In recent years, account-based marketing (ABM) has captured the attention of countless marketing professionals looking for real, sustainable business growth. That’s because this focused strategy offers just that. By aligning sales and marketing teams to collaborate on interaction with high-impact, mutually beneficial accounts, you can drive higher revenue faster.
And for HubSpot users, the platform’s tools make building and executing an ABM strategy easy. Take a look.
The What and Why of Account-Based Marketing
Your marketing team likely employs various inbound marketing tactics, casting a wide net to generate as many leads as possible. Generally, these are based on buyer personas and target general industries that may benefit from your product or solution – even if they’re not 100% ideal. This is all very important to your overall, broader marketing strategy and should never be replaced outright with ABM. Instead, ABM can complement your inbound efforts.
ABM’s goal is to have sales and marketing work together to define a specific set of target accounts within a particular market, so it’s easier to personalize efforts and attract those accounts to your business. You can use your inbound marketing material – such as your buyer personas – as a resource to kickstart your ABM efforts. As your departments collaborate, you can identify critical prospects (ones with buying power) within a target account and hit them with tailored campaign messaging. If you’re an enterprise organization that needs continuous high-value accounts to drive and maintain revenue, you should consider the more targeted ABM tactics.
How Does HubSpot Help With ABM?
HubSpot offers several out-of-the-box features to Marketing and Sales Pro and Enterprise users to help execute ABM strategies. Super admins or users with accounts access permissions can activate these tools by navigating to target accounts under contacts and clicking get started.
After this, you’ll see your target accounts’ home, where you can see, edit, and track your ABM progress. To identify a target account that you’d like to see in this dashboard, your team can set up a score property to slowly qualify companies, build a tailored workflow, or do it manually by:
- Clicking on Prospects in the left sidebar menu to browse through potential prospects
- Clicking on Recommendations to see what HubSpot suggests based on data from your account
- If you want to select one from the recommendations, hover over it and click “Choose as target account”
- You can also add target accounts by marking companies as targets in bulk via the target account property within a company record, importing them, or using a workflow
Once your marketing and sales teams have worked together and identified target accounts, you can utilize and edit ABM features, such as properties:
Company properties
- Target account – as noted, this is where you identify the companies you’re marketing to within your ABM strategy via a company record
- Ideal customer profile tier – this property shows how close a company matches your ideal customer profile in three tiers, with tier one being excellent, two being medium, and three being less ideal
Contact properties
- Buying role - the role that contact plays in the sales process, like decision making
Once your ABM features are activated, your HubSpot portal will create contacts based on the ABM properties you’ve identified on company and contact records. You can use these lists in your sales and marketing emails, ad audiences, and smart content. HubSpot notes you can personalize it by segmenting as such:
- All contacts labeled as an influencer
- All contacts labeled as a champion
- All contacts labeled as a budget holder
- All contacts labeled as a decision-maker
- All contacts with a buying role
- All contacts associated with target accounts
When it comes to workflows, the template “Sort companies by ideal customer profile fit” works for an ABM strategy. You can use this workflow by:
- Navigating to Automation > Workflows
- Clicking Create workflow
- Choosing Templates
- Selecting Companies from the Type drown
- Navigating to that specific template
You can edit this template to fit your company’s defined ideal customer or account, then run with it.
Learn more about getting started with HubSpot's ABM solution on our latest episode of Lynton Cast where Roman and Ethan Kopit of HubSpot discuss how to set up your account-based marketing strategy in HubSpot, misconceptions around B2B companies using ABM, and the #1 mistake everyone makes when getting started with ABM.
How Do I Monitor All of This?
As noted, once an admin activates your ABM tools, the first thing you’ll see is your target accounts home, which is the dashboard that provides an overview of everything you’re doing. Examples of high-level metrics based on all your target accounts:
- Target accounts - the names and the amount
- Accounts that have an open deal - accounts that are not closed-won or closed-lost
- Open deal value, or the sum of property values in the open deals associated with your target accounts
- Missing any buying role - the number of target accounts where the associated contacts don’t have a buying role property
- Missing decision-maker - the number of target accounts where the associated contacts don’t have a decision making value within their buying role property
If you want to see an overview of a specific target account, click on that specific one then hit account overview. Here, you’ll see:
- Activities associated with the company (account)
- Contacts associated to the company (account)
- Internal stakeholders (HubSpot users from your company who are a part of the activities associated with accounts, i.e., a sales rep)
- Deals associated with the company (account)
- Tracked page views from associated contacts
While you’re in a specific target, you can backtrack from the account overview and work on it by selecting actions. Once you’re there, you can actively move the needle forward on this account by creating a task, creating a note, or viewing a company record to see status updates.
What About ABM Reporting?
Like your other inbound marketing efforts, ABM is only useful if you take the time to make efficient updates. The best way to determine what to do to improve your ABM success rates is to monitor your progress through reporting. With HubSpot reporting tools, you can do that by:
- Navigating to Reports > Dashboards
- Clicking Create dashboard
- Choosing Target accounts to view your ABM dashboards
- Selecting the appropriate dashboard that suits your strategy
- Setting up your dashboard to your specific requirements
What Else?
In the world of marketing, ABM is still relatively new, so not all businesses have measured whether it’s the right fit for them. If you’d like to discuss the concept more in-depth or need help using any of HubSpot’s tools, reach out to the Lynton team today. We’ll work together to tackle your ABM questions or concerns!
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