To build a successful account-based marketing (ABM) program, focus on strategically targeting specific, high-value accounts that align with your ideal buyer profile.
But identifying these high-converting accounts is a huge task.
Chances are, your sales team dedicates a significant amount of time to it every month or quarter (depending on how often you select accounts to target as part of your ABM program).
Even so, there’s no guarantee you’re going after the right accounts — and the risk of human error is high. Not to mention your time is better spent engaging with warm leads who are likely to convert instead.
Thankfully, with UserGems, not only will you find ICP-matching accounts to target, but it will also automate the entire process — freeing up precious time for your team to concentrate on account engagement.
Curious? Schedule a demo.
Must-haves for running high-converting ABM campaigns
As you try to figure out who to target for your account-based marketing strategy, it’s important you have a solid understanding of who your ICP is before you get started. Using these two strategies can help.
- Align your sales and marketing teams
Coordination between these teams is key to strategically engaging warm accounts and closing deals. To this end, sales and marketing should:
- Track the same performance metrics or KPIs
- Run ads and outreach simultaneously
At UserGems, sales and marketing put this into practice by:
- Working together to decide which accounts to target and not straying from the agreed-upon list
- Tracking the same key metric: meetings booked
- Simultaneously running LinkedIn ads and ADR outreach to target accounts to increase booking rates
- Nail one-on-one personalization
One of the leading reasons why ABM campaigns fail is the lack of personalization.
However, you can’t nail personalization until you refine your target buyer profile.
Start with understanding your ideal buyer, their pain points, and how they make purchase decisions.
From there, create personalized landing pages and social media ads.
For example, this LinkedIn ad gets a lot of compliments from prospects on sales calls. People who take a demo with us often reference it — saying they either screenshotted the ad or shared it with their team.
Rather than taking a mass personalization route, pick a subset of accounts and test your personalized ads and other relevant content to find out what works for you.
Once you start getting positive responses, target more people in the segment with the same type of personalized content.
5 ways to identify and prioritize high-value accounts with UserGems
Instead of relying on salespeople to identify which accounts to go after, automate the process with UserGems. We help boost your ABM strategies by showing you warm paths into target accounts and prioritizing which ones to target using customizable filters.
Take a look at the following ways UserGems automates tracking a variety of buyer signals to save you time, keep your pipeline full, and kick pipeline anxiety to the curb.
1. Automate champion tracking
In contrast to folks who have never used your product, alumni customers or people who have previously bought, used, or demoed your tool are more likely to convert.
The reason is simple: they’ve seen or experienced the benefits of using your tool in a previous role.
In fact, targeting or involving old customers in closing new deals generates:
- 114% higher win rates
- 54% bigger deal sizes
- And, 12% shorter sales cycles
However, manually tracking alumni customers (or Gems as we call them) is time-consuming and prone to human error. Our data shows that when B2B companies rely on manually tracking customer job changes, they miss a whopping 85% of these champion-based sales opportunities.
With UserGems, it’s easy to automate champion tracking by connecting your CRM to our pipeline generation tool.
From there, UserGems gives you a list of warm leads to target every month.
Every time a past customer, user, or prospect joins a new target account, UserGems automatically adds them as a new contact in your CRM — along with their new contact information.
Cobalt took the plunge and started automating champion tracking with UserGems. The result? They created 91 UserGems influenced opportunities, totaling $1.7M in new business pipeline.
2. Review relationship type and persona to prioritize accounts
Successful ABM initiatives focus on not only finding high-value accounts but prioritizing going after the ones that are most likely to convert faster.
This means once you have a warm target account list from UserGems, start reviewing which lead personas and relationship types to prioritize.
By looking at their persona, rank prospects by those that match your ideal customer profile (ICP) the best.
For example, here at UserGems, we target three main personas: marketing, sales, and RevOps. So when an account has a new CMO hire (which aligns with our ICP), we automatically move it higher up in our list of priority accounts.
