In this article
- What account-based marketing (ABM) is
- How ABM differs from inbound marketing
- How to build an ABM strategy in Life Sciences
- Key ABM tactics and tools
- How to measure ABM success and ROI
What is account-based marketing (ABM)?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach where marketing and sales teams collaborate to target and engage high-value accounts with personalised messaging and campaigns.
In Life Sciences, sales cycles are long, complex, and high value. Buyers often require customised solutions and involve multiple stakeholders in decision-making. For example, you may be looking for some custom reagents for optimizing a molecular diagnostic assay to work with your flagship PCR platform for the detection of respiratory viruses or perhaps some deep sequencing to help develop an automated method for virome profiling to advance HPV biomarker discovery and surveillance.
Why ABM is effective in Life Sciences?
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) can be a transformative strategy for B2B marketers looking to develop partnerships and deliver commercial success through deliberate engagement with their high-value accounts, and in situations where retention of specific customers is paramount to competitive dominance.
Using an Account-Based Marketing approach can lead to several key benefits, including:
- Higher conversion rates
- Increased ROI
- Better alignment between sales and marketing teams
- Enhanced customer relationships and loyalty
ABM vs inbound marketing: what’s the difference?
Which is more effective? In an ideal world you would want to run both approaches side-by-side, since inbound marketing essentially represents your long-tail marketing strategy and ABM is more of a bottom of the funnel activity from the outset. With inbound marketing, you’re relying on people finding you by searching for content or researching a certain topic. Your business would have to have produced content on that topic, showcasing knowledge and expertise, that all must be discoverable and rank high in SEO. Individuals then would have to have clicked through a form and go into your funnel, then once they’re in the funnel, another process engages, and so on. For most companies, that is not enough to fill a business pipeline quickly, so this is where an ABM approach can be used for higher impact in big leaps.
“ABM treats every account like a market of one. It’s about understanding each account’s unique pain points and tailoring your messaging and content to address them.” – Joe Chernov, Vice President of Marketing at InsightSquared
How to get started with ABM
To get started with account based marketing, start by identifying one specific customer or a small group of target accounts. Sometimes, one-to-one ABM is referred to as ‘strategic ABM’ and one to few is also called ‘ABM lite’. Getting buy-in from sales at this stage of the process will not only ensure alignment between sales and marketing, but as they are closer to the customer, you will get a good idea of what messaging will resonate with these accounts. Next, get a SWAT team of sales reps to pilot a test (using the tactics outlined below) with these accounts and measure their performance against established benchmarks. Once initial results indicate success, it becomes easier to garner support from senior leadership and expand adoption across the organization.
Core components of an ABM strategy
- Definition of clear goals and objectives.
- Alignment of sales and marketing efforts.
- Creation of personalized content and messaging following careful research and identification of your key account(s) to target.
- Designating a dedicated internal portal for ABM collateral for your key accounts.
- Leveraging data and analytics for targeting and measurement.
- Continuous refinement based on performance and feedback.
Pro tip: Develop a playbook that outlines standardized processes and best practices for executing ABM campaigns consistently across your organization.
Get executives’ buy-in and secure a sponsor within the business – ideally someone in Sales Operations, and if that’s not possible then a senior level executive in Sales, whom the reps will listen to. This will help you craft and deliver the most cohesive strategy for your business.
Common ABM mistakes to avoid
- Don’t skip the step of thoroughly researching and understanding the unique pain points and motivations of your target accounts. If you don’t do this part, it will result in ineffective messaging and missed opportunities and prevent you from building those relationships effectively. It will cause your whole Account-Based Marketing program to fail.
- Treating ABM as a standalone tactic without integrating it into your overall marketing strategy can lead to disjointed customer experiences and inconsistent messaging. In a lot of companies sales and marketing data often resides in separate platforms, it is important to interrogate all systems that house data on your key accounts, to build the most complete picture of them prior to engaging them.
- At the same time as setting up your first ABM experiment, remember to adapt your approach to the unique regulatory or compliance requirements of the industry, to avoid undermining trust and hindering engagement with your target accounts.
- Implementing ABM without establishing clear metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success can make it difficult to evaluate ROI and justify resource allocation.
