This week – Getting under the skin of your prospects
As we’ve discussed in many of our (fabulous) posts on all-things-ABM, there are three different types of ABM programme, the strategy and content for each being determined by the number of prospects being grouped together.
- One to one ABM focuses on a single, key conquest (an ‘all your eggs in one basket’ scenario, if you will).
- One to few ABM targets a small, select group of potential clients.
- One to many ABM increases the number of accounts being approached, and, often, uses various tools and technologies to help automate much of the process.
With all three of these ABM programmes, whether you’re targeting dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of accounts, the key to success is carefully selecting, researching, and understanding your prospects in order to create highly personalised, useful content that connects.
When grouping together accounts, it’s also important to identify points that they have in common, whether they’re in the same sector, experiencing the same pain points, driven by the same business objectives, or share the same business verticals (amongst many other similarities and parallels).
Grouping together conquests based on intelligent information about the individual companies involved will allow you to ensure that your approaches are as focused and personalised as they should be – never scattergun, one-size-fits-all, or ‘fling some content at it to see what sticks’.
The intelligent information that you gather about what unites the companies you approach will allow you to ensure that your approaches are as focused and personalised as they should be, getting under their skin and learning how to speak their language to make the lasting connections that spell long-term ABM success.
In ABM, we call these unifying factors that link our prospects ‘insights’ – whether we identify them at industry-level, customer-level, or executive-level – and gathering and making good use of them is a hugely important part of the strategy-devising process.
So where can you gather the precious insights into potential prospects that will inform how you group them, understand them, and treat them?
For a start, a wealth of important public information is easily available online, including company financial and investor reports. Tools like Crunchbase, Zoom Info, and G2 will also help you not only identify potential prospects but determine whether they align with your long-term goals, and understand how to intelligently group then together for one-to-few or one-to-many programmes
At Ambition ABM, we make easy work of mining for insights as a key part of devising ABM strategy when working with our clients on both new and existing accounts. If you need help with this or any part of the ABM process, get in touch with our team today.
