Freya Oxton-Grant
Sales and marketing alignment is all about getting your sales and marketing teams on the same page, working collaboratively to achieve the same goals. When both come together and support each other’s activities, you can achieve maximum efficiency and productivity, boosting your ROI and increasing revenue.
Aligning sales and marketing is also a key element that can improve the performance of your Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns. Powerful ABM campaigns rely on the same things that successful sales and marketing alignment produce - shared data, shared content, and highly personalised marketing.
In this article, we will discuss what ABM is and how sales and marketing alignment is a crucial element of improving the results it delivers for your building product business.
What is ABM?
Account-Based Marketing is a highly targeted and personalised way of conducting marketing campaigns. Your sales and marketing teams coordinate to pursue and convert specific accounts, whether that’s large construction companies or architectural practices, depending on what your building product is.
According to research by Itsma, 80% of marketers say ABM outperforms other marketing strategies significantly when it comes to ROI. This is widely felt throughout the marketing industry, with ABM’s popularity being on a steep incline in the past 5 years.
ABM swaps out short term lead-generation tactics for strategic and specific targeting of key accounts, whether new or existing customers. This results in your marketing team engaging already qualified leads, and sales only contacting purposely nurtured leads.
Why is Sales and Marketing Alignment Important for ABM?
Although it specifies marketing in the name, Account-Based Marketing relies on strong alignment between both your sales and marketing teams. You must both come together to decide the best course of action when it comes to:
- Which accounts to target?
- How best to communicate with them?
- Which marketing content to use?
After carefully selecting target accounts, marketing can run highly personalised campaigns specific to those clients. Knowing the exact buyer persona and company a prospect works for can perform wonders for your business’ conversion rates, and therefore, bottom line.
When it comes to ABM, it’s important that just not sales or marketing are the ones to call the shots – both teams need their valuable input to be considered to deliver a successful campaign. Whilst marketing may want to keep hold of the reins of the ABM horse, who better than sales to know what’s really happening out on the front line.
Your sales teams will have a more contextual understanding of the accounts you are targeting with your ABM and can help by giving input that can help to win over these clients, especially in the face of harsh competition.
And there you have the crux of sales and marketing alignment – each team can bring their expertise to the table, and when it comes to ABM sales can get involved with making sure marketing gets that personalised messaging exactly right.
In turn, this will maximise the engagement of prospects with your ABM campaigns, as the content will resonate better with them as the target account.
Conclusion
Powerful account-based marketing supports the generation of important one-to-one conversations with prospects instead of just one talking to many. For maximum benefits, sales and marketing must ensure the methodology, process, and terminology used to support these efforts is in alignment.
While sales and marketing alignment can be challenging, the results are well worthwhile, especially when it comes to creating ABM campaigns that deliver results.
Want to learn more about sales and marketing alignment for your building products or construction business? Read our Complete Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment here.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.