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Account-Based Marketing: 5 Steps to Get Started And Drive Growth for Your SaaS Business

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If you're looking

to drive

growth for your SaaS business,

then account based marketing

may be one of the best

growth strategies for you.

Here's the thing, though

ABM account based

marketing is not the right strategy

for every company.

And a lot of times companies

overspend on technology

instead of just focusing

on the right basics

to make an album plan work.

So in this episode, I'm

going to walk you through the five steps

that you absolutely need

to know

on how to implement

a proper account based marketing

strategy to drive

growth for your SaaS business.

And when you implement these five steps

and include a bonus one, you will be able

to accelerate your path

to that next stage growth.

Intro.

Let's everybody.

Welcome to Unstoppable.

I'm T.K., and on this channel I help

SaaS founders like you grow

your SaaS businesses.

faster with an unstoppable strategy.

Now, if you're new to this channel,

welcome.

I drop in episode every single Sunday

with actionable strategies

and tactics from the trenches

on how to grow your SaaS business faster

if you new.

Be sure to hit that subscribe button

and that bell icon

and you'll get notified every single time

I drop an episode with the TK Energy.

If you are already part

of this community, my people.

Welcome back.

It's really awesome to see you over here.

I learned about ABM

at my last company, Tower.

We were at this very, very specific

inflection point.

We had a self-service business

where people could sign up

for our product for 30 bucks a month

and then $49 a month.

But what we really wanted to do

with our fresh series A funding

was we really wanted to figure out a way

to go upmarket.

wanted to sell

to more mid-market companies.

They were already coming in on their own,

but we wanted to sell top down.

We wanted to have a sales driven motion

we wanted to get one year deals.

And also we just wanted to charge more

because we just realized

that we were severely under

charging for our product.

And so in order to do that instead of

just waiting around for these companies

to come to us,

one lone salesperson at a time.

That's who we sold to.

We decided to launch an entire account

based marketing campaign

to go after our ideal companies

and help them to become customers faster

by introducing ourselves to them.

here's the thing.

I learned the hard way that ABM account

based marketing is not perfect

for every type of company.

It worked for us

when we sold Tower up to Marketo.

All of a sudden

I was the SVP of Strategy at Marketo

and I was at the forefront.

Marketo was one of the best

demand generation platforms out there.

I was at the forefront

with the thought leaders around ABS.

I learned a lot more over there as well.

So in this episode,

I'm going to walk you through exactly

who ABM is for, who it's not for.

And then I'm going to walk you

through the five steps

that you need to follow

to implement an effective account

based marketing strategy.

And if you watch till the end,

I'll also give you a bonus one on

how to ensure

that you're successful with it.

Now, let's first

get into exactly who it's for

and who it's not for.

ABM works best.

My example is probably

one of the best use cases for

and for tool wrap.

It works really well.

when you have larger axes.

ABM in itself

is not exactly the cheapest

go to market motion that you can do.

In fact, it's

probably a little bit more expensive

than a lot of the other

go to market motions that are out there.

And they cover a lot of different ones

in this channel.

But if you have larger TVs

meaning average

contract value, the average deal size,

then ABM is worth it.

If you have multiple decision makers,

meaning in order

to actually win a deal, go top down,

you need to convince

multiple stakeholders

to actually say yes,

that ABM works really well

because you're essentially going

after a target account

and marketing to specific decision makers

that exist within a single company,

a single account,

and getting them to all reach consensus

before they even reach your sales team.

And lastly,

if you have longer sales cycles, ABA

is in a way

designed to shorten sales cycles.

If you have longer sales cycles

and you have larger CVS,

you have a whole sales process.

Your multiple stakeholders

than ABM is going to be really,

really effective

to actually

not only get

into more accounts faster,

but also win those deals faster as well

to shorten the sales cycles.

that's who ABM is good for.

If you are a self-service SaaS business

where a user just signs up

for the product and swipes

a credit card,

ABM might be overkill for you

and may not be the right thing for you.

