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11 Account-Based Marketing Tactics to Turn Prospects into Customers

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Convert more prospects with account-based marketing tactics that work.

Account-based marketing tactics are a critical strategy for startups and enterprise sales teams. Account-Based Marketing strategies (ABM) has become one of the most effective strategies used by modern companies. 

Account-based marketing examples exist in startup to larger businesses.

While some thought that this model wouldn’t yield profitable results, 80% of businesses using this strategy have seen an increase in their return on investment (ROI) that’s much more significant than when using other tactics.

But what is ABM? And why are so many different industries embracing it as their new marketing tool? 

ABM consists of visualizing prospective clients or accounts as if they were their market. When it comes to the healthcare industry, doctors can be considered a specific account. Furthermore, larger organizations, such as medical centers, have a committee of stakeholders. If using ABM, each of these stakeholders should be approached as individual markets, since it’s likely they will all have different perspectives and goals.

This might sound counterintuitive, considering traditional strategies look to engage with as many clients as possible within a market. However, numerous companies now understand and benefit from the use of ABM. Unsurprisingly, around 60% of businesses are now implementing ABM-based models or planning to.

The important thing is not just doing it but knowing how to do it correctly. Therefore, it’s important to know the steps you should take to be able to implement account-based marketing with these 11 account-based marketing tactics.

The Benefits of Account-Based Marketing

Statistics reveal the many benefits of account-based marketing:

  • After two years, 89% of marketers report a higher return on investment from ABM than from traditional marketing initiatives.
  • Companies are practicing ABM generate 208% more revenue for their marketing efforts. 
  • 91% of ABM marketers see a larger average deal size, with increases of more than 50%.
  • In a survey of individual stakeholders, 40% said they are more willing to buy from suppliers who tailored content to their specific needs than from suppliers who didn’t. 
  • Nearly one-third of marketers reported more than 100% greater engagement with C-suite targets when working in an account-based manner.
  • ABM reduces up to 50% of wasted sales time on unproductive leads.

Create Your Account-base Marketing Team 

sales team accounts

Something that’s often underrated is the importance of teamwork when it comes to ABM marketing. Here, the information marketing strategists and sales analysts can come together to provide you with the knowledge you need. 

Therefore, before implementing ABM strategies, you should form a qualified team with people from both sales and marketing. This way, you can amplify the information available at the moment of selecting your prospective clients. 

Identify The Accounts with Your Account-Based Marketing Tactics

When it comes to healthcare, you must learn how the organization is built and managed. Is it a family group? Are the stakeholder’s doctors? Who are the biggest influencers in the decisions made within the organization?

Making an initial list of all the organizations that might be interested in your product will help you narrow down your prospective clients. After this, the next step is going deeper into the specific people who make the decisions. This valuable background will help you dictate how you will present your product. 

The more you know about how the healthcare organizations you want to approach work, the better. By the time you initiate contact, you should know as much about their business as possible. 

Only then can you genuinely offer products that respond to what they might need or want for their organization? Also, knowing whom you should approach will allow you to head directly toward the people that make the decisions.

Use Smart Resources 

How are you supposed to get this information? Well, there are now dozens of resources you can use to learn more about healthcare organizations overall. To know how ABM works, you should study the tools that will allow you to put this strategy in practice.

Some of the platforms that can provide you with the information you need are Hubspot and LinkedIn. Most healthcare companies, providers, and healthcare practitioners look to put their names out there on different platforms. This can offer you unique opportunities to learn more about their size, revenue, and what they focus on. Furthermore, you can even see whom they interact with, which might allow you to identify other prospective clients.  

Narrow it Down Your Account-based Marketing Tactics.

ABM sales team

You can decide to be as specific as your resources allow you to be. Depending on your product, you could focus on one medical area, such as cardiology. Another way to segment your efforts is by studying the overall distribution of the specialty you’re interested in. If there’s a significant number of cardiologists that could be interested in what you have to offer in a specific city, then it might be time to channel your efforts toward that city.

Personalize Your Approach with Proven Account-Based Marketing Tactics

Once you have identified and studied your prospective clients, you should make your approach as personalized as possible. If you’re sending them an email, make it a direct email that shows you know their business. Avoid generic or bot emails. Interestingly, 60% of those who open direct-mail emails are more likely to visit the website link of the sender. 

