3 Steps to ABM for fast growth SMBs

For many businesses there is still a perception that a successful ABM approach is the strategy of choice for larger enterprise companies. There is also a concern that creating a campaign with a level of personalisation, segmentation and tailored content is simply too costly, too complex or too resource heavy for smaller organisations.

Thankfully, people are starting to understand that the principles of ABM can be easier to implement and generate greater success in a smaller, more agile company. So how can SMBs and ambitious, high growth businesses execute an ABM strategy in a way that doesn’t bring their Marketing to a standstill?

We dug a little deeper and sat down with Stewart Hayward, Marketing Director at Fiscal Technologies to get his take on implementing an ABM approach in a smaller, fast growth environment.

"We have absolutely moved to an ABM approach at Fiscal, and it's a key part of our 2022 Marketing strategy. Up until now Fiscal had taken a broad marketing approach. When I joined in 2021, I was told we had a finite number of potential accounts in a niche market – I wanted to see if that was true" explained Stewart. Read on to discover Fiscal’s approach in three easy to implement steps.

Step 1: Sales & Marketing alignment

For many companies, and not just smaller organisations(!), there is very often an internal disconnect between Sales & Marketing – an almost invisible wall between them. Having these two teams operating independently rather than in partnership is of course an unsustainable model, especially for those companies looking to drive growth. Taking an ABM approach relies heavily on both Sales & Marketing teams working in synergy to nurture buyer relationships successfully, to provide relevant and engaging content that supports the buyer journey at each stage, and to aid the decision-making process by creating a customised experience. Whether that's for individuals, for companies or target sectors.

Stewart describes how he worked with the sales team at Fiscal to create a collaborative way of working between Sales & Marketing. "I worked alongside our Sales Director to identify the gaps in terms of the tools we were using, the quality of communications we were pushing out and tightening the process from lead to customer. The key was helping Sales to understand that Marketing is there to support and deliver – we are all on the same side. As marketers we promised to stop passing across leads which were unqualified and not within target, we created a detailed validation process to make sure Marketing was adding value to the process as much as possible at each stage. And we took a conscious decision to fix a process that was fundamentally broken."

Step 2: Get serious about segmentation

1:1, 1: few or 1: many – how you decide to approach the market with ABM is really up to you. What works best for your organisation and size of target audience? If you have a small number of key accounts that you want to crack open, you can be as niche and as focused as possible.

Here's how Stewart tackled segmentation, "The first thing we did was to clear the chaos and get rid of any unusable data, we actually did away with the Salesforce leads system, then regionalised and cleaned all our data and rebuilt the marketing process as an essential part of the existing sales process. It's vital to have visibility of your actual viable market. We identified the most viable accounts that are firmly in our target market and started to market in a different way – not to mass data but to accounts owned by our salespeople".

Here's where the Sales & Marketing alignment really comes into play. Creating and designing key messaging and propositions for your target accounts which are aligned with the sales teams to make sure everyone is speaking the same language.

"We built a 15-stage cadence where we added our materials, our objections, factsheets, webinars and so on to build a journey that is industry specific to our target accounts. Having cleaned and profiled the data, we now know who we are talking to and we're really clear on our target personas. As a result, we shifted the persona we were targeting and have seen significant uplift in our efforts because our data is better quality, our messaging is more targeted and we are arming our sales team with key reference points for each stage of the journey".

Step 3: Work smarter

This is where smaller organisations have the jump on larger enterprises. ABM for SMBs can actually be easier because they are able to be more hands on, closer to the strategy and tactical delivery and can pivot fast according to what the process throws up. If the sales team needs a piece of content to support the conversations they are having, then Marketing is able to provide collateral creation as needed - and at a level of personalisation that works without long lead times or processes to navigate.

Stewart explains, "At Fiscal we can afford to be personalised because the number of interactions with our target market are relatively low compared to much bigger companies with greater reach. Smaller organisations can deliver ABM so much better – we don't need to operationalise everything; we can test, learn and eventually we can scale - but that's not our starting point. We can afford to communicate more completely with the Sales teams and have a more focused input on each opportunity and piece of content. We work as a team across Sales & Marketing, and we are all pulling in the same direction".

Top Tip!

We asked Stewart what his top piece of advice would be for SMBs looking to tackle ABM as part of their marketing strategy. He told us, "Find your starting point, and define your sweet spot, you don't have to go for 100 customers, in fact there's no reason you can't just do it with five. Think about the different roles everyone in your team plays in the process of supporting the buyer journey. The Sales team have their key contacts, but your senior people should be trying to connect with their counterparts, your CEO with the customer leaders; and Marketing should be connected to their Marketing teams and their social platforms. Create content for those particular personas. It doesn't have to be a complete pivot to ABM overnight, you can run your existing strategy in parallel and test the concept. Do what you can with the resource you've got".

About Fiscal Technologies: FISCAL Technologies is the leading provider of supplier risk intelligence solutions that empower progressive finance teams across the globe to protect organisational spend.