So that's who it's for and it's not.

if you're still watching,

then ABM is likely for you

or you really want to learn about ABM.

Let's dig

into the five steps

that you need to follow

to actually implement

a proper account based marketing plan.

If you're excited to dig into step

number one,

go and smash out

like button for the YouTube algorithm

and let's get right into it.

So step

number one

in building a proper account

based marketing plan

is the same step number one

as any sort of marketing plan.

But it's particularly true for account

based marketing because remember,

you want to go after specific accounts

and market to them in order to do that.

Step number one is to really establish

a proper ideal customer profile.

Your ideal customer profile should have

the standard things like formal graphic

demographic, techno graphic,

but it should

ideally get into more details.

When I work with founders,

we do 29 different points

to really flesh out

a proper, ideal customer

profile to really understand

who is our ideal customer.

Why is this an urgent,

important problem for them?

How are we differentiated?

Why are they underserved?

Why have they not gone

with the competitor yet?

And how do we actually approach them?

So you want to make sure you first define

your ideal customer profile.

A lot of times

people confuse their ideal customer

profile with their total

addressable market.

So if this entire circle

is your total addressable market,

let's just say you're going

after a $12 billion market.

What this little segment

is going to be your ICP

and usually your ICP

is going to be a very specific segment

of this total addressable market

that's going to get you

to that next stage of revenue growth.

They're more likely to buy now.

They're more likely to engage now

and to get you to that next

to your revenue growth.

And that's where our ideal customer

profile really comes in handy.

And that way

you're already shrinking down your total

addressable space

that you're going to be going after.

Once you have a proper

ideal customer profile, the next thing

you'll really want to flesh out

is your messaging.

The reason messaging is super important,

particularly for account

based marketing plays.

You're going to be running

a number of different place

or a number of different people

in order to really get their attention.

Let's just say

you send them an email,

it's going to have a subject

line, otherwise

they'll never open the email.

Let's say you do a cold call.

Well, in that case,

the first sentence

is going to be super important.

Just can't be.

Hey, you have a second? Right.

Whatever comes after

is what's going to really

keep them on the line

if you're going to run ads.

Well, what's going to be the ad copy?

All right.

All the way right down to your home page.

If they click through

and they will research you

before they engage with you,

that big piece of text right up top

in your home page,

well, that's your messaging.

So based on this very specific ideal

customer profile

to get you to that next stage of growth,

you really want to make sure

you have proper messaging in place

because otherwise

you're going to put a lot of effort

in your account based marketing place

you're going to reach these people

that really should be buying from you.

But a way, you're going to show up

with t shirt stains on your shirt.

You won't look very good

and they'll judge you on that.

And first impressions count

and they'll

won't want to do business with you

when you really get your act together

down the line

because you've already had it all wrong.

They'll say, No, no, no, we're good.

We went with the other guy.

So you really want to make sure

you get your messaging down?

Once you have your ICP

and your messaging,

then come step number three,

this is where it really gets fun.

What you want to do is create what I call

your Dream 100 list.

Your dream 100 is out of this ideal

customer profile.

You really want to flesh out

100 accounts.

You can.

In fact, it's best

to do this in a spreadsheet

or your CRM system.

You want to do

100 of these target accounts

that fit into your ideal customer

profile.

Now, if you're like,

okay, I have a million of them,

or I have a thousand of them.

Well, in that case,

what I would say is

you want to go back

to your ideal customer profile

and refine that a little bit

more to figure out

which of that market

is more likely to buy

and how you can filter down

with the most likely to buy companies

that are in that space.

So you want to build out your dream 100.

Now, part of this is the company.

Part of this is the contact info.

Part of this is data around the company.

But more importantly,

it's also the key decision makers.

There's going to be key decision makers

that you have in order to win a deal.

And the big magic

in account based marketing is

you start to focus on 100 companies

or so that you really want to target,

but not just the companies,

but specific people at those companies.

