Succeed In Marketing by Partnering with Sales & Finance | BusinessOnline

Written by BOL | Oct 27, 2020 7:00:00 AM

82% of B2B marketers said ABM greatly improves the alignment between marketing and sales at their company.

Account-Based Marketing Stats Every Strategist Should Know, LinkedIn, July 2020.

Here’s a fact: Account-based marketing requires personalized outreach. That’s a sales function. Marketing doesn’t have the skills or manpower, so aligning with sales is vital. ABM necessitates that you work together to share data and customer feedback, identify new accounts, and develop coordinated strategies to engage and nurture.

Both sales and marketing need to measure and optimize their efforts to identify what works and tweak what isn’t performing. Eventually, you’ll want to speak the same language in both departments, but keep it simple to start and agree on a single source of data and revenue reporting. Here’s a hint: Marketing’s value in the organization is defined by its ability to connect activity to sales and revenue.

Sales ARE your key marketing metric. Don’t fight it, embrace it!

The more information both teams have to work with, the more they will be able to create effective content to nurture and grow account relationships. Together you need to uncover what matters to an account. The better you are at solving their business problems, the better you’ll be at creating compelling campaigns.

Meghan Flannery at Drift puts it this way: “In traditional demand generation, marketing throws leads over the fence for sales to chase. In ABM, there is no fence. The collaboration is close, constant and totally focused on account needs.” We like that quote! ABM is a team sport.

According to Forrester Research, organizations with aligned sales and marketing teams see an average of 32% annual revenue growth, while less aligned companies see a 7% decline in growth. Studies also show organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions have 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates. This is no coincidence.

It’s unfortunate that ABM has “marketing” in the title, because it is truly a function of sales and marketing working together for the same outcome: Efficient revenue growth.

Break Principle #6 and all hope of ABM success will be crushed by ego-driven, interdepartmental squabbles.

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