ABM is all about building relationships with prospects. To build relationships effectively, however, marketing needs to take the time to engage appropriately and warm up contacts so that, when passed to sales, there's a seamless transition and ongoing engagement. By engaging directly with accounts, nurturing relationships, and adding value, you're positioning your brand to be top of mind when contacts are ready to buy. It takes time, patience, and a bit of strategy, but if you engage with your audiences effectively, you'll observe higher win rates and more effective long-term engagement between your target accounts and your sales team.
But when's the right time to reach out to a contact? At the first sign of engagement, or further down the line? More importantly, how do you begin to engage with a contact, how do you know when it's time to pass them off to sales, and when does a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) become a sales-qualified lead (SQL)?
This article is designed to give you constructive advice on engaging with contacts effectively to help you increase conversions. By the end, you'll have a better idea of what engagement means in the context of ABM, how to measure it, and how to engage with accounts effectively (without being too aggressive).
Linking ABM With Your CRM
To get the most out of your ABM and to avoid creating confusion (like having contacts in two places at once or uneven lists where some contacts are in one place and others somewhere else), it's important to sync your CRM with your ABM platform. That way, you have a uniform contact list and a central repository of all engaged leads with complete records of engagement activities between them and your brand.
How Leads Get Created
Once you've built out your audience, you'll have a variety of companies to target during your ABM campaigns. From these account lists, leads are created in two ways:
- If a lead interacts with any channel within your ABM Campaign (including display ads, social ads, emails, etc.), they will begin to "warm" and should be scored according to their engagement.
- If an account visits your website, you can deanonymize the account and identify all the contacts within the buying circle to measure intent and engage with contacts directly.
Note that if you are using Propensity, we have an ABM Connected Website feature that helps companies track and qualify accounts visiting their URL. You can learn about it here.
Score Your Leads For More Effective Engagement
Accounts within a campaign typically get scored from "cold" to "hot." You'll want to qualify and engage with cold leads differently than hot leads, so segmenting them from each other is essential.
Contacts can be scored in two different ways:
- Based on the frequency and recency of their third-party intent (for example, how often they research topics you care about). This does not suggest the contact is ready for a sales call (or transactional outreach), but it does reflect a likelihood to engage with marketing campaigns and your product.
- Based on the recency and frequency of first-party intent (for example, visiting your website, clicking on marketing emails, engaging with LinkedIn or Facebook ads, etc.). This activity suggests that the contact is ready to be directly engaged with and is ready to be passed onto sales.
Depending on their level of engagement, contacts will be issued a "score" and segmented out as "cold," warm," or "hot."
Scoring LinkedIn Engagement
If you are running LinkedIn campaigns, scoring engagement on that platform is essential so any contacts showing engagement can be scored correctly in your ABM campaign. To measure engagement, look at your LinkedIn stats under your company's "My Leads" tab on LinkedIn.
What Scoring Can Tell You
Cold contacts have yet to show engagement and shouldn't be handed over to sales. They need time to "warm up". On the other hand, hot leads have already been "warmed." They've shown:
- intent signals that matter to your company (they've researched topics related to your product or service
- general recognition of your company (they've been fed and seen programmatic or social ads)
- signs of engaging with your brand (they've downloaded content or clicked on ads/social posts)
While cold leads may require retargeting and warm leads signal the need for more brand visibility, hot leads have shown strong engagement signals and are ready to receive direct contact from your sales team.
Don't Get Too Transactional Too Fast
Contacts passed to sales do not signal the end of engagement or the start of a sales transaction. In fact, sales teams shouldn't treat engaged contacts as SQLs; they're actually MQLs. While these contacts have shown interest in your brand or offering, they still need nurturing based on their interests and intent signals. Avoid the urge to approach every contact from a transactional perspective. Instead, look at hot leads as low-hanging fruit: the most accessible accounts primed for outreach.
Having a playbook in place, where marketing and sales have an agreed-upon "cheat sheet" of how to engage with contacts (and when), will help you in the process of qualifying leads, handing leads from marketing to sales, and giving sales the context needed to continue the conversation to develop relationships. Playbooks act like maps that plot out engagement touchpoints and advise marketing and sales on the next steps after certain engagement milestones are reached.
For example, once an account has engaged across three channels (clicked on an ad, visited the website, signed up for the newsletter), the account is passed to sales, who assigns a representative who may try to connect via LinkedIn or email.
Social Selling vs Cold Calling
While cold calling seems like a natural next step once your contacts have moved from cold to hot, we've found it's much more effective to have a "stepping stone" between qualifying and calling your contacts. This stepping stone is called "social selling."
Social selling is all about engaging with your contact on social media before ever picking up the phone. This involves commenting on their posts or mentioning them on your company's social media. It's a natural way to engage with a contact before setting up a call. Think of social selling as the ultimate conversation starter. Read more about social selling here.
Allow Contacts to Opt Out
Sometimes, accounts or contacts will want to opt out of receiving more correspondence from you - and that's fine! It's better to know who's interested (or not) so that you can focus your energy on convertible contacts. Typically, prospects can opt out of email sequences themselves; however, if you prefer to remove them from an entire campaign, simply click on your Profile -> workspace settings -> exclusions, then follow the instructions to upload an opt-out list. Click here for the guide.
Conclusion
Engaging with your contacts requires a little bit of time and strategy, however, with patience, you'll be rewarded with more robust contact lists full of contacts already interested in your offering. Take the insights you're gathering to create targeting ABM campaigns that speak to their unique requirements or address their pain points, and you'll be able to start an organic conversation with your ideal customer base.