The first step in implementing ABM is defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Since you’ll be focusing on businesses, you’ll need to gather enough data about the types of companies you want to work with.

Some of the vital data points you need are:

• The companies’ locations
• The size of the businesses you’re trying to reach
• The vertical or industry the businesses operate in

Once you figure out who your ideal customers are, you’ll need to identify your buying centres within those organisations. These are the departments you’ll interact with all through the process.

This involves identifying the primary stakeholders within those departments and defining the persona or profile of your solution’s typical customer. You must find out about their main objectives, motivations, and recurring problems.

This process will help you make better marketing plans in the long run, ensuring that your marketing campaigns reach the right people.

You’ve done a lot of research and gathered lots of info about the companies you’re targeting. At this stage, it’s important to make a list of target accounts so you can draw more valuable data.

Identifying specific targets to study will allow you to gather granular information such as the companies they’re networking with, their corporate culture, their investment portfolios, how decisions are made in the company, the pain points, and the interests of the decision-makers.

Now that your list is ready, you want to group the accounts that you have selected. Arranging the accounts into different tiers gives you more clarity and lets you quickly sift through the available data.

You may arrange different types of potential consumers (high-potential customers, medium-potential customers, and low-potential customers) based on the available opportunities and the chance of success, into three tiers:

1. Programmatic ABM tier (1:many)
2. Strategic ABM tier (1:1)
3. Scale ABM tier (1:few)

By now, you should have a firm grasp of the accounts you’re pursuing and the associated individuals. Additionally, you’ll have tiered those accounts to make the information more accessible.

Now, it’s time to start developing personalised brand messaging and themes for your target accounts.

Developing your messaging involves communicating in a way that helps your customers and prospects understand your company’s values. Here, you would need to tailor your content, message, and activities to the individual needs of your prospects. Doing this creates a connection and opens the door for possible business opportunities.

One of the most crucial assignments is determining how to reach out to your target accounts. This task includes selecting the best marketing channels and determining how you will communicate your message to these organisations at the appropriate moment.

Choosing the correct channels is crucial since channels serve as the frontiers for a company to promote its products. Most likely, sales will suffer if a business owner chooses the incorrect one.

At this stage, you have almost everything you need to kickstart your ABM campaign. But don’t be too hasty; now is the time to create an ABM play. An ABM play is a series of activities organised and executed to reach out to and engage target accounts. It contains defined objectives and actions carried out during the sales process.

The process of creating an ABM play is similar to that involved in creating an autoresponder sequence and email marketing automation. Everything follows a sequential pattern and is carefully executed.

Creating a strong ABM play first requires a strategy outlining the steps necessary to contact a decision-maker or close a target account

Everything you’ve done to this point is creating the groundwork for your ABM campaign. It’s time to test your game plan. But before starting, you want to go through your strategy several times to ensure nothing is out of place.

It’s also essential to measure your progress as you execute your plan. Measuring your progress can help you figure out how to adapt your plan of action where necessary, which could speed up your progress. Asking certain questions as you go will help you keep track of your progress. Here are some thought starters:

• What could you do differently in the future?
• Are your key performance indicators (KPIs) in line with your company’s revenue?
• Are there any gaps or issues in your execution that youcan fix for future campaigns?
• Will you increase the number of stakeholders to target?
• Will you replace some of your existing targets with new ones?

You’ve done a lot of research and gathered lots of info about the companies you’re targeting. At this stage, it’s important to make a list of target accounts so you can draw more valuable data.

Identifying specific targets to study will allow you to gather granular information such as the companies they’re networking with, their corporate culture, their investment portfolios, how decisions are made in the company, the pain points, and the interests of the decision-makers.

Tracking progress by looking at page views, interaction, click-throughs, and additional metrics is quite important. But these are more specific to traditional lead generation. For ABM, you must see if you achieved your primary goals or met your top-level KPIs including quality account target, account contact growth, and revenue expansion within accounts.

More importantly, check if your team was able to establish quality account relationships and convert those relationships. At the end of the day, everything comes down to how well you can fill your pipeline, gain new customers, and meet your revenue targets.

Focus on driving engagement within your target accounts
rather than customers’ online activities.

• Are phone calls being scheduled?
• Were there many downloads of your content?
• Have any of these targeted leads progressed
  through the funnel?
• Are there any stumbling blocks when it comes
  to prospect engagement?
• Are emails being read and responded to?
• Was there a satisfactory amount of social interaction?

These metrics are more important for a growth-minded ABM team than the traditional marketing metrics. Remember that the more engaged your prospects are, the more likely they are to buy, and ABM is a longer but more rewarding game than traditional B2B marketing.

Having a positive ROI is, of course, a good way to
measure ABM's success. You must monitor target
account advancement across the whole buying journey to
appropriately quantify ABM success. With so much clarity
around sales, you can take a step back and assess the overall
impact of your efforts on your bottom line.

Furthermore, it would help if you considered how you could
do things better in the future. Have your sales and marketing
team discuss the high and low points of each campaign to
help them improve areas where improvement is needed.

Strategic ABM is the gold standard, as we've earlier stated. Shifting to strategic ABM requires developing valuable relationships and de-emphasising transactional activities. However, strategic ABM requires understanding your customer's goals and crafting your messaging around those goals.

To do that, follow the following steps:

• Use competitive profiling to find strategies to unseat competitors and demonstrate the value you deliver to your stakeholders.
• Recognise the high-value stakeholders who will help you sell more within a given account.
• Enhance your brand's profile by telling a compelling story that appeals to technical and economic customers.
• Share your account's plan with your stakeholders, and let them see the potential ROI through personalised online assets.

As much as you want to celebrate your wins internally and move on to the next promising account, you should also channel your energy to drive advocacy. You can drive advocacy by broadcasting your story while simultaneously driving adoption and usage. Follow these 4-step advocacy-plan to maximise revenue:

Leverage marketing automation to offer highly customised experiences to your stakeholders while also gathering behavioural data for future ABM projects.

• Conduct a white-space analysis to determine who you know and who you need to know.
• To raise awareness among new, high-value stakeholders in your account, employ a combination of online (e.g. social media and online advertisement) and offline (e.g. networking and speaking engagements) initiatives to drive use-case awareness.
• Utilise micro-level retargeting in conjunction with geofenced and IP advertising to broadcast a range of important messages to educate decision-makers about your more significant propositions.

Upsells are necessary not just for increasing a customer's average order value but for strengthening your customer relationship. Additionally, it is an opportunity to outwit your competitors by communicating your upsell offer in the most appropriate way to drive all stakeholders to action. Here's the three-step process involved:

Make your competitors less relevant through laser-focused positioning.
Find the right balance of physical, online, and sales enablement activities to engage customers, spark interest, and change perceptions.
Demonstrate value to all stakeholders by sending highly tailored use case communications via the digital platforms they use frequently.

Contract renewals are essential for businesses to thrive. Don’t rest on your laurels after winning a contract and hope the procurement team hands you a new contract on a platter. You need to earn the right of renewal by demonstrating value, mobilising end-users to support your business case, and overcoming any resistance. Here are the exact steps to take to make sure of this:

• Connect your use cases to your client's strategy and show you've done it previously. Then, back it up with an ROI model that demonstrates the impact on both the top and bottom lines.
• Understand your decision-makers as well as their competitors. Know who you're dealing with, their issues and motives, and how to reach out to them.
• Use the correct tools, tactics, and messaging to demonstrate to your clients that you understand them and their business better than anybody else.