The 4 key principles of Account-Based Everything (ABE).

At Green Hat, we believe that Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is really Account-Based Everything (ABE) as it requires the close alignment of both sales and marketing for success. ABE can be a powerful strategy for B2B marketers, allowing them to coordinate, personalise and optimise marketing, sales, and customer success efforts within a targeted set of accounts. But what are the core principles of this methodology? What makes it distinct from other marketing approaches? Let’s take a closer look and examine some of the key foundational principles behind a successful ABE strategy. 

1.  It’s data driven In ABE, account selection, segmentation, personalisation, content and campaign optimisation are driven by marketing data, vendors or tools. In practice, both the target account and the target persona’s behavioural data are captured and measured by marketing tools such as intent data vendors, marketing automation, predictive analytics, and account-based marketing tools. The right marketing and sales tech stack is required to achieve the level of insights that can drive an ABE strategy.   
2. It’s an orchestrated effort Gaining high levels of account engagement across all target accounts requires a fully orchestrated approach between marketing, sales and success teams. Understanding which accounts to focus on at each of the stages of the buying cycle and creating combined playbooks with key initiatives is an essential part of the framework and will do wonders for your results. This is where having shared revenue goals between all teams becomes critical. Measuring those revenue goals every week, month, and quarter will align the various initiatives across your organisation towards your goals and provide a tangible criteria for success that your teams can strive for.  
3.   It requires collaboration Having common goals requires greater levels of collaboration and communication between teams. As sales or success teams move forward with the target accounts, marketing needs to monitor and have open dialogues about the progress. This will ensure that ABE activities are always aligned and become a continuation of sales and success touchpoints. These activities are supported through your tech stack, which enables marketing to stay on top of the latest updates from other teams via a CRM that’s integrated with ABM tools.
4. It’s personalised What makes Account-Based Everything so effective is its ability to align your teams’ efforts and actively move target accounts down the funnel. But this only works when there’s relevant content for each account (one-to-one) or group of accounts (one-to-few), and by serving relevant content to each of the key personas in the buying party.  

ABE can be challenging, but the rewards are huge 

ABE’s strength lies in its approach to personalisation, but this strength comes with a cost. You’ll need specialised content for each account, or group of accounts, and the personas involved. All this content needs to be researched, planned and developed along the way. The resources needed to fuel your ABE strategy with the right content can balloon quickly, which is why it’s so important to define your ABE strategy up front and choose your target accounts wisely. Having an experienced partner who understands your business landscape and has first-hand experience implementing ABE can greatly streamline the process.  

If you’d like to learn more about how ABE can boost your B2B business let’s have a chat! 

At the end of 2022, we hosted a webinar discussing the use of Intent Data in account-based marketing. Intent tools such as Bombora are empowering B2B marketers to better understand and target prospects based on their online search behavior. In parallel, platforms such as 6Sense and Terminus are connecting to this data to enable personalised communications with this audience.