Top Tools To Support Your ABM Strategy

Is your tech stack setting you up for ABM success? To have a successful ABM strategy, you’ll need a tech stack that supports your efforts and goals. We’ve identified a few of our favorite  tools that can help take your ABM program to the next level. Read on for the top tools to support your ABM strategy.

Why ABM?

When implemented successfully, ABM can be key to your company's overall revenue growth. In fact, MarketingProfs research shows that companies that have account-based marketing strategies have seen 208% growth in their marketing revenue. ABM can help you with:

• Account Targeting - ABM enables marketers to target best-fit accounts most likely to convert.
• Personalization - ABM allows marketers to take a very personalized approach to their target accounts with messaging, content, and timing catered to each account's needs.
• Sales Alignment - ABM encourages alignment between marketing and sales teams as they work together to target and identify accounts.
• Results - ABM can provide a higher return on investment than traditional marketing approaches. According to The ABM Leadership Alliance, 76% of marketers shared that their ROI from ABM was significantly or somewhat higher than from traditional marketing initiatives.

What are the top tools for account-based marketing?

Now that we’ve covered why ABM is so awesome, let’s break down the tools you’ll need to add to your tech stack to support your ABM goals. Tools for ABM consist of full-suite ABM platforms, intent data sources, data enrichment tools, prospecting tools, marketing automation, CRM, gifting platforms, and more.

ABM Tool #1: Intent Data

According to Foundry, intent data is information that captures a person’s digital behavior and provides insight into their interests, needs, and purchase intentions. It can include data such as website visits, search terms, content downloads, social media activity, and more. When added to your tech stack, intent data can be a powerful tool to help marketers get a better understanding of where their buyers are in the purchase journey and what they need to create a personalized experience.

Here are a few intent data tools to use in your ABM strategy:  

Foundry Intent

Foundry Intent captures online research, social interactions, event participation, hiring activity, company initiatives, and more—giving your revenue teams unparalleled insight.  

Foundry’s proprietary approach to generating intent data leverages thousands of buyer intent signals from various types of disparate data sets. Normalizing these complex and often incongruous data to understand the signal through the noise is the work of a robust team of engineers and advanced machine learning experts. Foundry, formerly IDG, has acquired multiple martech and data analytics companies and hired top talent to build the most robust intent data set available to B2B tech marketers globally.  

Bombora

Bombora is a B2B company that specializes in intent data offerings. Bombora's intent data identifies which accounts are researching intent topics related to your business, products, and services. It scores these signals to then help sales and marketing teams prioritize target accounts, customize their conversations with them, and optimize marketing efforts. Bombora delivers its greatest value to organizations with 100+ employees. Bombora integrates with various ABM platforms including 6sense, Terminus, Demandbase, and Triblio.

G2 Buyer Intent

G2 Buyer Intent is a feature of the G2 platform which is a B2B software review website that allows users to research, compare, and buy software. G2 Buyer Intent shows you which companies are researching your category, your profile, and comparing you with your competitors. You can integrate these intent signals across your stack, powering your demand strategy with accounts that convert.  

ABM Tool #2: CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Systems

CRM (customer relationship management) systems can be used to support your ABM strategy in many ways. CRM is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. When integrated into an ABM strategy, your CRM platform can be a powerful tool to aid in account targeting, personalization, and sales acceleration.  

Check out 5 ways to leverage CRM data in your ABM strategy.

Here are a few CRM systems you could use in your ABM strategy:  

HubSpot

HubSpot is probably best known for its wide CRM and Marketing Automation platform (MAP) capabilities. HubSpot’s CRM platform not only allows users to track customer relationships but also aligns sales and marketing teams by facilitating marketing, sales, and service processes. HubSpot allows integration with other ABM tools, like Triblio, to deliver an even more seamless experience. Users like HubSpot for CRM and MAP due to its high availability of training materials and avid communities, making onboarding into the platform a breeze.

🔌See why Triblio users love the Hubspot integration for their ABM efforts.