More often than not, stakeholders in health industries have to deal with different issues in a weekly matter. They won’t be interested in anyone that might make them waste their time. Be direct with your offer by employing the knowledge you’ve been gathering so far.

By personalizing your approach, you will be more likely to build a long-lasting relationship. This is precisely the goal of ABM, building lasting relationships with clients that will continue to invest over time. Health organizations tend to be reputable clients with long-term plans when it comes to the visualization of their goals. 

Something to consider is the importance of knowing which platform is the one mostly used by the people you want to approach. By reaching out to them on their preferred platform, you’ll already be making an excellent first impression. 

Make an Accurate Budget

It’s important to determine the investment you’ll need to make to accommodate this strategy. Initially, you might consider getting a payday loan to cover some of the expenses. This is because ABM yields tangible results, but it might take longer than the immediate buys you get from traditional marketing. The upside is that these relationships with healthcare organizations are bound to be more lasting if the follow-up is done correctly. 

Your account-based marketing tactics need to be supported by a marketing budget that can support your goals.

Something to add to this budget is a personalized gift. This is a great way to stand out from other companies. It doesn’t need to be anything expensive, as long as it’s not something generic. Make it about them. It’s even better if it’s something useful. 

It can be a branded base with their name, where they can place their prescription pads. Or something like nutritional posters that allow them to explain diet changes to their patients. The goal is for them to remember your business in their daily practice.  

Use Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing will be a key ally throughout the entire process of ABM marketing. You can use it in different stages of the process:

Study and Understand Their Business and Needs 

To study their product, how they interact with other accounts, and how their employees respond to them is a great way to get to know your prospects. Depending on the specific medical area, you might want to see how the clients of a pharma company interact with them or the satisfaction level reported by patients of a hospital.

This will allow you to identify their needs and make them offers that respond to these. Even their lack of social media presence could lead you to determine if this is something this organization could improve.

Make Contact with These Prospects 

This one is the most delicate. While using a platform such as LinkedIn to initiate contact is appropriate as well as following them on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, the initial approach should be subtle. Instead of directly offering them your products or services, simply engage.

This can be done by responding to one of their posts constructively or retweeting something they’ve posted that might also be of interest to your followers.

Place Valuable Ads

Account-based marketing tactics include re-target PPC ads. Just as you learn about them through social media, they can also find out about you on the same platform. This is where all your research pays off. You can create a paid media advertising campaign that, while not targeted, addresses their needs and concerns. 

By learning what they might be interested in, you can indirectly offer them a solution. This can be very valuable when it comes to reaching the majority of stakeholders in a healthcare organization. 

Your Website Should Inform on What You Do, Not On Who You are

After you make the initial contact, your prospect will want to visualize your website. A common mistake is making it all about you, which won’t tell your customers what they need to know. Instead, the optimal focus is making it about what you do. 

How your actions and strategies will make their business better. Showcase your experience with healthcare organizations, and how your plans have helped them succeed.

Furthermore, you can personalize your website so that certain areas contain information pertinent almost exclusively to the client in question. 

You can only achieve this if you do proper research, which is the product of the joint effort of the sales and marketing teams. By reserving one section of your website to healthcare-related information, you can make sure you’ll grab their attention. 

If, as we said before, you’re focusing on a specific specialty, such as cardiology, then make sure your website shows how your product can be an asset to cardiologists. This allows them to know what you can do for them, even before you have made any offers.

Offer Educational Tools

One of the things most companies love, including those in the healthcare industry, is knowledge. By offering educational tools that can be worth their time, you can also start an interaction. 

Just like every tactic we’ve mentioned so far, it needs to be personalized. The more specific it is to what they do and what they’re interested in, the better.

Involve Them in Your Content

Through content marketing, you can engage your target audience. Make it interactive with interactive marketing techniques. You don’t have to interact with a healthcare organization before you make them part of your content. Let’s say you want to start doing business with a hospital. 

You can mention the hospital’s name in one of the blog posts on your website that’s dedicated to health topics. This might make you stand out from a sea of other companies. 