How to select target accounts
Accounts are typically selected based on criteria such as revenue potential, strategic fit with your offerings, likelihood of conversion, and alignment with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Realistically, even if you don’t think you are doing ABM yet, chances are that if you have Key Strategic Accounts, you are already doing a form of Account-Based Marketing. Good data capture and insights as well as collaboration between sales and marketing teams are crucial to ABM success. The importance of this cannot be overstated- sales and marketing have to mutually identify the accounts that your company is going to go after. You will be wasting time, effort and money if marketing is spending significant resources on identifying and talking to specific customers, but those aren’t the accounts that the sales team is trying to sell to. In addition, ensure that other executives such as Head of Customer Services or Customer Success and Head of Product and the CEO are involved and informed.
“ABM is a strategic approach that requires alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success to deliver personalized engagement at scale.” – Sangram Vajre,
Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist at Terminus
Pro tips: Use predictive analytics to identify accounts with the highest propensity to convert and allocate resources accordingly. Involve key sales colleagues and other folk with commercial remits to achieve alignment before deploying any tactics.
A segmented list of your key target accounts is essential. Once your target accounts are grouped by whatever criteria makes most sense to your business (e.g. by technology implementation type, Technology Readiness Level (TRL), stage of the decision-making journey etc.) then you can begin outreach.
A 3-step ABM engagement model
- Awareness: deliver content that attracts attention and drives initial engagement. Examples of content at this stage depends upon your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP) to a large extent, but infographics, podcasts, social media, application-specific editorials and webinars always work well with scientist buyers.
- Engagement: provide deeper content such as case studies, FAQs and webinars.
- Conversion: drive actions such as demos, consultations, or proposals.
Mistake to avoid: Neglecting to update your ICP based upon evolving market dynamics and customer insights can lead to targeting outdated or irrelevant accounts.
ABM tools and technologies
ABM strategies within Life Science, MedTech and Biotech companies often leverage technologies such as:
- Marketing automation platforms for personalized outreach. Examples could be Marketo, Terminus and Hubspot.
- CRM systems for managing and tracking customer interactions. Examples could be Salesforce (Pardot/Marketing Cloud) Hubspot, Pipedrive or Zoho.
- Predictive analytics for identifying high-potential accounts. Examples could be LeadSpace, Everstring, 6sense or InsideView.
- Account-based advertising tools for targeted ad campaigns. You can consider LinkedIn Matched Audiences, Demandbase or Terminus for example.
- Content personalization and management systems. Examples include PathFactory, Seismic, OneSpot and others.
Pro tip: Integrate your ABM technologies to create a seamless experience for prospects and optimize campaign performance through data-driven insights.
Mistake to avoid: Investing in ABM technologies without ensuring they are compatible with your existing tech stack or without providing adequate training to your team can lead to underutilization and inefficiencies.
Effective ABM tactics
Some of the most effective tactics for ABM in our sector start with a tailored value proposition for each of your key account’s unique challenges. Of course, the next step is listing out who the key stakeholders are that you’d be reaching out to. Having a custom landing page with content that will appeal the most to your key accounts is very effective and engaging on platforms like LinkedIn by sharing personalized content and participating in discussions with your key stakeholders keeps you top of mind with them. Paid advertising can be used to deliver tailored ads to key individuals within your target accounts, and retargeting those who have shown an interest, could work well to help bring them to your customized landing pages.
Finally, while hosting targeted events and experiences for key accounts can be really lucrative, they can also take a ton of your team’s bandwidth to execute, so just bear that in mind when choosing your tactics.
Pro tip: Authentic interactions and diligent post-event follow-ups are crucial for building trust with key accounts. Use tools like Otter.ai to capture important conversations, but don’t underestimate the value of good record-keeping; your marketing and sales colleagues will love you for keeping accurate records.
Mistakes to avoid: Inconsistent outreach will hamper the effectiveness of your approach, since all relationships need consistent effort in order for them to thrive.
How many accounts should you target in ABM?
Most Life Sciences and Biotech companies focus on a small number of high-value accounts, often between 10 and 50, depending on deal size and resources.
How to measure ABM success
Success in ABM can be measured by looking at:
- Account engagement levels.
- Conversion rates and pipeline growth.
- Deal size and revenue generated from targeted accounts.
- Customer retention and lifetime value.
- Overall ROI on marketing investments.