Similarly, by reviewing relationship type, you can see the exact way a lead used your tool at their previous company.
For example, if a lead is categorized as a “buyer” because they have decision-making power, you can prioritize them over someone labeled an “end user” who may not have as much say when it comes to allocating the company budget.
3. Look at the number of new contacts in target accounts
In addition to reviewing target accounts’ persona types to prioritize leads, review how many ideal personas are at the company overall.
If an account has a higher number of ICP-aligned new hires, for example, rank them higher in your target list.
What’s more, assess the number of newly joined executives at target accounts. Again, the bigger the number, the higher the account should be on your priority list.
Why? Because these executives have the budget to make a buying decision in your favor.
As prospects take on new roles, they typically look to invest in new tools. Our internal data confirms new executives spend 70% of their budget in the first 100 days. Reaching out to them during this time significantly increases your odds of catching their attention and closing the deal.
4. Use the number of Gems as intent data
Another way to prioritize accounts to dedicate your ABM resources to is by using UserGems’ custom field (included in our packages) called the UserGems number of UserGems.
Essentially, the UserGems number of UserGems is a buying signal indicating how many Gems are working at a target account.
Use it to create a report that specifies the number of Gems you need at a target account for it to be warmer (therefore, higher priority) than others.
For example, you might want the UserGems number of UserGems to be greater than 3 or 5 (or whatever your preference is) for it to move the lead higher up in your priority list.
Once you set this number, UserGems automatically syncs the report into your CRM tool — giving you a list of high-priority target accounts for your ABM approach.
5. Target existing customers to expand and cross-sell
Lastly, prioritize paying customers for your account-based marketing programs.
The play here? Going after teams at your existing customer accounts that aren’t already using your product to expand usage and adoption.
We used this account-based marketing approach at UserGems when we started noticing customer success teams showing interest in using our pipeline generation tool.
Our marketing team ran hyper-personalized LinkedIn ads targeting customer support teams that pointed out how UserGems would benefit them — while letting them know their organization was already using our tool.
Simultaneously, sales reps reached out to other relevant folks at the account with the same personalized messaging.
Using this ABM strategy we not only expanded but also increased retention (reduced churn) as our tool’s usage was no longer siloed into one department at existing customer accounts.
Leverage the same play to drive expansion within customer accounts as well as cross-sell if you own multiple products.
Bonus: Automate building buying committees to target
As B2B buyers become more risk-averse, buying committees are growing.
In turn, the changing purchase behavior is making it harder to sell, making the sales process longer as teams have to regularly track changing roles and new hires at specific accounts.
Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. Automate this work with UserGems.
It surfaces ICP-matching key decision-makers at target accounts and then adds them to your CRM.
This boosts your sales team’s productivity and reduces your reliance on SDRs to prospect into key accounts each month.
Account tracking also assists your marketing team with account-based segmentation — helping them create persona-based ad campaigns for your ABM strategy. This is particularly useful for LinkedIn ads as the platform doesn’t offer inclusion and exclusion filters to build your ad audience.
Once you identify prospects to target in your ICP account, you can segment them using “persona,” “seniority,” and “job title” inclusion and exclusion filters in UserGems.
By doing so, your ads won’t show to broad segments such as “marketing.” Instead, optimize spend by excluding irrelevant departments such as “content marketing” and “product marketing.”
We use Account Tracking for building our LinkedIn ad audience as well. The results have been great — our match rates have increased between 80% and 90%. Meaning that more of our target personas are seeing our personalized ads, improving our conversion rate.
Watch the full replay of Dig Deeper with UserGems, where Justine breaks down how to use UserGems to improve account-based targeting:
Level up your ABM strategy with UserGems
Successful account-based marketing tactics rely on hyper-personalization and sales and marketing alignment.
Once you’ve got these two elements in place, automate prospecting by tracking champions with UserGems. Then, decide which accounts to target by reviewing buying signals such as their persona, relationship type, and the number of Gems working there.
Ready to add automation to your ABM campaign? Book a demo with us!
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