The goal is to get on their radar. This way, when you first interact with them, they will have heard of you. To increase the quality of your content, you could even feature an interview with one of the doctors. Even better if they’re stakeholders in the company. This will work for you in two different ways. You’ll get to create good content, and you’ll be starting the interaction in a way that feels natural. 

Don’t Forget the Personal Touch

abm marketing team

Digital marketing is one of the best ways to do marketing. A personal touch can also help greatly. It can even set up the scenario for initial interaction. The presence of your brand at a medical conference or even creating an event that’s specifically tailored for them are good examples of this. 

Proven account-based marketing tactics will drive higher close ratios.

A workshop designed for cardiologists in a specific city is one of many ways in which you can promote in-person encounters that allow you to interact with the accounts you want to target.

Furthermore, a summit in which trends for hospital care are presented could attract stakeholders that you want to approach. This is a combination of general marketing and ABM marketing. 

You have narrowed down the field, the area, and the specific people you want to interact with. Now, you can offer an event destined for them and others as a way to show them what you have to offer without being intrusive.

We’re listening.

Have something to say about your thoughts on account-based marketing tactics? 
Share it with us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

Jim Hughes is a content marketer at OpenCashAdvance who has significant experience covering technology, finance, economics, and business topics for about 3 years. He likes to share all the insight and knowledge he has.

General FAQ’s


What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy that allows businesses to identify prospective clients and approach them directly and efficiently. This strategy promotes focusing the resources available to provide tailored-made solutions to a potential client’s problems.


Why Use Account-Based Marketing?

The tools provided by ABM allow the identification of the decision-makers within a large company. This is why ABM is especially useful when dealing with teams of stakeholders. By studying their interests, a more effective approach can be made.


How is Account-Based Marketing Used?

After determining the sector in which a business wants to focus, they should also identify whom to approach within said business. After studying their needs, a company can offer focused solutions. Furthermore, by presenting their work in the healthcare area, a business can show why an organization should work with them.


Is Account-Based Marketing Useful for the Healthcare Industry?

Given the common structures seen within the healthcare industry, such as boards of stakeholders and value analysis committees, ABM is a unique tool that can be of great help in this context. Instead of trying to approach a group, contact the individuals that make the decisions that can be the best way to understand what they’re looking for and how to offer them your product. 

Sales Pipeline Key Metrics: 10 Key Sales Metrics You Must Know

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The Modern Sales Pipeline Metrics and the Sales Pipeline Stages

Your sales pipeline key metrics are important across your sales cycle.

The concept of the customer buying cycle was invented in 1898 by St. Elmo Lewis.

Your sales pipeline key metrics are important across your sales cycle.

He emphasized that a prospective buyer going through a buying process starts with awareness, progresses to interest, then to desire, action, and eventually into reducing the number of options ending with a purchase. This idea is the basis for the modern sales pipeline.

Sales pipeline management metrics are essential if you want to win more sales. How can you improve something without benchmarks, ratios, and KPI’s.

Discover where your sales pipeline is leaking, then strategize a path to closing in pipeline gaps. Get your team to UNDERSTANDING quota.

The pipeline not only provides a visual representation of the sales process, but it also highlights potential pipeline gaps and opportunities to convert existing opportunities into closed deals.

When you can clearly see which targets are moving at predictable rates, new sales opportunities that arrive with little or no information attached, and which prospects have gone cold you can make strategic adjustments to your go-to-market strategy.

The article reviews sales pipeline analysis, sales pipeline conversion rate formula, and sales pipeline key metrics. It will also include sales pipeline health metrics, sales pipeline analytics, sales pipeline formula, and sales pipeline analysis.

Let’s dive in!

What is the sales pipeline?

sales pipeline marketing funnel
Matrix Marketing Group

A sales pipeline is a visual or data snapshot of where prospects are in the sales process. 

Sales pipelines show you how many deals salespeople are expected to close in a given week, month, or year and how close a rep is to reaching their sales quota.

It has been adopted and adjusted as a standard across industries for marketing. For professionals in sales, it is used as an outline of the sales cycle where all sales representatives are measured.

I’ll discuss how to build a sales pipeline with metrics. If you have not created your demand waterfall start there. Once completed you begin to map your sales process to your buyer’s journey. Keep in mind that this gets complex in an omnichannel environment.