We know from talking to other leaders in our sector, that in reality oftentimes, the metrics are not fully in place to support ABM activity. With inbound activity the metrics are usually more clearly defined and tracked e.g. demo requests, e-book downloads etc. With Account-Based Marketing you have to look at things a little differently. You’ll need to consider metrics that are rather more difficult to measure, such as:
Sales velocity: measures how quickly deals are moving through your sales pipeline and generating revenue. Sales velocity involves looking at four key parameters a) number of opportunities, b) average deal size, c) win rates, and d) length of sales cycle. The formula for measuring sales velocity is:
For example, if you have 50 opportunities, an average deal size of $10,000, a win rate of 20%, and a sales cycle length of 90 days, your sales velocity would be $1,111 per day:
- Sales cycle length: The time it takes to close the deal with ABM-targeted accounts compared to non-ABM accounts. CRM systems can track the duration of each sales cycle stage. But remember to take care in considering the complexity of deals when comparing sales cycle lengths, as more significant deals may naturally take longer to close.
- Pipeline growth: Measure the number and value of opportunities created within your target accounts. CRM systems can track opportunities and help visualize pipeline growth attributed to ABM efforts. Make sure you have a process for reviewing the progression of opportunities through different stages of the sales funnel to identify bottlenecks and optimize conversion rates. With Account-Based Marketing (ABM) in particular, make sure you are measuring the quality of opportunities and not just the quantity, to avoid a bloated pipeline with low-conversion prospects.
- Opportunity to close (O2C) rate: This is a crucial metric for assessing the effectiveness of your sales process, particularly in an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. It helps you understand how well your sales team is converting opportunities into closed deals and should be compared to the team’s normal O2C rate to ensure that your ABM program is actually working. The O2C rate can be calculated using this formula:
For example, if you had 50 opportunities created and 20 of them were closed in a given period, the O2C rate would be:
- Deal size & revenue: The average deal size and total revenue generated from ABM-targeted accounts. Use CRM systems to track deal sizes and attribute revenue accurately. Analyze the revenue contribution of ABM accounts over time to understand the long-term impact of ABM on your business growth. Be careful not to focus on deal size alone, consider also upsell and cross-sell opportunities, which can significantly boost what you’re reporting as resultant long-term revenue.
Pro tip: Implement closed-loop reporting between sales and marketing to attribute revenue and track the influence of your ABM efforts throughout the customer journey.
Mistakes to avoid: Failing to establish baseline metrics or benchmarks before launching ABM campaigns can hinder your ability to accurately gauge performance and make adjustments.
Over-reliance on vanity metrics, such as click-through rates or impressions, without correlating them to meaningful business outcomes like revenue generation, can mislead your assessment of ABM effectiveness.
“ABM is about delivering the right message to the right account at the right time, and that requires deep insights and personalized engagement strategies.”– Peter Isaacson, Chief Marketing Officer at Demandbase
How long does ABM take to deliver results?
ABM typically delivers results over longer timeframes than inbound marketing due to complex sales cycles, often taking several months to show measurable pipeline impact.
Is ABM suitable for all companies?
Now you might be thinking this all looks like a huge amount of work, and wondering if it is the sole domain of larger enterprises. Who doesn’t want an opportunity to be be able to say ‘We don’t need to worry about this, just yet’?
In fact, companies of all sizes can benefit from ABM because really, it is a way of focusing resources on high-potential accounts that align with business objectives. Smaller companies can start with a more focused approach and scale their ABM efforts as they grow. In most cases, even with big enterprises in our sector, you may only be looking at nurturing 50 or so of the largest accounts in this fashion.
Think of ABM like a tailored suit — impeccably designed to fit your key accounts perfectly, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach that leaves everyone looking baggy and unimpressed.
This quote says it perfectly:
“ABM is not a tactic, it’s a mindset. It’s about understanding who your best customers are, how they buy, and aligning your marketing and sales efforts accordingly.” – Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing
Understanding the nuts and bolts of strategic ABM and deploying the right tools and tactics can transform your marketing to sniper-precision. It’s about zeroing in on the targets that matter most and hitting them squarely between the eyes with messages and offers that resonate deeply.
Key takeaways
- ABM focuses on high-value accounts rather than broad audiences.
- It is particularly effective in Life Sciences due to long, complex sales cycles.
- Alignment between sales and marketing is critical.
- Personalised content drives engagement and conversion.
- Success should be measured using pipeline, revenue, and account engagement.
If you are looking to implement account-based marketing in Life Sciences, we can help you design and execute a structured ABM strategy, reach out today: hello@qincade.com
