Account based marketing (ABM) overview

Account-based marketing or ABM is a strategy of selling and promoting to specific identified accounts by first mapping lead activity to account activities and then calculating a score for each account based on its level of engagement. The end goal of Bizible’s ABM feature is to obtain a predictive engagement score. This score is comprised of an A, B, C and D grade that are calculated based on the data from both the sales cycle itself and from the actual marketing and sales activities that your prospects engage with. Bizible needs access to the data for at least the full sales cycle before it is able to assign each account a grade based on its level of engagement with your company. The value of PES will otherwise be null.

Accounts with an A grade are highly engaged, while accounts with D grades are minimally engaged. If the account is not engaged at all, the score would reflect the value of not applicable or N/A.

Account-based marketing will not work if you couldn’t see both lead and contact activities on the account. This ability is not native to Salesforce, which means leads’ activities are not reflected on the account. To get around this problem, Bizible maps the lead to an account in one of three ways. One is by matching the domain and the email address to the domain name of the website on the account. A second way is using the email addresses if the lead’s email address matches the contact’s email address. A third way is to match the company’s name on the lead to the account’s name.

When it finds matching information, the lead is mapped or connected to the account and all activities can be seen on the account level. If you visit the account, you’ll see the leads in a related list. Similarly, if you click on the lead, you can see the account it’s tied to in the accounts field.

Once all contacts and leads are mapped to the appropriate account, and Bizible had a chance to track touchpoints over a few sales cycles, it will then create a PES.

The PES lives on the account object. Remember that the PES is a dynamic value that changes as each account becomes more engaged. If you understand why the score changes, you’re able to structure your workflow to increase PES and look for sales opportunities.

For example, if you intentionally target accounts with the PES of D, do you expect the PES to increase? By how much? Was there any difference in the impact different ads had on PES? Another scenario to consider is when an account’s PES improves or drops on its own. Is there any effect on PES after nurturing the account? Could sales activities produce a decline in PES? Are engaged leads more likely to answer the phone when a sales rep calls? These are questions the PES score can answer for you. Knowing this information can help you coordinate sales involvement.

To help you get right into ABM reporting, Bizible provides you with three stock reports. These reports are available under the reports tab under the account-based marketing reports folder.

Generating the accounts with leads and contacts report won’t be possible without Bizible since the report relies on combining data from the lead and the account objects, an option that is not possible right now with Salesforce alone. The accounts by engagement score report groups your accounts according to their ABM score. All the accounts are evaluated together. All C accounts are grouped together, et cetera. To see the level of activity on each account, you’d create a touchpoint per account report.

If you decide to create the enhancement fields as per Bizible’s instructions, you’re able to see the last PES, the last date the PES changed and the last date the account was at any particular score.

To learn more about how to create any of these reports, look for lessons on the academy’s library.