And so

you'll actually want to flesh that out

in your dream 100 list as well.

So those are the first three steps.

Then the funnel

really starts to begin right

before I go to step number four.

And don't forget,

I have a bonus one all the way

and let me just pause here for a second.

Are you getting a little excited?

I get super excited about account

based marketing place

because you can get very focused

and you can yield incredible results

and they can shorten sales cycles.

A lot of magic happens

and it really brings together

the company

because whoever is wearing the sales

hat hovers, wearing the marketing hat

and all brings everyone together

and aligns everyone

because you're like

this 100 companies is all that matters

is how we're going to win.

Here's how we're going to hit

our revenue number. Let's go after them.

And it just it just becomes a lot easier.

So you're getting excited

about running your account

based marketing play.

Can I just get a

yes in the comments below

and also smash up like button

for the YouTube algorithm?

It just loves it when you do that.

And honestly, sort of.

We put a lot of love into these videos.

Also,

if you're in this stage

where you're building out

your account

based marketing play

and you need help

implementing all of this,

this is why I created my SaaS

Go to market coaching program.

You don't have to go anywhere right now.

I'll tell you more about it at all of

at the end of the episode.

I'll also link to it below.

Let's go to step number four,

and this is where the fun starts

to happen.

Step number four is personalization.

And I don't mean

just, you

know, hey,

I saw that you went to insert school.

that's not personalization.

True personalization is when you actually

go into each of these companies

and you start to really and analyze

what are the key

unique things about them

that really necessitates your product,

that ties into your messaging.

So you really want to look at

what's going on in their world,

what's going on in their blog,

if they're a public company

that you're approaching.

Back in the tower of Days,

we used to have our

orders actually research

their public filings.

The quarterly filings

that they had to understand

what was top of mind

for the leadership team.

So you really want to build out

personalization

for each of these hundred accounts.

The reason this is worth

it is because you're going after 100

high value accounts

that, you know is in your ideal

customer profile.

You've developed messaging

that you know

is going to resonate with them,

but also to cut through the noise

in addition

to the right messaging and the ICP,

you really want to have

the personalization ready

for each of these companies

that really in a way shows that, hey,

we really understand your business

and this is why we think that we should

do business and our software solution

would be valuable for you.

So you really want to build out

the proper personalization and bake that

into your dream 100 list.

So that's easy for you to access

once you have the personalization.

Then comes the fun part.

The fun part is

then you launch your campaigns.

This is the ABM execution.

one of the big things that super powerful

about ABM account based marketing,

it's a little bit of a misnomer

because it's both marketing and sales.

What I mean by that is you're

going to take this target 100 accounts

and you're going to figure out ways

to get in front of them.

You want to get in front of them

and get your message in front of them.

And your message

should be personalized

with the data that you researched.

And you want to do that

in a concentrated way

through as many channels as possible.

So the no brainer ways,

if you have salespeople

or you are the sales person,

you should do outbound.

And this can go in terms

of email,

DMS and calling,

but that alone isn't going to do it

because you have 100 accounts.

let's just say there's five, people

in each of these accounts.

That's 500 people.

And you may not have enough people

to do all of that.

So you also want to have air cover,

air cover as marketing, where by the time

the salesperson shows up does outbound,

they have heard about you.

This is where marketing comes in.

Remember, sales is 1 to 1,

marketing is one to many,

which is why you need both in order

to win in account based marketing.

So in terms of marketing,

you'll want to run ads,

you'll want to do social, organic,

you want to post online and engage

with them and connect with them.

You'll also want to do search engine

marketing and search engine optimization.

So they find you. They start looking.

You can invest in some intent data

tools

to figure out who's already in market

so you can target them

in a more personalized way

and add them to your doing 100

ad together.

Between marketing and sales,

you can also go to relevant events

where you know

your target

100 accounts are going to be there

and you can seek them out

in a very personalized way.

This execution piece

is not the hardest piece,

believe it or not.

The hardest piece is these four steps.

