Integrating an account profiling program into your enterprise strategy.
Enterprise reps and marketers know that their highest-value accounts deserve a strategic, customized marketing and prospecting approach. For fourteen years – since before ABM was called ABM – PipelineIQ has been helping enterprise sales and marketing teams understand their most challenging accounts to drive more relevant conversations and marketing programs. In that time, we’ve seen three consistent benefits to a well-executed account profiling program.
1. Enable your sales reps to spend their time more strategically.
With ever-shifting territories and more information available than ever before on their target accounts, enterprise reps have mountains of data to shift through to really understand their key accounts and what makes decision makers tick. To solve your prospect’s business problems rather than just rattle off your product capabilities, reps need to weave business strategies, technology investments, and key goals into prospecting conversations. The ability to map your solution to your prospect’s business challenges is sales 101… but not every rep has the luxury to dedicate time to research. An enterprise account profiling program can accelerate this process and keep reps focused on strategy rather than the more tactical research process.
2. Customize your marketing programs at scale.
It’s no secret that customized marketing programs are more effective for driving pipeline and ultimately help your prospects see you as a partner in solving their business issues rather than just a vendor. In practice, the upfront preparation to understand what resonates on an account, industry, and stakeholder level consumes a lot of resources for an already incredibly busy enterprise marketing team. Marketers are challenged to scale up on what works best – but what works best is the hardest to scale. An account profiling program that uncovers specific tactics and strategies within your highest value accounts can accelerate your custom marketing programs and help you scale across clusters of accounts to drive tailored content for drip campaigns, direct or email marketing campaigns, event invitations, and other marketing campaigns.
For instance, understanding that Dick’s Sporting Goods calls its customers “athletes” can help your marketing program stand out among vendors that aren’t weaving this insight into their outreach. Knowing that Costco’s e-commerce strategy is meant to compliment their brick-and-mortar experience rather than replace it can help you align better with their omnichannel tactics when marketing to decision makers.
3. Align marketing and sales strategy.
Field marketers, sales leadership, reps, and solution consultants are lucky to be together under one roof a few times a year. Carving out time to strategize on a set of strategic accounts in-person at sales kickoff or a training session can help drive better alignment between marketing and sales. A common understanding of your prospects and their business issues can make the conversation more strategic and lead to more actionable next steps. Even a monthly or quarterly skype meeting to touch base on ABM strategy around challenging accounts can drive better alignment and ideally, shorten your long, complex sales cycles.
If your teams may benefit from the value of enterprise account profiling programs, explore our ready-to-go account profiles or reach out to our professional services team to discuss your pipeline and ABM goals.
