Choosing your category is also a matter of scope and value. Note that the 1:1 ABM, ABM Lite, and Programmatic ABM focus on nurture accounts, on the other hand, the Bolt-on ABM aims the key decision-makers, targeting engagement with the entire buyer committee regardless the deal size. In other words, the Bolt-on ABM category intends to accelerate your demand generation and conversion rate, while the 3 other categories nurse strategic accounts with most revenue generation potential through personalized approaches.

Step Two: Identify & Prioritize Your Targets And Assess Buyers’ Needs

After setting the goals and choosing the right strategy, you must identify, select, and prioritize the target accounts and the ideal buyer personas fitting your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). An ICP is a detailed description of the type of customer that a business is targeting, based on a range of demographic, firmographic, and behavioral criteria. Companies which have these similar attributes are considered most likely to buy and be the most profitable and loyal customers.

An ICP typically includes factors such as the customer’s industry, company size, revenue, location, purchasing behaviors, pain points, and needs.
When selecting accounts, it is important to consider your ABM strategy mentioned in Step One.
Once you have a clear picture of the target accounts and the buyer persona, it’s time to assess the buyer’s needs and define the scope of overall campaign efforts. In order to make this actionable, you must identify the buyer persona’s fundamental business challenges/needs/interests, and how your product portfolio addresses them.

Step Three: Define Your Campaign

The next step would be to determine campaign scope, define steps, and asset design based on the buyer personas. Having a distinguished campaign scope and steps is vital, as running numerous campaigns, you must prioritize and rationalize the campaign approach.
Nonetheless, at this stage, you must define the campaign performance metrics and KPIs that were agreed amongst the stakeholders of the ABM campaign.
SiriusDecisions emphasizes the importance of defining a campaigning hierarchy at this stage to “rationalize the campaign approach against the organization’s different buyer personas”.

Step Four: Campaign Refining & Program Planning

Campaign Refining

The objective of this step is to refine the campaign based on market, industry, target, persona, etc. and define the indicators to be used for performance measures. Questions you should be asking are:

• • Does your campaign have clear and rational campaign segmentation based on different buyer personas?
  • What are the quantifiable program goals?
  • Does your budget and measurement plans require adjustment to reflect the final campaign targets and scope before it goes live?

According to leadspace “working on this step carefully allows you to create personalized and consistent awareness, avoiding randomness campaigns within an entire organization.”

Program Planning

Campaigns are further segmented to different programs with different objectives and initiatives to execute.
The program planning step should aim to design adequate program strategy and content / asset designs for different types of programs. The program planning phase should consist of a timeline of program execution, central and regional campaign elements, and different program metrics.
According to SiriusDecisions, there are 4 main program families:

• • 1. Reputation
       • Target evangelization
       • Increase awareness
    2. Demand creation
       • “acquire, engage or accelerate demand”
    3. Sales enablement  
       • Progress opportunities
       • Accelerate pipeline
       • Navigate prospect’s buying cycle
       • Engage with customers / potential buyers
    4. Market intelligence
       • Gathering information on buying audiences, markets, competitors & their internal audience

As there is no standard buying cycle, it is vital to set flexible programs with no automatic base, which will bring interesting, updated, and dynamic information coming from real-time data and buyer signals.
ABM programs must be more adaptive and combine account and buyer information with technology, such as Artificial Intelligence to be prepared for the quick changes in the purchasing behavior and market demands. Thus, drawing expert mechanisms and refined programs ready to provide personalized content, fresh answers, and adaptable solutions for the different customer needs in the buyer cycle.

Step Five: Channel Selection

Depending on the buyer persona, the means of communication should differ as you’re proactively reaching out to your best-fit targets to communicate the right messages and initiate the engagement. Strategically selecting the appropriate channels and harmonizing the messages delivered to the target is important.
Some of the commonly used channels are emails, social media, video, website, infographics, blogs, white papers, display ads, events and webinars.

Step Six: Execute Campaigns And Begin Sales Outreach

At this stage, the campaign finally goes live to generate brand awareness and engage with decision-makers at your target accounts, setting the stage for more effective sales conversations.
Along with the marketing campaigns, your sales representatives also participate in the outreach by using more traditional methods of engagement such as making phone calls and emails. Due to this, it is vital for sales and marketing to align on regular basis to validate the understanding of the scope of the campaign, which products to cover, and what sales enablement initiatives are involved. During this stage, it is important to harmonize the action and effort between the marketing and sales team to spark interests from the targeted accounts.

Step Seven: Post-Execution

Once the campaigns go live, the resources allocated to the campaign team must still be committed to ongoing sales enablement activities. On a regular basis, campaign efforts must be evaluated, measure the effectiveness, and level of optimization to be modified if necessary. Recurring alignments between sales and marketing is necessary to share feedback, track the campaign performance, and assess the performance against the goals. Such evaluation and alignment will play a pivotal role in the development of future campaigns.