You do these four steps, then

your execution actually

becomes a lot easier.

You know exactly who to target.

These 100 accounts.

You know exactly how to message to them,

you know, exactly

what channels they're on.

You know exactly what to say to them.

Because you've done the work

around the personalization,

getting that personalized message

in front of them is not the hard work.

is really getting intentional about

who are the accounts you're going after.

What is the 100 accounts?

Who are these people

and how do you personalized to them?

Then it becomes easier

to actually execute.

if you skip one through four

and just jump to the execution

and say, Look,

here's our ICP

and you wrote it in a napkin

and you hand it over

to a marketing agency or fractional CMO

that can't get a real CMO job,

then you're going to spend a lot of money

with the wrong messaging,

with a whole bunch of motions

that are wasted.

But worst of all,

you're going to burn your brand

because first impressions matter.

So they're going to see

that really shitty campaign

they're going to say,

These guys are not serious.

So by the time

we actually get around to this,

we're not going to do business with them.

And it's really hard

to get a second chance

after a bad first impression,

which is why the step

five is super important.

Now, I promised you a bonus step,

which is step number six, By the way,

if you're so watching,

you're getting value.

I hope you are.

Please smash out.

Like but for the YouTube algorithm,

it just loves it when you do that.

The bonus step is to establish

a set of metrics.

What you don't

want to do is just set it and forget it.

And the biggest thing that I recommend is

you actually have a monday metrics

meeting with sales and marketing.

The big thing here is

you really want to measure all the way

from the campaigns

you're running on the marketing

all the way to the opportunity

that you're working in sales

and you really want to connect the dots.

The reason this is super important

is out of these hundred accounts,

you really want to understand

what's working and what's not.

Typically for an account based

marketing campaign,

you really want to understand how quickly

they're becoming opportunities

and how quickly

they're becoming customers.

And you really also want to understand

which aspects of your campaign

are really working.

Based on this data,

let's use the blue marker right here.

This is going to be a feedback

loop to your execution

and also to your entire strategy.

Based on this,

there are a couple key

things that you'll be looking for.

The first thing you'll be looking for

is, is our ICP correct?

Meaning these hundred accounts

that we're targeting,

is it resonating with them?

Was our thesis around why

this is the most relevant market

to go after Relevant?

The second one is the messaging.

Is our messaging actually resonating?

Part of this will be through

the outbound campaigns.

Part of

this will be through

the marketing campaigns.

So you want to work

together to understand is our messaging.

This thesis,

we have our on the messaging.

Is it actually working?

and the third thing

you want to understand

is what channel is working.

I've worked with countless companies

with their account based marketing plays.

I'm running in my own companies.

The big thing that I've learned in any

go to market

strategy is

there's always this one channel

that crushes it.

So while you will be doing intent and ads

and social

and SEO and email admin calling,

one of them is going to emerge

as the channel that just crushes it,

which is why you want to look

at these metrics and figure out

which channel is crushing it.

And you essentially

want to put more dollars into the channel

that's crushing it the most

because that's working

and you want to double down on it.

The reason I put this as third is

if your messaging

and targeting isn't working,

then nothing will matter.

But if you're messaging is working

and you're targeting is working,

then it's a cool where is it working

and where do we put

in more resources and more money

so we can scale this?

And that's how this whole thing

comes together.

And then it gets really fun.

So now you know exactly who account

base marketing is for

and who it's not for.

If you have a self-service business,

probably not the best idea,

but if you have larger CVS,

if you have longer sales cycles

that you want to collapse,

if you're multiple stakeholders,

they have to convince

in the sales

process, account

based marketing is super powerful

for you.

Now, in order to actually implement

a proper account based marketing plan,

step one,

you want to flesh out

your ideal customer profile.

Don't just write it in a napkin.

Do a proper ideal customer profile.

Exercise.

Once you have your ICP,

then define your messaging.

The messaging should be personalized

to the ICP you're targeting at Mass.

