Do you need to focus your sales and marketing efforts on only the top accounts and industries to drive more revenue for your IoT company?
Account-based marketing is arguably one of the most effective sales and marketing strategies for companies that aim to close more high-value deals.
Read on to learn more about why your IoT company should implement an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy in 2021.
You will learn:
IoT is a technology that can be applied to many different fields and is usually categorized into Consumer IoT, industrial IoT, Healthcare IoT, and Governmental IoT.
This makes ABM an ideal strategy for acquiring customers for IoT companies, as it helps you to target large key accounts or accounts in a specific industry.
This will make it easier for your business to unlock the full potential of each target account, and help you double or triple your client base.
You can use a tiered approach to account-based marketing, segmenting accounts into different tiers based on their revenue potential.
If you are only targeting a few high-value accounts with high revenue potential, treating each account as a market of one would make sense.
You could also use the "ABM Lite" approach.
This is when you target a few hundred accounts within a specific industry or vertical. where you adjust your content and case study to their create custom for one specific industry or customizing a white paper with the target accounts logo on it.
You could use an ABM-Demand generation hybrid where you want to target a few thousand accounts using very targeted advertising, events or inbound marketing campaigns. This big difference from most demand generation strategies is that you do not score leads, but marketing qualified accounts (MQAs).
Whatever approach is the best for your IoT company, an account-based marketing strategy will help you to reach the right fit buyers in multiple channels at the scale you need.
According to Gartner, the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision-makers. Each of these decision-makers is usually “armed” with four or five pieces of information they’ve gathered independently through online research.
As more decision-makers doing research are involved, combined with having many different options available, it is harder than ever for prospective buyers to actually reach a buying decision.
The solutions to this are to create and share content that helps buyers complete different jobs in their buying process:
The B2B buying process is not linear, and buyers will “loop” between these different jobs, or they can happen at the same time.
Your job as a provider of an IoT solution is to provide information that makes buying easier to navigate the buying process.
Research from Gartner shows that “customers who perceived the information they received from suppliers to be helpful in advancing across their buying jobs were 2.8 times more likely to experience a high degree of purchase ease, and three times more likely to buy a bigger deal with less regret.”
Gartner calls this Buyer Enablement and is perfectly aligned with account-based marketing. You do not have to wait for a qualified lead to come to you. Sales reps can be a channel to prospective customers, who reaches out to give prescriptive advice.
IoT is a hot topic these days. Like every new technology or idea, it can be a big challenge to communicate the business value to decision-makers.
In large and complex B2B deals it is not only about getting one single person to sign on the dotted line. There are multiple ways each role and department can benefit from IoT, and you need buy-in from the whole organization to close the deal.
Account-based marketing is the best solution to this challenge. This strategy helps you to pursue large companies with multiple decision-makers and departments, and tailor your message to each individual.
With account-based marketing, you will have a quality over quantity approach where you proactively reach out to the right fit prospects and companies that can benefit the most from your IoT solutions.
By targeting different buying roles, you can use different types of content to target different pain points of each role and explain how IoT will alleviate this pain before they become a blocker in the sales process.
You can create anything from videos, articles, white papers, interactive tools and then educate and nurture each of the decision-makers at once.
Think about business value IoT can bring to a business:
These are just some of the examples of the business value can bring. By mapping these to each buying role and department, you can easily address every goal, challenge, and concern they have, making it easier to get buy-in from the whole organization.
For the last 10 years, strategies like inbound marketing, content marketing, and other “pull” strategies have focused on generating as many leads as possible for B2B companies.
The basic principle was that if you fill your top of the funnel with quality traffic, convert on an offer and become a marketing qualified lead (MQL), then be nurtured and educated so that they end up as a sales-qualified lead that is passed to sales.
According to Forrester, only 0.75% of inbound leads actually convert into closed revenue. Needless to say, big parts of marketing budgets are wasted.
What often happens with inbound marketing is that a single person has a need and starts their research online. However, while this person might have a want or need, they often not have the budget or authority to make a purchase decision.
This is one of the big problems account-based marketing is out to fix for B2B companies not getting results from their marketing.
According to Joe Chernov of Pendio, account-based marketing aspires to be a zero-waste sales & marketing strategy. What makes ABM different is that it only focuses on the right fit accounts that are likely to buy from your company.
With ABM, you stop chasing down low-quality leads and instead work on expanding and engaging contacts in the same organization. As mentioned earlier in this post, the different departments and roles will require different content and messaging, making your company and solution seem more relevant to prospective buyers.
In this way, account-based marketing helps you focus on those accounts that will make you the most revenue and profit, and optimize for your two most valuable resources; time and money.
By implementing an account-based marketing strategy for your IoT company, your sales and marketing will be able to reach multiple decision-makers in high-value accounts.
By implementing this strategy, you will be able to build your organization’s reputation, build long-lasting relationships with prospects, align your team and win more deals.
