“Calling” Technology Closes Account Based Marketing Gaps

In 2004, ITSMA coined the phrase “Account Based Marketing” (ABM) and defined it as “treating individual accounts as a market in their own right.” It’s a structured approach for developing and implementing highly-customized marketing campaigns to markets of one, i.e., accounts, partners, or prospects. This approach, typically employed in enterprise-level sales organizations, involves marketing and sales taking a close look at key business issues facing the target, mapping them to individuals, and tailoring campaigns to address those issues.

A recent SiriusDecisions State of Account-Based Marketing survey showed that over 90% of marketers recognize the value of ABM. Companies utilizing ABM practices have reported better alignment with sales, increased abilities to close bigger deals with target accounts, while also increasing pipeline velocity.

However, there is a gap between ABM and sales outreach. Marketing provides leads to sales. But the problem is reaching the leads and establishing a relationship. Marketing identifies leads, but it’s the interaction with the prospect that is central to the success of ABM. Point tools for sales address part of the ABM solution, but they do not help engage with prospects in the most effective manner. An opportunity gap widens as time passes and leads grow cold as no one has made contact. Dialog with customers is still the only way to build a trusted relationship and advance the sale; the sales reps who interact with customers first are often the sales reps who win.

Sales teams need to synchronize priorities in order to determine who should be contacted first. Even with the best ABM system in place, leads can be dropped when passed to the sales team. You need to properly identify and target the best leads using predictive analytics. If the account based marketing leads are not optimized for priority, the sales cycle is delayed, competitive players are introduced, and your investment in the lead and the opportunity is lost.

Organizations considering ABM systems need to bridge the sales gap with tools that can help teams identify and target the most promising opportunities first to engage in meaningful dialog quickly. Predictive lead scoring captures real-time customer purchasing influence data and presents it in a visual way that’s easy to understand and act upon. Afterwards, marketing and sales can join forces to measure and monitor real-time engagement data to dramatically shorten sales cycles. ConnectLeader also measures how account based marketing strategies are being executed. All activity data, including executive level and sales representative level reports allow you to spot trends and take action.

Adaptilytics from ConnectLeader helps close the ABM gap by using a predictive intelligence engine that analyzes, prioritizes, and scores prospecting lists. This offering further improves outbound dialing results by enabling users to customize the prediction algorithm based on a prospect’s installed technology, intent to buy, contact data and best time to reach. Investing in predictive analytics for macro-level target marketing gets down to actual individuals as targets.

ABM Gap Is Closed Faster with Call Management Systems

The fact remains: Direct communication is still needed to establish a relationship and close the sale. Click Dialer is one of the tools that help with click-to-call software that resides within CRM and allows users to simply click and dial any phone number, take notes, leave a voice message, send email, and quickly move onto the next prospect. Sales teams need tools like this in order to execute the account based marketing plan--if the gap is not closed, then the endeavor fails.

Multi-channel communications is what is needed these days in order to provide sales teams with the best tools to optimize the account-based marketing. Multi-channel communications includes: email, voice, text, video, and social. This is what sales teams need, not just another dialing system. Multi-channel communications give salespeople the best tools for achieving their needed interactions, while also allowing the company to better measure and monitor how sales teams are executing against the account based marketing plan.

ConnectLeader’s tools proved full account-based communication while tying it into the forensics from predictive intelligence. ConnectLeader’s Adaptilytics uses predictive intelligence and feeds prioritized leads to multi-channel communications system (email or calls or text). In order to fully utilize the ABM system, sales teams need additional data, such as knowing the best times to reach prospects, which results in more efficient outbound dialing. Multi-channel communications means giving the sales team a new set of tools that goes beyond simply making random dial-to-reach attempts.

Companies need to continually identify, market and measure progress against their target account list. If the volume of leads is significantly larger they need to process such volume of leads quickly to eliminate that time gap between lead and contact with the use of multi-channel communication tools, such as ConnectLeader’s Team Dialer. This is an agent-assisted dialing solution that takes sales dialing to the next level by allowing a group of human agents to make 125-150 dials per hour while filtering through non-productive dialing activities such as navigating voice mail systems, dealing with gatekeepers and leaving voice messages. Using Team Dialer, sales representatives are able to engage in 8 to 12 live conversations per hour with decision makers, while concurrently executing live voice conversation and voicemail drop as modes of touches.

In addition, Personal Dialer from ConnectLeader is another example of a highly-effective sales dialing tool that helps to close the ABM gap. This sales dialer software expands the Click Dialer features to allow users to seamlessly dial using a patented visibility and control capability while improving sales productivity from 30% to 100% compared to manual dialing, while concurrently executing live voice conversations and voicemail drop as modes of touches. This is another example of technology from ConnectLeader perfectly suited to improve ABM deficiencies.

Account based marketing has become a business to business phenomenon. Yet, for all the increased sales results that it is providing, there still exists a gap between the marketing’s predictions and real-time experience of sales reps. ConnectLeader with it’s Adaptilytics, Click Dialer, Team Dialer, Personal Dialer, provides the tools which can close that gap, fully utilizing the ABM system by feeding it rich, real-time data, and delivering high-speed prioritizing technology, which allows salespeople to quickly and accurately reach clients. You want your sales teams to be the first in and establish a rapport based on data that is current and personalized. This is a winning strategy and ConnectLeader is providing the tools to achieve the victory.

Author: Senraj Soundar, CEO, ConnectLeader