The Modern Sales Pipeline Stages

digital marketing funnel sales roi

As sales have modernized, the pipeline stages held the same meanings but have been massaged to mirror the dynamics of the current sales landscape. The steps consist of:

Awareness (Attract)

Before you can generate those valuable sales leads, you must think about how you’re going to get those leads to your website.

This starts with a digital marketing plan that outlines the various marketing tactics you’re going to use to drive people to your website, and more importantly, the marketing tactics that will keep them coming back.

During awareness, a stranger begins troubleshooting a problem, they want improvement, or they are identifying a need. This particular stage contains prospects from visitors to marketing captured leads (MCLs).

These people could be anything from strangers to visitors reading through your sales material trying to gain a better understanding of your offerings.

Consideration

In consideration, a prospect has identified your product or service as a solution to their previously recognized issue. Under most circumstances, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) live within the consideration stage. They’ve shown interest and taken notable action towards making a decision.

Decision stage to close

Finally, within the decision stage, the sales prospect knows your organization fits the bill and is trying to determine between you and your competitors, which of you accomplishes exactly what they need.

These people have considered sales-qualified leads (SQLs), the individuals most ready to make a purchase.

Sales Pipeline Stages

What’s Missing with Your Sales Pipeline Metrics?

Companies are most often good at gauging the performance of their people but find it difficult to measure and analyze the performance of the business as a whole.

If companies don’t know what to look for or test, they are not able to see areas of improvement.

This inefficiency makes organization-wide sales metrics essential in regards to the health of a sales team and understanding where opportunities lie with prospects.

The best example is grasping where a prospect is currently in the sales process and are the steps to get them to the next stage.

Simply measuring revenue is a classic method for seeing sales performance; this only shows what is coming out of the pipeline rather than seeing more in-depth analytics and stages.

With products with a long sales cycle, it’s important to monitor the entire pipeline and look at ways to make the selling process more efficient and effective. By reviewing and measuring each stage of the sales cycle, you gain a broader sense of what is happening within your sales team and areas that are not performing as well.

For most companies, raising the average performance is a better and stronger strategy than looking for new hires. Identify high-priority sales items like, what are the key metrics for improving the sales process?

CEO and founder of Matrix Marketing Group, George Schildge

This is a visual representation of sales prospects and what stage they are in in the purchasing process. Understanding your sales pipeline gives you a better in-depth explanation of the lifecycle of customer prospects from the first connection to closing the deal.

A Sales Pipeline Template To Guide Your Buying Cycle

Sales Pipeline - Matrix Marketing Group
Canva

Sales Cost Ratio and Sales Pipeline Key Metrics

Your sales cost ratio is vital for your sales pipeline key metrics are important across your sales cycle.

Software companies with direct sales forces typically spend 25%-35% of their revenues on compensation, commissions, travel expenses, and related costs, plus another 10%-12% on marketing.

The biggest selling costs – travel, demos, and negotiation time – usually take place late in the sales cycle. If a company’s sales expenses are high compared to the competition, it’s usually a sign that sales reps are hanging onto low-probability prospects that should have dropped out earlier in the sales cycle.

Sales Cycle Length

A good way to shorten the sales cycle is to watch how the best sales reps move prospects to a final yes-no decision. Top performers usually spend more time in the early stages of the sales process.

They do a more thorough job of demoing the product and establishing the value proposition, so their customers are less hesitant when it comes time to sign a contract.

Here are sales cycles from our marketing assessment. If you have sales cycles over 12 weeks be careful. The predictability of sales close rates diminishes over time.

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Deal Fallout By Cycle Phase

In a well-managed pipeline, a predictable percentage of deals will fall through at every step from initial customer qualification to final negotiations.

It’s important to look at why deals fall out, because these reasons may uncover hidden problems with marketing messages, pricing, competitive features, or even the performance of individual sales reps.

Moreover, a big spike in the fallout rate almost always means trouble for the sales forecast two or three quarters in the future.

Sales Close Ratio

Even if sales reps are meeting their quotas, a low or erratic close ratio is a red flag that has killed many a qualified sales team.

If you’re losing a bunch of deals in the end, it could mean that your value proposition isn’t clear enough or the product isn’t what the market needs. Sometimes all it could mean is that your salespeople need additional training.

