We live in a world of disrupted markets, transitory customers and growing demands for context and personalisation. In response, ABM has become the engagement strategy of choice for many of the world’s leading enterprise B2B brands, and those who follow them.
Conventional thinking dictates that, for most, 80% of revenues come from 20% of customers. So, surely it makes sense to focus your sales efforts on the customers and prospects most likely to deliver more profit?
Clearly something needs to change: So what’s holding you back?
All too often, what’s promoted as ABM is simply business-as-usual. Established tactics, by another name.
ABM isn’t just another tactic. It’s an engagement strategy that brings together the very best of sales and marketing efforts, within in a considered framework that addresses the full customer lifecycle and places them at its very centre.
The band-wagon keeps on rolling, but we’re nearing the end of the road. It’s time to call a halt. It’s time to face facts.
Mindsets must change. Enterprises must stop trying to sell stuff and start understanding what their customers actually want and need.
It’s time to turn your thinking upside down. Start with the customer, understand their deepest needs, and then prove that you are the perfect fit to not only satisfy them, but anticipate them so they stay ahead of disruption in their own markets.
This is true customer centricity.
Calling on over 40 years’ experience in enterprise B2B communications, we have developed a one-to-few approach that applies the rigour and intent of pure ABM to small target communities that share similar and strategic priorities. By grouping customers, prospects and partners by their needs, and not simply by what you want to sell them, it becomes possible to deliver highly relevant conversations within a common framework and process – spreading your investment across, say, five to twenty accounts.
We have reimagined ABM. Now we want to help you do the same.
(ABM) is a highly-tailored, strategy of communicating with a single customer organisation, as a market of one, with the purpose and timing of every engagement driven by their actual and perceived needs.
drills down further to focus on closing down a single deal or contract – often within the structure of a formal bid process.
can be useful in capturing, understanding and responding to how a customer engages with your organisation. But, marketing automation is not, in itself, ABM.
take a proposition, product, service or solution, and offers this to multiple customers through a set of tactics, underpinned by a common process. This is not ABM.
Contextual ABM is fundamental to nurturing awareness, understanding and belief; growing brand advocacy; and achieving customer loyalty.
By aligning your sales and marketing efforts to the accounts that matter most, you’ll evolve relationships from transactional to strategic, to identify and mine more sales opportunities; increase upsell and cross-sell opportunities; and engage customers earlier in the process.
Contextual ABM integrates seamlessly with pure ABM and Deal Based Marketing (DBM), because all 3 related disciplines start with the customer.
Start planning for better customer journeys by following the Seven Steps to Contextual ABM:
Aggregate your key customers into groups. Choose them wisely. They are the ones that represent your best chance to yield value over the long-term. The ones who need more of what you do well. The ones you need to acquire, develop and protect.
See the world through your customers’ eyes. Research their markets and the events and trends that drive them. Uncover insights that recognise the challenges and opportunities they face and the strategic priorities these give them.
Understand where you fit in. How do your products, services and solutions answer their strategic priorities? What outcomes will you deliver? What’s your delivery model? And how does your culture fit with theirs?
Create and share a vision of success. Focus on the outcomes you’ll deliver together. Shape it into consumable content – whether text, video or infographic; screen optimised or mobile first. Explain why you. Inspire them. Call them to action.
Build infrastructure to support multiple engagements, at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Make it simple for your audience to quickly locate whatever they need. Track and analyse their visits, to shape better, increasingly relevant messages and communication.
Empower your customer facing teams. Equip them with great sales tools that can be adapted and tailored. Share every aspect of your plans – not just the what, but the why. Grow your sales people from sceptics to adopters, advocates, even evangelists.
Reach out to your targeted decision-makers and draw them into the process. Use content seeding to grow your reputation. Use targeted social to share your opinions. Use hypertargeting to track their digital footprint. And don’t be afraid to get personal – from social selling to physical DM.
In a single year, we have helped our customers to land over £200million of incremental revenues, through strategic ABM and DBM engagements. In-fact, one global brand recently let us know that working with Gilroy takes their win rate from below 27% to over 63%.
Contextual ABM marks the next stage in our evolution. It’s our mission to make ABM more accessible and more achievable for more ambitious organisations.
It’s an exciting journey, and we’d like to invite you to join us. To find out more: T. + 44 (0) 8456 184 184 E. hello@gilroy.co.uk
We’ll listen to your corporate ambitions and what stands in your way. Through our proven framework and methodology, we’ll help you to map out a strategy for Contextual ABM and agree the steps that will get you there.
To find out more, or to book a Challenger Lab session, contact Gilroy’s client services team: T. + 44 (0) 8456 184 184 E. hello@gilroy.co.uk
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