SugarCRM

SugarCRM is a powerful, customizable, and flexible customer relationship management (CRM) solution that offers an intuitive user experience and robust collaboration features. Its open-source architecture allows for limitless customization options, while its analytics dashboard gives users actionable insights into customer data that can be used to create more personalized customer service and stronger customer relationships.  

Triblio syncs with SugarCRM to support list building, predictive scoring, ROI reporting, and prioritizing accounts for sales. Triblio is the only ABM provider that integrates directly with SugarCRM, enabling you to seamlessly connect your go-to-market motion- triggering actions and leveraging data in SugarCRM.

Salesforce

Salesforce is the CRM system most widely used by businesses of all sizes to manage their customer interactions. Salesforce is highly customizable, allowing businesses to tailor the platform to their specific needs and workflows. Integrating Salesforce with your ABM strategy can enable list building, predictive scoring, ROI reporting, and prioritizing accounts for sales.

ABM Tool #3: Gifting Platforms

Gifting is a great tactic for personalizing your buyers’ and customers’ experiences - a crucial element of account-based marketing. Gifting helps delight prospects and customers, as well as to drive actions such as demo requests, enrollments in customer education courses, and software reviews.  

💡 Here are a few gifting tools to use in your ABM strategy:  

ReachDesk

Reachdesk enables B2B companies to deliver the moments that matter at scale through data-driven direct mail and gifting. Through Reachdesk, companies can deliver gifts and direct mail to build deeper connections with customers, prospects, and employees at the click of a button. Users appreciate Reachdesk’s ease of use, easy setup, and quality support. Reachdesk touts global support and gift availability and guaranteed ROI.  

Sendoso

Sendoso, the leading Sending Platform, allows users to connect with customers and drive revenue with personalized gifts, branded swag, eGifts, virtual experiences, and more. As the leading sending platform, Sendoso offers more integrations than its competitors. With a wide catalog of gift options and robust integrations, Sendoso is well suited for at-scale gifting strategies.  

Alyce

Alyce is redefining direct mail and swag as the intelligent, AI-enabled “revenue impact” gifting platform that sales, marketing, and customer teams use to send gifts people want to open doors, spark conversations that keep them top of mind, and continue to add value for prospects and customers—at scale—accelerating the entire buying cycle. A feature that sets Alyce apart is the ability to allow gift recipients to exchange chosen gifts or donate their value to charity.

ABM Tool #4: Marketing Automation Platforms

MAPs (Marketing Automation Platforms) are a valuable tool for implementing ABM strategies. MAPs help account-based marketers automate processes such as lead nurturing, segmentation, and personalized messaging. Using a MAP you can also automate tactics as part of ABM campaigns, and pass lists of leads or accounts into campaigns and reports.

💡 Here are a few Marketing Automation tools to use in your ABM strategy:  

HubSpot  

With HubSpot, all your marketing tools and data are on one easy-to-use, powerful platform. You’ll save valuable time and get all the context you need to provide a personalized experience that attracts and converts the right customers at scale. Plus, marketers can keep data at the center of everything they do because Marketing Hub is built as part of the HubSpot CRM platform. When using the full CRM platform, marketers can achieve unparalleled alignment with sales to prove ROI and validate investments.

Marketo

Adobe Marketo helps marketing teams be the drivers of demand and growth in their companies by delivering exceptional experiences in concert with sales at every stage of the customer journey. Adobe Marketo helps companies bring together the customer data, content, automation and analytics needed for marketing and sales to coordinate engagement with customers that’s personalized and measurable at every touchpoint - and do it with efficiency and scale. Users of Marketo categorize it as powerful but with a learning curve compared to alternatives such as HubSpot.

Pardot

Pardot is a software as a service (SaaS) marketing automation platform by Salesforce. Pardot creates a single source of truth by aligning marketing and sales around a unified view of all interactions, helping all teams engage with relevance to build strong relationships with B2B buyers and accounts. With features like CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, account-based marketing, and ROI reporting – marketing and sales teams are empowered to work together to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles, and track marketing ROI.

