still a white glove service, but it allows us to utilize our resources more efficiently.
Our ABM setup and ratio are based on our priorities, which are reputation and relationships. These are extremely important, accounting for 80% of our focus while revenue growth accounts for only 20%.
That’s due to the fact that rapid revenue opportunities are most likely to come through maintaining our reputation and growing our relationships.
These are our three pillars, or the three R’s, as we like to call them:
- Reputation
- Relationships
- Revenue
We aim to bucket every account we work with to ensure that we're driving growth through these three pillars.
ABM partners with strategic account program teams
Let’s take a closer look at how we tailor our approach to each account or account cluster. Within each account, there are four different categories of roles that we want to market to:
- End users, application owners, and data scientists
- Executives
- Division heads
- Business heads and market data heads
Each of these four groups gets individual campaign treatment from us in collaboration with sales. As an example, if we look at end users or application owners, there's a set of client-facing representatives that engage with those users at the account.
They get us qualitative and quantitative feedback on how we can grow our reputation and grow relationships with those end users.
With executives, we take a similar approach. When we're marketing to the C-suite, we work to define who in our C-suite can build a relationship with the executives at the account, who can grow them, who can set priorities, and who can help drive the direction of our campaigns and sub-campaigns for that account.
When it comes to the one-to-few approach, we partner with our sales organization, customer success, support, solutions consultants, and account managers. In my opinion, this is the key to a successful ABM program.
Our partnership with sales
If you’ve ever worked alongside a sales team as a marketer, you’ll know that they always want to know the ROI of our campaigns and how we can help them while they're out in the field.
We have kind of a soft contract with the sales organization, where they’ll receive certain benefits from the ABM program as long as they give us what we're unable to drive on our own.
One example of what sales gets is new insights into people in business units. We mine data on each account and share any changes with our sales teams.
For instance, we'll inform them if Credit Suisse has hired 10 new managing directors, grown their ESG business, or made layoffs in a certain segment of their business. The sales team uses this intel to decide how to manage the relationship and move forward with their efforts.
Another example is the measurement of KPIs. We always share the performance of campaigns, the responses, and how they compare across audiences. We also use these insights to assess engagement among target accounts.
Customized content is also a key factor. We sit down with financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America to understand what their environmental social and governance (ESG) teams need.
We identify nuanced differences in their focus areas and then customize and curate our marketing content based on those conversations.
Now let’s look at what sales give us. We get regular account updates and feedback, as well as access to detailed account plans.
We spend time looking at the financials and getting to know the divisions within the account, how they're performing, and the nuanced changes between the accounts through that quantitative feedback.
We also receive qualitative feedback on deliverables. For instance, if the sales team has gone out and done a roadshow to three offices of a particular account, we want to get as much direct feedback as possible, which we’ll then incorporate into our plan.
How to build a customer and data-led ABM strategy in six steps
As marketers, we all aim to be customer-led, which often leads to selecting strategic accounts against specific criteria. If your goal is to grow in a particular region, you can base your ABM program on accounts that’ll provide the most growth potential in that region.
Similarly, if your aim is to grow business opportunities with a specific role, you should build your ABM program around that. This is step one.
Once you and sales leadership have agreed upon criteria for the accounts you want to target, the next step is to move to step two, which is all about account insights.
You want to look at a variety of data points, such as customer satisfaction scores, feedback on particular product families, and geographies, and incorporate that into your plan.
Another way to leverage account intel is to assess how accounts market themselves. That way, you can utilize their messaging (without plagiarizing, of course!) in your ABM program, speaking to them in a language that you know they understand.
In step three, we align our ABM strategy and planning with our group strategic accounts (GSA) planning. This involves long sessions where representatives from different global teams share feedback.
This open forum enables the representatives to hear each other's thoughts and ideas, helping to inform the strategy and plan with key accounts. Although the process can be exhausting, it’s incredibly helpful in allowing us to create a robust and reliable program.
Step four is to create your account messaging, audience, and go-to-market plan. The idea is to create messaging that supports the account’s business objectives. We start by looking at our own organizational identity and image.
Next, we look into the account’s goals and mission and how the account positions itself. From there, we can identify areas of alignment between ourselves and the account and see which of our products will best support the account’s needs.
Next, we create client-centric high-level messaging for each audience group within the account. We generally create four to five different individual campaigns as part of a very tailored, personalized approach.
Once we've got our messaging down, it’s time for step five: execution. This is where we create personalized content and tactics based on the account’s priorities.
For instance, if we know that an account is trying to grow business in a particular area or region, we can use that intel to decide where to concentrate our budget as we go to market.
Our sixth and final step is the ongoing measurement of our campaigns via an ABM dashboard. There’s a variety of KPIs we use to measure success, depending on the campaign.
We also compare the performance of marketing tactics between the individual audiences at the account. Our sales teams have found this especially valuable.
For instance, if we've been marketing separately to corporate treasurers and heads of wealth management, the same account team is still looking after both audiences.
If they can see that the wealth managers digest more content than the corporate treasurers, our sales folks might decide not to go into a meeting with a white paper for the corporate treasurers because they know they’re not going to read it.
Here's our account health and ABM dashboard. On the left are some of the metrics we look at, including account financials, revenue trends, customer satisfaction scores, and a variety of other factors that allow us to know the account more intimately.
Providing this account expertise is a huge part of how we get sales teams’ buy-in for the ABM program.
How we align our ABM success with the three R’s
Remember those three R's I mentioned? Let’s get back to those. Relationships and reputation account for where we concentrate 80% of our human resources and budget.
Obviously, we want to drive revenue; however, we find when we build strong relationships and cement our reputation with customers, revenue naturally follows.
We measure the success of our relationships in terms of the awareness we’re driving. We can demonstrate this through factors such as increased website traffic, earned media, the volume of mentions we find through social listening, and the number of impressions we get across various marketing channels.
As marketers, we all know that this kind of awareness has a lot of value because it makes us memorable to our audience.
Plus, the accounts we’re targeting will know they're getting a very personalized experience, not just from our in-person engagement but also from the assets we're creating and the tactics we're utilizing.
We view our reputation in terms of the loyalty we create in our customers. We track this through our customer experience monitor.
We look at cancellation trends, we look at renewals across the one-to-one ABM accounts in particular, and we look at the usage driven by our ABM retention plans.
Driving relationships and reputation has been extremely important and successful for our ABM program, so these are the two pillars that I’d suggest concentrating on the most as you build your program.
