Focus Article- Heather Tice and Stacy Dreher

Mastering Account-Based Marketing: A Path to Stronger Client Relationships

One strategy that has gained traction is account-based marketing (ABM), a targeted approach that tailors marketing efforts to engage specific high-value clients.

The key difference between ABM and traditional marketing is personalization and customization. Traditional marketing leans more generic, with a mass appeal, while ABM requires marketing, sales and client service teams to work in tandem to create personalized experiences through content, events and solutions.

A recent McKinsey study shows that personalization improves both customer loyalty and a company’s gross sales. This is because personalized marketing can help businesses in building stronger relationships with customers, leading to higher lifetime value and increased revenue.

Identifying Strategic Accounts

The first step to ABM is one that many firms have already taken: identifying key accounts to nurture (such as a Top 100 client list) with customized engagement and support. Building these strategic client ranking systems requires understanding which clients could benefit from a broader range of services, as the most valuable clients are the ones where a firm is working with multiple departments and providing several services.

To do this, it’s important to look beyond just revenue. “We’ve found some clients had great revenue, but poor utilization, so we reevaluated that,”Suzanne Reed, CMO, LBMC, says, “We used revenue, potential and realization as our guiding factors.”

Leveraging Technology to Streamline ABM Efforts

Gathering the information needed to develop ABM strategies can be a manual process, and the ongoing nature of tracking interactions time intensive. For many firms, this limits the potential for making this a repeatable process.

“Cross-selling and ABM, however, shouldn’t be a one-time initiative,” explains Tim Keith, CEO and founder of Propense.ai. “It should be an ongoing process throughout the lifecycle of your clients. Change management at the leadership level is needed for cross selling to be repeatable and scalable. For that to happen, we need to make it easier for our partners,”explains Keith, and that’s where technology can help.

CRM systems should integrate with financial data, making it easier to identify key accounts and help you understand what your marketing should focus on based on the content they consume and the conversations they have with client service or sales teams, explains Danny Estrada, vice president of consulting, Rare Karma.

“With a recorded history of all interactions, CRMs provide firms insights into what has been sold to a client and what else can be pitched,” said Estrada. The data housed in CRM systems can also identify the most profitable practice lines or the areas with the best margins, allowing your marketing to be more focused, he said.

Discussing his platform, Propense.ai, Keith highlighted its role in simplifying cross-selling and ABM strategies. The AI platform predicts the next services a client might require based on historical data and ideal client profiles. This data can then be used to run targeted marketing campaigns. The platform also employs artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically generate emails for professionals, reducing the time and effort required on their part.

LBMC uses Introhive to streamline its cross-selling process by identifying who within their firm has the best relationship with their top clients. The platform scrapes contact data from email headers and Outlook calendar appointments and assigns a relationship score based on the frequency of communications and meetings.

CRMs, Propense.ai, and Introhive (or other related platforms) can be used by marketing and business development teams and support staff to simplify ABM and cross selling for partners by identifying top accounts and relationships, and then recommending which services should be sold.

Building Teams for Success

Identifying an owner of the data and insights produced by these types of technology is a major challenge to a successful ABM rollout. It is crucial to identify everyone involved and understand who is playing what part in the process. This helps avoid unintentional mishaps stemming from ignorance of what the other is doing. Marketing, sales and client service professionals need clear expectations and an organized structure.

LBMC realized this and created a new client account service manager position to play an important role in supporting this alignment. They not only help manage these accounts, but also make sure that partners fulfill their duties. The firm is also leveraging its new client account service manager to facilitate meetings and maintain consistent interactions with high-value clients, aiming for at least a quarterly engagement.

“Marketing loses some interpretation by getting information through intermediaries,”Reed said, ”Having someone in the meeting with the client provides valuable intelligence to help us react and devise programs that better support growth strategies.”

Business developers can also use the information produced by platforms like Propense.ai to help partners identify the next sales opportunity. This allows partners to focus on the relationship and be actionable rather than sifting through data.

Quantifying ROI

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions found that 87% of marketers who measure return on investment (ROI) believe that ABM outperforms all other marketing investments.

By focusing on understanding their clients better, and making sure they were satisfied, LBMC saw an additional $3 million in revenue from fewer than 30 clients. “It was about being intentional and building relationships,”Reed said.

To further track ROI, LBMC uses its CRM to see the expansion of its client base and leverages PowerBI reports for its industry segments to show how the client has evolved over time.

Getting Started with ABM

The key takeaways for getting started with an ABM strategy are to start thinking proactively versus reactively and to invest in the right technology and people.

“Professionals in this field often address clients' existing problems instead of proactively offering solutions that could be beneficial based on their industry or risks,”Keith notes. “There’s a need to transform this approach and actively reach out to potential clients with tailored solutions with strategies like ABM.”

Investing in the right technology to streamline data collection and automate campaigns and having the right people to own these efforts is also critical for adopting ABM strategies.

By identifying target accounts, aligning teams and leveraging technology, ABM can help nurture client relationships and work not only as a competitive advantage, but as a driver for long-term growth.

Heather Tice, marketing manager, EisnerAmper. Contact at heather.tice@eisneramper.com

Stacy Dreher, marketing director, James Moore & Co. Contact at stacy.dreher@jmco.com