HubSpot and account-based marketing - The essentials to implement ABM

HubSpot has recently released a set of features to support Account- Based marketing activities. It is the start of a larger plan. We'll see today how to implement ABM in your business and how some basic features will support this.

With Account-Based Marketing, you can give power to your B2B marketing and sales strategies. The principle is to target specific accounts of prospects or/and customers. By setting up a short number of accounts to target, it frees ressources to focus on those and create a personalized strategies to close deals with them.

In order to conduct such strategies, your marketing and sales departments will work closely, to create the best experience for those accounts. Dedicating specific resources to your ABM is needed in order to have results.

Step 1: Define your goals

The first thing to do is to define your goals. What do you want to achieve with an account-based marketing strategy?

Here are some example of objectives that you can have:

• Selling one specific product;
• Winning specific accounts;
• Easing the buying process;
• …

Step 2: Define your strategy

In order to achieve those objectives, you can choose different strategies to approach the accounts:

• One - to - one : Select between 1 and 10 accounts. Dedicate an entirely personalized strategy. Create content that is centered around one account.
• One - to - few : Segment your target accounts into different categories. Create one strategy for one segment. The personalization is then focused on the characteristics shared by the segment instead of on the account. With that, you can target a higher number of accounts (10 to 50).

Step 3: Create ICP - Choose the target

Once you have a global idea of what efforts you are willing to put in place and for what, you can create your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This consists in defining the characteristics that your ideal customer would have. With that knowledge, you'll be able to recognize which accounts, in your prospects and customers, are the most interesting ones.

How are you going to access that? Get the input from your teams. Which accounts seem promising and for what? What are the characteristics of the accounts that are closing? You can also look at the data available in your CRM. Take, for example, the 25 last accounts that have been closed. What do they have in common?

You should end up with a list of characteristics to recognize which accounts are promising and where you should put your efforts.

In the beta features of HubSpot, you'll find 4 things to support you in that.

• A property on the company, indicating the level of closeness to the ICP. There are 3 tiers, helping you see where you should put your priority.
• A workflow template to automate the filling of the previous property. It segments the companies according to the criteria.
• A second company property, indicating the target accounts.
• A contact property, where you can indicate the role in the buying process that this contact has in its organization. It can help you target your messaging towards this contact.

Step 4 : Plan

With this list of accounts that you want to target, define how you are willing to do that. Account-based marketing can be used with inbound marketing strategies. Which is good since HubSpot is initially set up for inbound marketing. Creating this strategy and planning your actions can be done the same way that you do it at other times.

Step 5 : Execute

For the execution of your plan, HubSpot has released some features to help you.

First, in the beta, you'll find predefined lists, based on contacts. Those are meant to be used as Ad audiences.

Second, an account-based playbook, with guidelines to close a big account.

Step 6: Evaluate

Along with those, a specific dashboard is available, allowing you to keep track of the results of your ABM efforts.

How to start

Those are the features included in the beta. In the coming months, this ABM basis will grow. If you start now, you'll have the basics to start thinking and putting your account-based marketing in place. Over the time, more and more tools will come, and you'll be able to include them into your processes. 

Download our free ABM one-pager to learn how we can guide you through the process of implementing an ABM strategy.