No matter your industry, a marketing strategy is critical to your success. It’s how you brand yourself, find opportunities, close deals, and — most importantly, generate revenue through continued upmarket growth.
But the type of marketing you implement is what actually sets you apart from your competition — and that’s precisely where account-based marketing (ABM) stands out. Though both traditional, inbound marketing and ABM focus on generating leads, ABM aligns sales and marketing departments to close high-quality accounts faster while traditional marketing is less targeted. However, you don’t need to cut out all the work you’ve done with inbound. There’s plenty of room for both in your company. Together, they can form a marketing strategy that focuses on both quality and quantity with the best-fit clients.
For its part, you can use ABM’s better customer identification and a more personalized engagement process, to shorten sales cycles, provide higher ROIs, increase productivity, and set the building blocks for an eventual move upmarket.
And although ABM has been around for some time — it continues to gain popularity each year. In fact, in 2022, experts believe using ABM in your organization will help you
- Move toward personalized interactions that lead to forming better relationships with key decision makers at larger companies
- Use various opportunities with existing customers more effectively — including demand programs, upselling, and cross-selling — to further drive revenue
- Strengthen your lead-scoring models based on new buying signals and patterns, resulting in better, more streamlined marketing-to-sales handoffs and a move upmarket
If you want to move upmarket with ABM, you need strategies that work.
Fortunately, we have you covered.
Here are four real-time, real-life companies — Mixpanel, HealthLink Dimensions, Dialpad, and Goverlan — that moved upmarket using ABM and how they did it.
Mixpanel: How they used ABM to support a shift to a freemium, product-led growth model
As a leading business analytics service company in the computer software industry, Mixpanel helps companies convert, engage, and maintain users through powerful analytics (like interactive reports and team dashboards) and tools (data integrations and management).
- The Challenge: Moving away from traditional, sales-driven marketing that primarily focused on “big fish” accounts to a freemium, product-led strategy. A new freemium model meant an increase in accounts they could target — thousands of high-growth, small startup opportunities that Mixpanel had initially overlooked.
- The Solution: With RollWorks and marketing automation solution Marketo, Mixpanel better identified and engaged top accounts, launched hyper-personalized ads to encourage signups, and shifted to a freemium model. By implementing ABM, Mixpanel increased the number of accounts they could sell to, scaling from 100 to 2,000 target accounts.
- The Payoff:
- 200% increase in YoY sign-up volume
- 98% increase in Lifetime Value (LTV) sourced from paid channels
- 60% increase in conversion rates
HealthLink Dimensions: How they used ABM to break into a new market and increase new customer pipelines
Healthcare data company HealthLink Dimensions (HLD) and its full-service marketing agency Acclaro prides itself on its 95% client retention rate, thanks to its 20-plus years of experience, its multi-sourced, compliance-grade data, and a collaborative approach to tackling healthcare data threats.
- The Challenge: To expand into a new healthcare market, HealthLink Dimensions had to find a better way to reach new clients and differentiate itself in a crowded industry — especially because they were sending the same messages to the same email subscribers.
- The Solution: Using RollWorks — as well as LinkedIn, Google Analytics, and CRM Salesforce — HLD successfully refined their ICP, aligned their sales and marketing teams to better engage their updated TAL, and tailored their messaging to speak to the three healthcare sectors they serve — hospitals, life sciences, and insurance.
- The Payoff:
- 234% increase in new customer pipeline in just over a year
Dialpad: How they used ABM to engage full buying committees in enterprise accounts
Allowing people to connect from anywhere, cloud communication software Dialpad supports voice, video, and messaging on any device — ensuring users never miss a business call again.
- The Challenge: As Dialpad began to expand their product suite and offer new products to enterprises, they wanted to find a way to target specific accounts, increase engagement, and shorten sales cycles.
- The Solution: With RollWorks and CRM Salesforce, Dialpad leveraged ABM tactics like persona-based targeting, website personalization, and ad personalization. These allowed them to create hyper-personalized, industry-based ad campaigns to bring more accounts into their pipeline.
- The Payoff: In only nine months, Dialpad saw
- 52% faster time to close a deal
- 10x rise in site visits from target accounts
- 21x rise in accounts engaged
- 87x ROI in sales pipeline influence
Goverlan: How they used inbound and ABM to target higher-value deals and drive growth
Unlike traditional SaaS companies, Goverlan sells customer remote support software with short sales cycles.
- The Challenge: Although Goverlan traditionally sold to SMBs, it needed to target higher-value deals to hit aggressive revenue goals — with only a two-person marketing team.
- The Solution: Using RollWorks, marketing automation solution HubSpot, and CRM Salesforce, Goverlan implemented an account-first targeting strategy to move upmarket. And they didn’t have to abandon inbound marketing completely. Instead, Goverlan expanded upon inbound marketing’s base foundation by implementing ABM key strategies like account scoring, account groups, intent topics, and account targeting playbook to strike just the right balance of quality and quantity.
- The Payoff: Within 13 months, Goverlan exceeded their revenue goals, seeing
- 15x revenue from initial investment cost (and 95% of those won opportunities were influenced by ABM efforts)
- 40-50 new requests per week
- 173 new conversions created by the revitalized retargeting program alone
As these examples prove, ABM works — no matter your industry, size, or current marketing strategy. And as it continues to evolve and grow, this year and beyond, it’s only going to make marketers’ work easier, more efficient, and more profitable for organizations worldwide.
Still unsure if your company is ready to upmarket with ABM?
Check out our ABM Hub to find out with valuable resources that will teach you more about the basics and how to get started, including:
