Ultimate Checklist to Select Accounts for Account-Based Marketing Program

Selecting the right accounts is a major factor in achieving success with any account-based marketing program. The key objective of account-based marketing is to find high-value accounts which will increase your ROI.

Conversely, mapping the wrong list of accounts will waste your resources and efforts and lead you to miss better opportunities. Here we have cited four effective account selection methods to double or even triple your conversion rates:

Questions to ask

We recommend asking these questions to ascertain if the accounts match the requisites of ideal customer profile. These questions will help you define and analyze your market, strategies, measuring techniques in use, previous accounts your company has dealt with, strengths and weaknesses of your products/solutions and services and industries and prospects you need to target for revenue growth.

1. What kinds of accounts have proven valuable so far?
2. What characteristics of customer profiles have brought sales success?
3. What characteristics should be avoided while looking for accounts?
4. Which type of account will draw high revenues?
5. Which kind of accounts and profiles will best suit your new or upcoming products?
6. Which new industries and sub-industries will bring you major opportunities?
7. Which type of accounts will your marketing and sales team have more advantage?

First, select fields

Before submitting an email address, marketers try to collect as much information as possible about the visitor who completes a form. Common fields are company size, industry, role, and product interest.

We started out generating more leads for one client, Vorsight, by offering dynamically-serving content based on the form field answers, immediately after the thank you page. A manager who downloaded a generic whitepaper about sales training would get another whitepaper offer about managing sales teams. A rep who downloaded an offer got a whitepaper about how to prospect using social selling techniques.

Segment accounts

Another effective technique of selecting accounts is to segment accounts in your list of targets. Segmenting accounts is the first step to personalize campaigns and messages. That’s why you need to segment the accounts for customizing mails and messages before sending to accounts.

The most common approaches of segmentation is to categorize accounts by industry type, company size, those who are using your competitors’ products and services (in an effort to churn those customers by using high-end account intelligence data). You can use gated content such as whitepapers, eBooks, infographics etc., for both email campaigns and website campaigns.

Check out your top performing email campaigns and whitepapers and other educational content featured in those emails and then, publish those contents on website resource sections to achieve significant increase (we’ve seen as much as 30 percent) in content downloads.

Use data

While you are looking for the right data to categorize and define the high-yielding target accounts for account-based marketing campaigns, it is important to include following set of data in order to determine the Ideal Customer Profile (ISP).

Intent Data – Intent data will reveal if your targeted company is currently in the market to look for solutions and products that align with your product and service offerings. Trace these following intent data for account selection process:

• Type of topics and information key decision makers of the targeted company are interested and researching online.
• Their interactions with forums
• Their clicks on ads and the kind of content they download

Engagement Data – This data will reveal kind of engagement you are getting from the targeted company. To understand how engaged the company is with your content and site, look at these insights:

• Website analytics
• Data from the CRM platform
• Reports for the marketing automation platform in use
• Insights from sales team and representatives’ activities

Firmographics: The firmographics data will show company traits which will help predict sales success and that include size of the firm, industry and vertical, company growth and revenues, number of branches and locations, number of employees, etc.

Technographics: The technographics data will reveal information about technologies that are in use by your targeted accounts and the kind of technologies they want to invest in. This data set will also inform about the technologies that complement and relate to your marketing technologies. Additionally, you can also use this data to check technologies which will contradict your solutions and rule out the chances of their investment in your solutions.

Use all these analytics data, segmentations and questions to define the accounts that are in the market for your solutions and that you need to prioritize upon. By combining these insights, you can select the right accounts accurately for revenue-driven account based marketing campaigns.