Craig Rosenberg, Co-Founder of TOPO HQ, shares actionable thoughts on delivering highest converting first meeting for enterprise sales, marketing, and sales development teams.

Custom Content Plays Deliver The Highest Converting First Meetings

What is the overall goal of Account-Based Marketing? The entire theme of Account-Based Marketing is Instead of sending horizontal white papers, you want to reach out to prospects using ways that say “we’ve done research on you and we’d love to talk to you about it”. This is an offer and of interest to the prospect, since it will be in their best interest to explore the information you give them when initially reaching out. This is for full custom and highly targeted types of accounts.

This seems like a lot of work; will a marketing team create a base template for this type of report and it then is it the SDR’s responsibility to fill in the details for each account? Marketing should create a template for this (this is marketers “forte” – example below) – Marketers should show the SDR’s the “X” number of sections they need to fill in for each account and how they should collect that information. The marketing team should set it up so it’s easily customizable by anyone, whether an SDR or member of the sales team. Either way, marketing should be the ones to create the customizable template.

Ideal Background of a Marketer Creating Custom Content Plays

Who is the right marketer to hire for this type of role to create the account based marketing reports/templates? The Account-Based movement has been a reconnaissance for marketers – this is bringing back the actual “art-related” components of marketing. What most companies do is they have a Pursuit Marketer OR Account-Based marketer who is in charge; they might use creative resources such as agencies but you want to have someone who is not all quantitative and has a history of creating campaigns. You need people that have created things that require art and not just the science/analytics behind marketing. Traditional marketing roles are now re-emerging – field marketing is being re-named into “Account-based” for some organizations. These people are in charge of Account-Based and their backgrounds combine both creative and demand-generation, with a slight history in event marketing of well. The key takeaway is to have someone with a mix of art and science.

Example of Account-Based Marketing in Action:

Below is an Account-Based report that a BI analytics company used to target pharmaceutical prospects To narrow it down they chose a division within each prospect, which is really smart – with custom campaigns, the more you can narrow it down the more conversations you’ll see. This BI company went after the diabetes division and created a report using their products on diabetes – the focus wasn’t about the medical issue but instead of focusing on other the brands/competitors in the space. They made a report that had names of brands in the space – this changes the conversation from “Let’s meet so I can sell you something” to “this is your job to find out what I have” (i.e. the competitive intelligence the BI company is handing them for free. The BI company created these reports (example below), which can be created at scale, and put all of their marketing and ABM advertising and all SDR outreach into this effort. Their reps we’re reaching out to diabetes divisions within pharmaceutical companies to say “We have this report, take it, you don’t have to fill out a form or anything – we just want you to have this. And then we can talk about it.” The BI company has given the prospect this value, since its an analytical report about the prospect – and this is especially true for the ones that finish third or fourth in the brand ratings – these are the ones that want to understand how you came up with your numbers. This brings a lot of focus and a lot of meetings on the table.

The overall goal of Account-Based marketing is to get the first meeting to talk about something valuable/relevant to their business and then they ask “tell us more about how we can work together.”