What do you get when the ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA team up for a webinar? An hour-long session jam-packed with important insights and key findings centered on ABM best practices and advanced strategies. What you don’t get is enough time to answer all the questions submitted from your webinar attendees.So we’ve created a blog series where ABM experts representing the members organization of the ABM Leadership Alliance answer questions focused on ABM & Covid-19, ABM 101, ABM Tactics and ABM Strategy. If you didn’t get a chance to watch the webinar, you can check that out here.

In our fourth and final installment of our series, we’ll answer the big “How To’s” of ABM Strategy.

Q: All very positive on virtual pivot and people’s engagement, but are people seeing a decline in pipeline? Concerns about Q2 and Q3 from a demand gen perspective?

A:At Bizzabo, the Demand Gen perspective is that our customers and prospects are primarily looking to be guided and informed. We are working on generating demand assets that will help them to make educational decisions. Once the demand team is implementing the right adaptation to the current situation, and identify the need of customers and prospects, it will help them to better perform. We are making sure that our customer’s need is being heard in these uncertain times and must creativity think outside of the box.

Moran Harpaz, Demand Generation Director, Bizzabo

Q: At what point in the stages of a crisis, do you start returning to “regular” marketing engagement with clients?

A: I don’t think you can go wrong with listening to your customers to see what they want from your organization. I had the opportunity to speak with some customers as well as customer-facing colleagues within the first few days of the pandemic, and the unanimous feedback was that our prospective buyers and customers needed help! Like you, they were struggling to figure out what to do.  If you can, try to speak with some customers, see what they’re saying online, check in with front-line colleagues, etc. That information is invaluable.

We have chosen to keep up our regular email cadences, but we have been evaluating what’s going out much more closely to ensure it’s appropriate day to day as the situation unfolds. We have been watching our unsubscribe rates closely to ensure we’re not annoying people, but so far the results have been positive and we haven’t noticed any major changes in behavior. People are still consuming content and responding to our programs, in some cases we’ve actually seen an increase in content consumption and program registration. (Full disclosure: We use PathFactory to measure this.)

What we have done is curated an approved list of topics and content assets that are relevant to the challenges our audience is facing in this situation, and we’ve focused our major campaigns and communications around that. It’s hard to know exactly when is the right time and what is the right topic for every individual person, but you may want to run some smaller tests and see how they perform if your organization is more risk-averse. These 2 approaches may allow you to continue using the great content and campaigns you’ve prepared in a more cautious way.

Cassandra Jowett, Sr. Director of Marketing, Pathfactory

Q: What are some strategies or tactics do you currently implement around utilizing a data-engine to power your ABM strategy?

We rely and look at data at all stages of the funnel to power our ABM strategy.  It’s important to have a solid marketing data strategy in place as well as the right technology to be able to do this well.  Data management should involve cleansing and unifying data, automating the accurate flow/routing of data to Sales, viewing data holistically for engagement trends, and then using data to measure success. Some successful steps we take are:

Analyze target account information in the database to ensure the right accounts, personas, updated contact information, etc. are in there before we even think of running a campaign.

After that is done and programs are running, campaign data metrics are important for Sales and Marketing alignment. You need to know which accounts Sales and Marketing are touching and which campaigns are most effective.

View engagement data trends for target accounts to get early stage metrics on if your ABM efforts are working. Focus on accounts that are engaging or ones that aren’t and try a different, creative approach.

Use data to report out to key stakeholders on how your account-based initiative is working.  Also, use all of this integrated data to measure Sales and Marketing combined efforts as well make data-driven budgetary decisions.

Charm Bianchini, VP of Growth Marketing, LeanData 

Do you want to continue to learn more from these amazing and insightful panelists? Make sure to follow the ABM Leadership Alliance on Twitter< and LinkedIn. You can also sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with all things ABM right in your inbox.

Stephanie Blackwell

Demand Generation Manager, Demandbase

Stephanie Blackwell is Demand Generation Manager at Demandbase. In this role, she works as the coordinator for the ABM Leadership Alliance as well as running campaigns for Demandbase. She has a background in partner marketing and reality television production.