Account-based marketing (ABM) is uniquely positioned to supercharge outreach, giving users a competitive edge. With an ABM platform, marketing and sales teams can find and reach the right people (at the right time!) and automate much of their early engagement efforts. However, like any marketing tool, an underlying strategy is necessary to use it effectively.
To that end, many of our clients are curious about how they can align their sales and marketing efforts so that messaging remains consistent every step of the way. In this guide, we'll explain the nuances between top and bottom-of-funnel engagement touches and what your teams can do to communicate better with leads. We'll also explain the importance of having a solution like Propensity integrated into a CRM and finish with some helpful best practices you can adopt today to nail your outreach throughout your ABM campaign.
Top of Funnel vs Bottom of Funnel
Picture a funnel: all leads originate at the widest part (the top). Marketing and sales efforts filter leads until the narrowest point, the very bottom, where the most engaged are ready to convert. As the funnel narrows, however, your engagement strategy must also adjust.
Until these leads begin to engage with your brand, they stay at the top of the funnel and are considered cold. Once they start engaging, they shift from cold to warm and move further down. When an account has engaged across multiple sales touches, it becomes hot. Hot leads indicate a high level of interest in your offering, and these are ready to be handed off to sales. This move - from warm to hot - typically happens near the bottom of the funnel.
While the top of the funnel is the responsibility of your marketing team, as leads warm and turn hot, they must be seamlessly transferred to sales for further engagement. So, while the top of the funnel is all about qualifying leads, the bottom is about using all the insights you’ve gained to hyper-personalize each sales engagement for higher conversion rates.
Propensity: Your Secret Weapon for Top of Funnel Marketing
Propensity is designed to sit at the top of your marketing and sales funnel. It provides marketing teams with the tools to find accounts, build personas, create an ICP, and locate in-market accounts. It offers Always-On ABM to automate the process of warming accounts and automatically passes warm and hot leads to your sales team via a connected CRM.
Propensity syncs with your CRM to pass hot leads on to sales, which takes over the engagement process. At this point, your CRM can assign leads to sales representatives who can develop direct, personal relationships with accounts and individual contacts. CRMs can also help further automate messaging, such as InMail outreach or direct email campaigns, that continue the work Propensity has started to convert the account.
Generating Engagement by Focusing Your Marketing and Sales Messaging
Messaging needs to be consistent throughout a campaign. However, there are slight differences in how to effectively engage with an account depending on its position in the sales funnel.
Top of Funnel Messaging
Leads at the top of your funnel may not be as familiar with your brand or offering. The goal here is to build visibility and trust. Marketing efforts should focus on creating content and ads that educate and directly address the prospect's needs. As a marketer, ask yourself this simple question: if I was this client, what would I Google to find the answer to my question? Then, build a campaign with that phrasing in mind. Content shared here should be generally free of sales-y language and should serve to educate or enlighten.
Bottom of Funnel Messaging
By the time your ideal customers get closer to the bottom of the funnel, they have begun to engage with your brand, so gaining visibility is less important. What's more important is taking insights you've gathered from the account and making messaging more personal. You'll be able to see, for example:
- Ads or links clicked on
- Social media posts engaged with
- Emails opened
- The content they've downloaded
- Web pages they've visited
This will give you a very clear understanding of what the account is interested in and give you insights into ways to hyper-personalize your content so that you are speaking directly to the interests of specific accounts. In these interactions, it’s time to offer your brand as the ultimate problem solver.
Propensity Playbooks to Time Your Outreach
At the top of the funnel, where the goal is to get an account to become familiarized with your business, it's essential to offer many marketing touches and do so regularly across various platforms. To organize and standardize your cadence, Propensity provides a variety of customizable playbooks to help a team organize its outreach strategy. A typical playbook might have a sequence that looks something like this:
- Programmatic Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Linkedin Ads
- Marketing Email
- Direct mail
The account would enter at the top of the funnel, with Propensity feeding content via various channels. At this stage, the goal is to gain brand awareness and trust while offering engagement opportunities. Once an in-market account engages with the outreach, the lead moves from cold to hot. Here, the lead would move from marketing to sales, where sales would take over direct outreach.
