In the previous article, we talked at length about the ABM methodology, its benefits, various ABM strategies, and how it can be clubbed with the good-old inbound for higher conversions.
Now, let’s talk about the real deal – implementing ABM using HubSpot!
Beginning with your ABM strategy in HubSpot
Strategizing your ABM in HubSpot begins with defining and configuring the default ABM properties, and using workflows, setting up tiers, and notifying sales teams on the fly. Since ABM is tied into the HubSpot CRM, all the account activity can be easily found on contact records.
But first — ICPs
Ideal Customer Profiles, or ICPs, make up the most critical part of any ABM strategy, so it makes sense to begin our discussion from here. Creating ICPs is a team effort, and should be done by both marketing and sales teams in collaboration. Then, it should be agreed upon by the stakeholders as well.
Think of an ICP as a buyer persona. It embodies all of the qualities that would make your potential customer the best fit for the solutions that your company provides.
Pro Tip: To come up with ICPs, think of various variables, like company budget, revenue, company size, number of employees, growth rate, number of decision-makers, and more.
ABM properties in HubSpot
HubSpot has created three primary properties that support ABM, which are responsible for populating data to your ABM dashboards, lists, reports, target accounts home, and account overview.
Buying Role
Buying Role is a contact property that helps in identifying the role that a particular contact plays during the entire sales process. In HubSpot, contacts can have multiple roles, and multiple contacts can share some common roles as well.
Target Account
This is a company property, and it identifies the company that you’re targeting as a part of your ABM strategy. It is a singular checkbox that tremendously simplifies your life in terms of reporting, your target accounts home view, and more.
ICP Tiers
ICP Tiers is another company property, and it categorizes how closely a particular company matches your ICP in three tiers. Tier 1 companies are the ones that are a great fit for your products/services. Tier 2 companies are slightly less compatible than Tier 1, and Tier 3 is even more low priority.
Pro Tip: ICP Tiers are meant to help you set priorities and categorize your potential customers. However, if you’re working with just a few select accounts, set the tier to 1 and table the rest until you need them.
Utilizing HubSpot Workflows for ABM
Whether you start from scratch or use HubSpot’s predefined workflow templates, you will have the ability to fully customize and create automate workflows that suit your sales cycle. Here are some templates that you can check out.
ICP Tier Setting: HubSpot does have a template for this, but you can use custom workflows and automatically set tiers based on your needs and criteria. It will save you one step and make the tiering less manual and cumbersome!
Lead Nurturing: At its core, ABM is a strategy that focuses on high-value content. This content will fall into various stages of the buyer’s journey (check below). Whatever be the piece of content, it will most definitely fall into one of these categories.
So, once a lead converts, you can use marketing automation and nurture your leads, and make them prepared for engaging with sales!
Account & Sales Notifications: Using marketing automation, you can notify your sales team based on ABM activities like highly engaged target account activity or buying role conversions. Pretty much like a Marketing Qualified Lead, you’re first thinking about what constitutes a sales-ready target account or lead, and then making relevant moves related to sales when the time is right!
ABM integrations on HubSpot
With HubSpot, you can integrate several tools to overhaul your ABM strategy and make the most out of it. These are the tools that will essentially comprise your marketing tech stack. Here are some of the important ABM integrations present with HubSpot:
Slack
Slack is one of the go-to tools for collaboration for both marketing and sales teams. The Slack and HubSpot integration has many features that can help your ABM strategy, including:
- Entering a /hs-report-company Slack command to immediately receive metrics and figures on a particular target account.
- Creating company-based or deal-based Slack channels and managing them through a HubSpot workflow.
- Sharing notes in HubSpot to Slack immediately during a meeting or any discussion call!
Creating ad campaigns is one of the more important components of an ABM (and especially, LinkedIn marketing) strategy. By creating your LI ads to HubSpot, you can create a company list audience to automatically sync companies from your target accounts or a specific company profile tier to the matched audience on LinkedIn. Easy peasy!
Vidyard
80% of video marketers say video has directly helped increase sales.
One of the more famous video platforms to integrate directly with HubSpot to further your ABM efforts is Vidyard. There, you can easily create, track, and insert personalized videos into your emails and HubSpot landing pages. Here are a few key uses of this integration:
- Easy embedding of videos anywhere
- Creating in-video call-to-actions and linking to web pages, blog posts, pricing pages, or any other pillar page.
- Generating video transcripts automatically, and improving accessibility and SEO.
- Providing product demos, client testimonials, marketing videos, and more.
HubSpot ABM Reporting and Dashboards
Reporting is a crucial part of any ABM strategy, and like inbound reporting, you can expect dashboards and templates available by HubSpot to support your ABM efforts as well. Simply start with HubSpot’s ABM dashboard template, and you’ll get nine out of the box reports that focus on solving your queries around your ongoing ABM campaigns and provide a better understanding of its success (or lack thereof).
Reports included in this dashboard are:
- Ideal customers
- Target accounts by page views
- Buying role by target account
- Contacts created at target accounts monthly
- Contact source report by target account
- Contact lifecycle stage by target account
- Deal stage by target accounts
- Target accounts by active deal amount
How much does HubSpot’s ABM software cost?
If all of this has sounded great so far, you’ll likely be wondering the cost of this whole deal. HubSpot has released all the tools for ABM under Marketing Hub Professional and Sales Hub Professional products.
As you can see, a majority of the new ABM tools are shared between Marketing Hub and Sales Hub, so you may want to consider access for both.
Here’s the breakdown from the Hubs.
Check out – Inbound Marketing Agency
Wrapping it up
We hope this two-part series was able to provide you insights on ABM, how does it differ from inbound, and how to implement ABM using HubSpot. Feel free to explore the various features that HubSpot ABM offers, and remember to opt for this strategy only if it’s right for you. If you have any questions that you’d like us to answer, please drop us a comment below!
If you’re still struggling with understanding some nuances, reach out to us, we’ll talk it out!
