Berglund advocates a shift in marketing budget and sales resources : “ Spend your money on your top accounts. ” That’s why he advises B2B marketers to make a good analysis of their customer base: which customers deliver 80 percent of your turnover? Can you get more out of these customers? Ask yourself what the effect will be on your turnover if your top accounts take 40 percent of your portfolio instead of 20 percent? Which relevant products or services have they not yet purchased from you? And what percentage of the company does not yet use your products? Are there perhaps specific regions or countries where you can upsell ? And if you can’t upsell, then your objective is obviously retention, the Swede emphasizes.
Testing
Once you’ve identified your top accounts, try to identify similar businesses that might be interested in your products or services. Berglund: “In mature markets that are fragmented, it’s often difficult to find and acquire similar customers.”
For his new employer Climeon, he distinguishes between three types of account-based marketing. With strategic ABM, you focus all your attention on one account at a time. But, as Berglund knows, scaling up is a bit difficult. That is why industry-related ABM can be interesting for companies. You start with one ' vertical ', for example the steel, hospital email list cement or energy sector.
Within that, you identify and approach 5 to 25 accounts with industry-specific content to start with. Finally, you see list-based marketing at companies where the value of the accounts is relatively small and where a relatively larger number of customers provides 80 percent of the turnover. Berglund: “You then also go after a large number of accounts, but not without testing.”
Influencers
For each target account, it is then important to map out stakeholders: who are the key people and who are the influencers? That is quite a job, as Berglund's daily practice shows. Per account, he has to deal with two to five key contacts and 100 to 150 influencers. At Climeon, they identified 59 accounts. That translated to 100 to 300 contacts and 6,000 to 9,000 influencers. But how do you reach all these people? " Lack of access is a serious challenge ", Berglund admits.
Lack of access is a serious challenge – Berglund
Campaign
Berglund uses the following tools at Climeon as building blocks for a successful ABM campaign.