Propensity can automate top-of-funnel marketing efforts (programmatic ads, LinkedIn and Facebook ads, emails, etc.). However, once the lead is sufficiently warmed, a CRM sync would allocate a hot lead to sales for the next piece of the sales process: direct, personalized outreach.
Feeding Warm and Hot Leads to Your CRM for Sales Handoff
While Propensity automates top-of-funnel marketing efforts, bottom-of-funnel marketing is best handled by physical salespeople due to its hyper-personal, one-to-one nature. However, with Propensity's assistance, marketers can share a wealth of information with sales teams—from intent data to engagement insights—via your CRM. That way, sales can understand lead scores and map precisely when an account started to engage and track its journey. This allows them to customize interactions with accounts and find unique inroads to help them close the deal.
Propensity seamlessly integrates with HubSpot and Salesforce. When Propensity is synced, the platform feeds all lead information into the CRM. And, once leads are deemed "hot" (i.e., accounts have shown engagement across multiple touchpoints), the CRM can assign individual sales representatives to the lead. Most CRMs have ways to feed leads to sales associates, including round robin, specific attributes, geographic areas, etc. CRMs or automated outreach platforms also have sales cadences that can be created to automate individualized outreach so that sales can focus on developing relationships and closing deals.
Best Practices for Messaging
Effective messaging is the cornerstone of successful ABM. However, consistency and personalization are essential, whether it's marketing or sales outreach (i.e., top of funnel or bottom). Over the years, we've developed a few basic best practices that help teams harness the power of ABM and maximize engagement (for better conversion rates).
Embrace Omnichannel
The key to moving prospective accounts further into the funnel is to increase visibility, which will supercharge the likelihood of engagement. That means being everywhere your audience might be. So don't just run programmatic ads. Build a campaign that has marketing touches in multiple places, including:
- Programmatic ads
- LinkedIn and Facebook ads
- Marketing email
- Direct mail
- Etc.
Don't Gatekeep
When you use an ABM platform, you'll already have visibility into a lead's email, social handles, contact details, and more. Directing accounts to landing pages or gated content is unnecessary, even at the top of the funnel.
Share Your Marketing Strategy with Sales
Integration and communication between sales and marketing are essential for ABM's success. By involving sales teams in the marketing strategy, you can ensure alignment and coherence across all touchpoints. Propensity has found success by showing sales, for example, the ad visuals and copy used in the marketing portion of the outreach strategy. If sales can see how the product or service is being marketed to their leads, they can ensure their direct sales outreach aligns with the messaging a lead has already been exposed to (and further personalize it).
Diversify Your Ask
A lot of general marketing and sales outreach ends with "book a demo" as a CTA. However, we've found it's best to start by simply asking for a conversation. There are three main "asks" you should focus on that have nothing to do with demos. Try these asks (in this order) across your sales sequencing:
- Ask for a call to discuss the client's needs. Ask for a preliminary discussion. That way, you are letting the potential customer direct the conversation. They can describe their pain points and ask questions, and you can offer more tailored solutions.
- Ask that they try a free trial. If the customer doesn't immediately respond to a call request, offer them a free trial or some other way they can see your product or service in action on their own time.
- Ask if there's anyone else at the company they can direct you to. If they still show a general lack of interest, ask them to direct you to another person in the company that may need the product or service. It could be that you are simply not connecting with the right person, and/or someone else on their team is a decision-maker.
Use Cohorts to Course Correct or Reaffirm Direction
Continuous improvement is vital in ABM. That's why campaigns are divided into cohorts. Each cohort may run for a set time (from a few weeks to a few months). Once it's finished, Propensity's cohort analysis will allow you to track historical performance and make data-driven adjustments to your strategy.
Whether it's refining audience targeting or optimizing messaging, use cohorts to identify opportunities for growth and change tactics as needed.
Conclusion
When marketing and sales can align their messaging and engage with the account in the right way at the right time along the buyer's journey, they can build credibility and trust with their audience. The key is to build engagement early and to develop sales touches that continuously engage with leads until they are ready to make a purchase decision. Remember that, after each cohort, you'll have a wealth of data at your fingertips so that you can see what went right (or wrong) to refine your approach over time.