Looking for ABM Nurture Best Practices

[Jessica_Brook]

My company is implementing an ABM strategy and I wanted to hear what kind of nurture campaigns others have had success with for new leads that come in via ABM. What does you cadence look like? What type of content are you sending in the nurture? How are you aligning this with sales follow up strategy? Thanks! 

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Rachel Noble​

[Josh_Hill13]

There is a lot of content from ABM vendors. Some hallmarks of an ABM program.

• List of Accounts. - ICP
• Proper Lead Assignment
• L2A matching - automated
• Buying Team is known with Personas and you can understand the gap between Known people and whom you need.
• Mapped out cadence of Purchasing Names, Call Cadence, Personal Email Outreach, Driving people to opt in; ads, retargeting all focused on the Account and People in that Account. Don't waste money spamming the Industry. Engagio and some others are good at managing this.
• I call these Super Attention Grabbers: using PFL or other tools to send physical items that are unique and focused on the Hardest to Reach Person. Adam New-Waterson has a lot of posts on LinkedIn that explain how he works with his SDR team to come up with clever ways to reach the right person. SnapApp, Terminus, some others can enable generating 1-1 content.
• Events - stalk the person online and show up at the event. Hustle.

What's going to work for your audience? Only you can answer that.

[Rachel_Noble]

Thanks for the PFL shout-out! +1 to Terminus as well.

[Rachel_Noble]

Thanks Darrell Alfonso​ for the reference!

Are you looking into purchasing the Marketo ABM add-on? For the record, we have not purchased it and carry out pretty complicated multi-channel ABM outreach, so know that it can be done either way!

From my point of view, there are two distinct but inseparable components to successful ABM: strategy and execution. Here are my thoughts for consideration:

Strategy

• Who are you targeting?
  • Which accounts?
  • Which divisions?
  • Which job titles/departments from each account?
  • What is the org chart from each account/for these titles?

          A quick note here: data is key. Don't buy a list and hope for the best. I'd suggest having an SDR or marketer hand-pick the list and verify           important contact info such as phone number and address by hand.

• What will your outreach look like?
  • What channels? Email, direct mail, phone calls, banner ads, etc
  • How many touch points? How frequent? (this may vary depending on account/job title/department)
  • What is the messaging/design?
  • Who from each account will SDRs reach out to? Often this is hand-picked by the SDR team.
• What are your goals?
  • Engagement
  • SQAs? (Sales-qualified accounts)
  • Pipeline
  • Revenue

Execution

We typically use a combination of emails, direct mail, banner ads, website personalization/RTP, and outreach from our SDR team. The messaging is consistent and timely (an email might show up an hour after the direct mail piece is delivered, and a sales rep follows up the next day). It is also persona-based. For example, a CMO will care about ROI, but the head of IT is more concerned with the security compliance of our software.

I wrote a blog post a while back about integrating multiple channels: Omni-Channel Marketing and You: What OCM looks like in Marketo .  This wasn't for ABM-specific outreach but it covers operations side of things.

Best of luck to you!