Lead Response Time

More businesses are practicing inbound marketing methods, resulting in more companies making it a priority to become focused on online tactics and the generation of leads.

Companies who act upon a lead within the hour of the initial query are several times more likely to close the lead compared to companies who waited longer. Having a quicker response time can boost and the overall performance of sales substantially.

Sales-To-Support Ratio and Sales Pipeline Key Metrics

If sales reps need to rely on a large team of pre-sales and post-sales support people, that’s another red flag. Though this ratio only makes sense in comparison with direct competitors.

Companies with good sales-to-support ratios have usually put a tremendous amount of effort into the design instead of establishing support band-aids in the field. If a product is easy to learn and use, it will inevitably be easier to sell. That’s why the user interface best practices are so critical.

Total Number of Leads and Opportunities

In addition to looking at the total amount of generated leads, you’ll want to consider the supporting factors: number of website visitors, number of subscribers from your blog, and the total amount of those who have signed up for notifications from your site.

Have you been working with your marketing team to develop further opportunities? Sales and marketing alignment is crucial. What is your demand waterfall? Grab a marketing funnel calculator.

Sales Volume By Location, Channel, or Territory

As boosting performance is a priority for many businesses, being able to see insightful metrics that are broken down into new client acquisition per rep, per location, sales territory or channel are the best metrics to be reviewing. These insights especially help companies look at areas for opportunity and new sales channels that have the potential to be profitable.

Opportunity Win Rate for Your Sales Pipeline Key Metrics.

Tracking the opportunity win rate will give more detail and insight into the ability of your reps to close a deal. Closing is essential and is big for determining sales performance.

Is your close ratio of 20% or 75%? Your close ratio is vital for your sales pipeline key metrics and is important across your sales cycle.

Although, some reps may be competent in networking and working through the pipeline while closing the deal can be difficult and a challenge. That doesn’t mean they are a bad salesperson; they just need a role that respects their hunting nature.

The ratio of Leads To Sales Qualified Leads

It’s essential to be able to differentiate between leads that show potential and those that do not. You can count the number of leads over a set amount of time as well as the number of qualified leads over the same period.

To get this ratio, you divide the number of qualified leaders by the total number of leads. This will give you the leads to sales qualified leads ratio in a percentage. With this method, you can determine what strategies are the most effective and which need improvement.

Wrap up on Sales Pipeline Key Metrics

Your sales pipeline key metrics are important across your sales cycle.

We covered sales pipeline formula, sales pipeline key metrics, sales pipeline management, and 

SaaS pipeline metrics including sales pipeline stages. Let us know if you would like the sales pipeline metrics ppt deck.

Although this process can be redefined and adjusted in several ways, these metrics are a great starting point for helping to develop and create your forecasting model.

It’s essential to view the development of the forecasting model as a process, not an event. Conversion rates and throughput times will fluctuate due to the economy, season, and competitive landscape your company falls into.

By updating and improving your forecasting formula routinely, based on these metrics and other variables will have a bigger impact on your key metrics over time. In this regard, accurate forecasting is a historical science, the more you look to the past, the better you will become at predicting the future.

Have something to say about sales pipeline key metrics? Share it with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

General FAQ’s

What is the sales pipeline?

A sales pipeline is a visual representation of sales prospects and where they are in the purchasing process. This process enables sales reps and sales managers to forecast the number and dollar amounts of deals that will close in a given period.

What are the stages of a sales pipeline?

Sales pipeline stages describe each step a prospect takes through your sales process, from becoming a lead to becoming a customer. The stages are lead generation, lead nurturing, marketing qualified lead, sales accepted lead, sales qualified lead, closed deal, post-sale. Typical stages could be simple to complex. Just start. Here’s an example: MCL, MQL, SAL, SQL, Win/Lost (simple and easy to measure).

What are sales pipeline metrics?

The new sales pipeline metrics emphasized that a prospective buyer going through a buying process starts with awareness, progresses to interest, desire, action, and eventually into reducing the number of options ending with a purchase. The buyer moves through these stages that can be measured and continuously improved. These stages may or may not be linear.

Why is a sales pipeline important to a small business?

A sales pipeline is a visual and orderly way of selling a product or service. It allows salespeople to get a hold of where their money, deals, and other sales efforts are at all times.

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