Forbes recently published an article in which Account Based Marketing (ABM) was mentioned as one of the B2B Demand Generation Trends to fuel your 2020 Marketing Strategy. They call it “a strategic approach that orchestrates personalised outreach across marketing, sales and customer success to drive engagement and revenue for a target set of accounts.”
Conversational ABM is an approach we, at LeadFabric believe will gain more traction in 2020. It’s not a gimmick, but a proven method for increasing engagement with your target accounts and creating more opportunities for your sales team.
Conversational ABM means you can create separate conversations for different customers and roll out the red carpet for your most targeted accounts. Instead of sitting back and waiting for conversations to happen, you reach out and initiate them. When your target prospects visit your website, that’s when you take action, because that’s the best opportunity for revenue your company has.
Using a conversational marketing solution like Drift, your sales team or sales development reps (SDRs) can receive push notifications as soon as stakeholders from your target accounts land on your website. That way, the owners of those accounts can jump into action and offer assistance immediately. What’s more, they can see exactly where those stakeholders are coming from and what content they were interacting with, which means account owners have a ton of context going into those conversations.
Of course, they can’t be expected to reach out every single time a stakeholder from a target account lands on your site. That’s why it’s important to set up personalized welcome messages for each of your account segments.
At LeadFabric, for instance, we built a Drift chatbot for a small campaign aimed at our major customers. Most of our accounts are large in size and while we maintain strong relationships with core teams, this campaign wants to create more awareness about LeadFabric’s offering in the wider organisation and generate cross-sell opportunities. To thank them for their business over the past year, we sent our major customers a jar of chocolates. If they wanted to order more sweets for their colleagues, we invited them to talk to our bot. The customer data we had collected over time in our MAP was uploaded to Drift before the bot went online. As soon as the first targeted accounts arrived on our home page, the personalized conversation started automatically.
By using language in your welcome messages that matches what stakeholders have already seen on your homepage, your ads or even a message sent with some chocolates, you’ll create a through-line that runs from the start of the campaign to the finish. For your target accounts, the buying experience will feel streamlined and cohesive.
For your account owners, meanwhile, life just got a whole lot easier, because you can now identify website visitors in real-time and use bots to schedule meetings and provide content recommendations for your target accounts 24/7 (even when their account owners are asleep or spending a day at the beach).
For companies that are serious about turning campaigns into actual pipeline for their sales team, bots can help make sure that no target accounts slip through the cracks and that no potential sales conversations go unheard. It’s not about replacing your human sales reps or SDRs, it’s about giving them the tools they need to do the best job possible.
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