Does your account-based marketing playbook need a refresher?
With many companies reporting a decline in inbound, there’s a renewed focus on outbound sales. In fact, a recent SaaStr survey found that 71 percent of companies are relying more on outbound in 2023.
Unfortunately, outbound motions get a bad rap because people associate them with intrusive, unwanted cold calls and spammy emails.
ABM Outbound Done Right is Incredibly Effective
Outbound done wrong is incredibly expensive. Cold calls and cold emails are a costly way to do outbound without any signal from the buyer.
However, outbound done right is incredibly effective.
Today’s successful tech companies are taking a hybrid approach. They’re collecting buying signals traditionally associated with inbound sales and acting on those signals with outbound plays. They nurture prospective customers until they raise their hand for a demo.
In this post, we’ll share some tactics and strategies that three LeanData customers use for outbound account-based marketing (ABM) plays.
Expedient Automates Account-Based Outbound to Operate at Scale
Expedient is a data center infrastructure as a service (IaaS) company that offers cloud solutions and managed services like disaster recovery, security and compliance. With Salesforce as their customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Expedient deploys a combination of integrated technologies to support their ABM initiatives.
First, Expedient uses 6sense to collect intent data from their website and emails. 6sense also provides insights into the keywords that led visitors to Expedient in the first place. This data also helps Expedient know which product the visitor was searching for. Within 6sense, Expedient has created specific segments for all of their product types.
As a particular account heats up, these “6sense qualified accounts” (6QAs) are enriched with data from ZoomInfo and clustered into a buying group of decision makers which are then routed to the appropriate sales rep, a process fully automated through LeanData.
The Expedient sales rep receives the account information along with an email template that can be sent “as is,” or customized even further.
Nicholas Lansberry, to not only deliver the right data to the right reps at precisely the right time, but also ensure that reps reach out with context.
“This has become the gold standard for our organization. It arms the sales team with everything they need to hit the ground running: who to talk to, when to contact them, and what to talk about. It also allows us to automate as much as we need and operate at scale.”
Nicholas Lansberry, Go-To-Market Operations Manager, Expedient
Maxio Accelerates Speed to Lead
Maxio is a financial operations platform built for B2B SaaS companies. Their solutions cover the full spectrum of the subscription lifecycle including management, recurring billing, SaaS metrics, expense recognition, and more.
For their ABM plays, Maxio uses the LeanData-G2 partner integration to uncover intent signals as buyers research the Maxio product, category, or competitors on the G2 website. Maxio automatically matches the buyer’s company information with an existing account in Salesforce, and then triggers Sales or Marketing plays based on intent insights.
Maxio uses a combination of LeanData, Salesloft and Slack to accelerate speed to lead. When intent data surfaces new leads, LeanData immediately checks to see if they are matched to an existing account, and if they belong to a customer, prospect or competitor. The lead is either rejected or converted. If converted, the lead is routed to the right rep based on automated territory assignments.
Next, the marketing activity and ideal customer profile (ICP) score on the contact are evaluated to determine if there is a business opportunity. The opportunity then routes to the right Sales team member and triggers a Slack notification. This alerts the appropriate Maxio Sales rep to check Salesloft.
This ABM strategy eliminates manual steps that would otherwise be taken to match, evaluate, convert, and route each and every buyer signal. Now, the right reps can instead just get alerted immediately and engage the right buyers.
6sense Prevents Lead Leakage with ABM
6sense is a B2B predictive intelligence platform that uses AI and big data analysis to provide insights into buyer behavior and intent. Built for ABM, 6sense helps identify the most valuable accounts to target and provides insights into their interests and behavior.
As you would imagine, 6sense uses their own technology for account-based motions. When experiencing periods of high-volume, in-market accounts, 6sense lacked a way to dynamically change territories based upon new customer and prospect opportunities. As a result, sixty percent of the in-market opportunities for accounts were being lost, a classic case of lead leakage.
Using LeanData, 6sense accounts are automatically matched, routed, and timestamped. Sales reps now work on new opportunities that weren’t fixed within their planned territories. Combining LeanData with 6sense, they’ve seen a 60 percent increase in pipeline generated per month.
The Modern Approach to Outbound
The reality of a challenging economy is that B2B companies need to boost their outbound efforts. No stone can be left unturned.
Today’s successful ABM plays combine the strengths of inbound and outbound motions. This means: (1) there must be buying signals and, (2) outreach must be performed with context.
This hybrid approach uses automation, ensuring the entire process is quick, efficient and scalable, all the while nurturing prospective customers to see the value of your service without alienating them. It also ensures your sales reps are focusing on accounts most likely to convert.
Kim Peterson
Kim Peterson is the Manager of Content Strategy at LeanData where she digs deep into all aspects of the revenue process and shares her findings across multiple content channels. Kim's writing experiences span tech companies, stunt blogging, education, and the real estate industry. Connect with Kim on LinkedIn.
