Published:

02/22/2019 06:50pm

Essential Tools for ABM Strategy in Wealth Management

If you have been reading our articles in this Account-Based Marketing series, you are now familiar with what ABM is and the steps you need to take to implement this type of strategy. Part of the process to launch an ABM program is to first ensure that you are fully educated and prepared for strategy implementation. Next, you will need to determine the right platform, software, and technology to use to support your organization and teams. We cover this in our previous posts.
In summary, wealth management firms and financial advisory businesses stand to benefit from learning more about – and implementing – account based marketing in their business. This method of personally targeting your audience for custom messaging and engagement is a great way to show your clients and potential clients that you care, and are the trusted advisor with whom they want to do business.
Outlined below are our recommendations for resources and tools for financial service and wealth management organizations to explore as they begin their ABM strategy implementation.
ABM Education and Certification
FlipMyFunnel is a great resource to broaden your ABM knowledge. The website offers a variety of materials, including an Account Based Marketing Crash Course, a survey report, and a podcast. All of these resources are free and include helpful statistics from their users to illustrate the value of ABM. In addition, FlipMyFunnel offers over 200 lessons through their ABM University for $499 – a great skills development opportunity for your team. This is a valuable investment to make for anyone involved in the ABM implementation as they will have the opportunity to “learn how to drive revenue by implementing ABM in their organization and earn a vendor-agnostic ABM certification” (FlipMyFunnel).
Demandbase is another website that provides a wide array of learning materials. Their free resources include ebooks, webinars, and videos, or you can take a look at their blog to read about specific ABM and B2B marketing topics. In addition to these materials, Demandbase offers an ABM certificate upon the completion of online courses or classes in Boston. Also, you may want to keep in mind that Demandbase is not only an educational resource, but it also provides software solutions specifically for ABM analytics, engagement, and management.
Finally, an essential website to review as you educate yourself about ABM is Terminus. They offer amazing content to guide any size company through creating an ABM strategy or learning the ins-and-outs of ABM from the beginning to the end. No matter the experience level, there is a framework under their ABM Resources for every business. There is an introductory set of resources that explain what ABM is, an overview of 7 different strategies, and an ebook to plan, build, and measure ABM success. In addition to this beginner’s guide, the Terminus blog shows various different tips and tricks for ABM in video and article form. With this wide array of free resources, your ABM team can be at ease while planning a new strategy and kicking-off their new project.
ABM Software and Solutions
Although Terminus and Demandbase are listed as educational resources, they are also major players in the ABM platform arena. These software solutions solely exist to support your ABM strategy with features like audience management of target accounts and funnel progress measurement tracking. Terminus boasts that they are “your end-to-end solution for identifying and prioritizing target accounts, engaging them with a multichannel approach, activating sales for targeted outreach, and reporting on your ABM programs to every level of the business” (Terminus). Meanwhile, Demandbase claims to be an effective, easy, and comprehensive platform that lets you define your account audiences, identify the interests of decision-makers, and target key contacts with personalized experiences.
Both of these ABM platforms include so many useful and beneficial features, it is hard to choose between them. However, it is important to note that an ABM platform works best when used with a CRM and marketing automation solution, so you will need to keep integration with your other technology in mind.
CRM Platforms
A customer relationship management (CRM) platform is one of the best tools that you can use in addition to your ABM software. A CRM allows your company to manage customer interactions – and for ABM, this is very important to track for each target account to ensure they are being properly communicated with in a timely and appropriate manner. Your CRM platform can also store key information about contact history as well as all of the communications between the ABM team and the account as a whole.
The most well-known CRM option out there is Salesforce. This robust solution has many standard modules set up for any company looking to track their customers, accounts, and contacts as well as can be customized for each organization within the developer’s console. Salesforce is also set up to seamlessly integrate with Demandbase for ABM and it’s proprietary marketing automation tool, Pardot. The one drawback to this software is that it is an investment.
If you are small firm and looking for a free CRM solution, you may want to check out Hubspot. They offer many great features in their platform like pipeline management, activity logging, and live chatting capability. The platform also integrates with Terminus to directly trigger ABM campaigns within the CRM software.
Finally, Pipedrive is a powerful, affordable CRM platform that is focused on activity-based selling. Meaning, you have full visibility and control of the sales pipeline, customer communications, and metric reporting. Best of all, Pipedrive strives to provide its end users with a simple, intuitive interface that will save you a great deal of time when setting it up for your organization as well as during daily usage.
Marketing Automation Tools
One of the last tools needed to complete your tech stack for ABM strategy implementation is a marketing automation solution. This software will save your team a lot time by automating emails and messages to be sent to contacts at a specific account. Another feature of marketing automation is that you are able to customize subsequent actions based on the responses from recipients. This makes the messages much more personalized and relevant. Regardless if the messages are being set ahead of time or going to a broad audience, marketing automation platforms allow you to customize the subject line, recipient name, inline content and more.
As previously mentioned, Pardot is a great marketing automation option as it integrates with Salesforce and Demandbase. The image below illustrates how this three-way software solution would operate.
Source: Invado Solutions
Hubspot was also mentioned as a CRM tool, however, they also offer a marketing automation solution that is not a part of their free solution but they do have many pricing options to choose from.
Remember, to get started, the value of your software and tools is increased if you properly research each option to make sure it is right for you. Ensure that you are thoroughly vetting your platform options by examining their usability for your sales team as well as their integration capability among each other and your existing tools.