Once you have that,

then break down your ICP to the hundred

most promising accounts

and list out all the data

you can find around these accounts,

including the key people

you need to be targeting.

Once you have that,

then you want to actually do

some work

and personalizing this

for each of these accounts

and each of these people

so that by the time

you get in front of them,

you are set up for success.

Because remember,

first impressions matter

and then finally you can drive execution.

When you drive execution,

make sure you have the ground game.

That's the sales team.

That's the 1 to 1

along with the air cover.

That's marketing.

That's one to many.

The two work together.

If you're doing this right,

by the time

your sales team is approaching

these people,

they have already heard of you

through your marketing.

That's where the power really comes.

And lastly, as a bonus,

you want to measure the metrics

both across sales and marketing.

Based on your metrics.

You will want to iterate

on your ideal customer profile,

on your messaging.

And then as that's working,

you will want to double down

on the channel

that's performing the best.

So now you know exactly how to

launch a proper account

based marketing plan.

Now, here's the thing.

What you may not know is, okay,

how do I flesh out a proper ICP?

I really don't

want to write it in a napkin.

How do I actually define my messaging?

I want to make the right

first impression.

How do I build out my dream 100 list?

What data should I collect

and how do I actually put it together?

Or what kind of personalization

should I do?

And most importantly,

how do I actually do this?

Sales motion

for outbound

and the marketing motion

for the air cover.

And lastly,

how do I actually track these metrics?

Well, this is why I create my SaaS

go to market coaching program.

inside of this program,

we do three key things.

First, we flesh out

your ideal customer profile.

Now, I've worked with countless founders

inside of this program.

Everyone thinks they have an ICP

until they work with me.

We do a 29 point analysis

to really understand

who your ideal customer

profile is going to be.

Once you have your ICP, then

we teach you

how to develop your messaging.

We call this a manifesto.

Your manifesto is your positioning.

It's your value proposition,

it's your strategic narrative.

It's how you communicate to the market

why they should do something

about the problem

you solve and why they should choose you.

Once you have those two pieces,

you have your core strategy

for your account based marketing plan,

and also, honestly,

for any go to market motion

you want to run.

Then comes the third pillar.

The third pillar is your Broadway show.

The Broadway

show is a consistent

set of sales and marketing activities

that you can run,

whether it's to your broader ICP

or to the specific dream 100 customers

that you have to actually

get your message in front of them

and convert those two leads,

pipeline and revenue growth.

It is an incredible program.

If you'd like to work together,

just go to T.K.

Datacom, slash G T and T.K.

Datacom slash GTM on that page.

You'll get all the details

around the program.

Now, this is my sixth year

running this program.

What I've learned is the better the fit,

the better the results.

And we've had incredible results.

We have countless success stories

that we've shared on this channel,

and we'll share them with you as well.

all we ask is

if you'd like to work together,

just follow form

and book a call with us on the call.

We'll figure out where you are,

what your goals are.

If it sounds like it's a fit

and we can actually help you,

we're off to the races right away

and it's an incredible program.

So just go to T.K.

Care.com slash GTM.

Also,

if you got value from this video, please

smash out like button

for the YouTube algorithm.

It just loves it when you do that.

I drop an episode

every single Sunday

with actionable strategies

and tactics from the trenches

on how to grow your SaaS business faster.

So if you haven't already, be sure to hit

the subscribe button and that bell icon,

you'll get notified every single time

I drop an episode.

Also, if you have a fellow founder,

if you have a team member

that would get value from this,

if you're part of a Slack group

or WhatsApp group with other founders,

please share this video with them.

It'll just mean the world to us.

We want to help

as many SaaS founders

as possible build incredible

software companies.

And let's remember,

everyone needs a strategy

for their life and their business.

But when you are with us,

yours is going to be unstoppable.

I'm take nothing next episode

or inside the SaaS

go to market coaching program.

Take care everybody

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YouTube Transcript:
Account-Based Marketing: 5 Steps to Get Started And Drive Growth for Your SaaS Business