ABM Tool #5: Sales Engagement

A sales engagement tool is a software platform that enables sales professionals to automate and optimize their sales outreach activities. When aligning marketing and sales on an ABM strategy, sales engagement tools are a vital integration to utilize in your tech stack. Sales engagement tools can help your sales team with multichannel personalized outreach, enrollment into cadences, and sales activations.

Here are a few Sales Engagement tools to use in your ABM strategy:  

Salesloft

Salesloft is a sales engagement platform that helps sales teams to connect with their customers and prospects more effectively. The Modern Revenue Workspace™ by Salesloft is the one place for sellers to execute all of their digital selling tasks, communicate with buyers, understand what to do next, and get the coaching and insights they need to win. Though it has fewer features than Outreach, some users consider Salesloft easier to use.

Outreach.io

Outreach is a sales engagement platform that helps sales reps to engage with prospects and customers across multiple channels, including email, phone, social media, and text messaging. From prospecting to deal management to forecasting, Outreach leverages automation and artificial intelligence to help revenue leaders increase efficiency and effectiveness of all go-to-market activities and personnel across the revenue cycle. More than 5,500 companies, including Zoom, Siemens, Okta, DocuSign, and McKesson depend on Outreach to power their revenue organizations. Users enjoy Outreach’s wider feature set, but some find the integration challenging.  

ABM Tool #6: Sales Intelligence Tools  

Used in tandem with sales engagement tools, sales intelligence tools equip sales reps with data and resources to close more deals.  
 

Here are some top sales enablement tools to use in your ABM strategy:

Cognism

Cognism is a company that provides a suite of sales acceleration tools that help businesses find and engage with potential customers. Cognism's products and services use artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to help clients automate the process of lead generation and lead qualification. Cognism helps businesses connect with prospects by providing premium contact, company, and event information, including firmographics, technographics, sales trigger events, intent data, verified business emails, and phone-verified mobile numbers.  

Gong

Best known for hosting sales call recordings, Gong is a company that provides an AI-powered revenue intelligence platform for sales teams. Gong's platform uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze and capture sales conversations, emails, and other customer interactions in real-time. The patented Gong Revenue Intelligence Platform™ empowers customer-facing teams to take advantage of their most valuable assets – customer interactions, which the Gong platform automatically captures and analyzes. Gong then delivers insights at scale, empowering revenue and go-to-market teams to determine the best actions for winning outcomes.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a subscription-based tool offered by LinkedIn that allows sales professionals to search for, identify, and engage with potential customers on LinkedIn. It provides advanced features and filters that help salespeople to find the right leads more efficiently. The tool is designed to help sales teams to identify and target potential customers by providing access to LinkedIn's extensive database of business professionals. Sales Navigator provides advanced search filters to help sales teams narrow down their search results by factors such as company size, industry, location, job title, and more. Sales Navigator is a great tool for individuals to use to get insights on their prospects, but somewhat lacks robust integrations for at-scale use cases.

Apollo.io

Apollo is a sales intelligence tool best known for its ability to enrich contacts and accounts. Sales and marketing teams can use Apollo to build lists for advertising and cold outreach in tandem with their ABM platforms and sales engagement platforms. Apollo's B2B Database includes over 260M contacts and 60M companies with robust and accurate data. Teams leverage Apollo’s Engagement Suite to scale outbound activity and sequences effectively. Apollo also offers an Intelligence Engine with recommendations and analytics to help sellers close deals.

ABM Tool #7: ABM Platforms

We saved the most important tools for last. What might be the most important part of your ABM strategy is of course the ABM platform you decide to power your programs with.

Triblio  

Okay - we might be a little biased here. But don’t take our word, see what Triblio users are saying on G2 and why we were voted a leader across 8 categories plus awarded the fastest implementation, and highest user adoption rate. Triblio’s Account-Based Marketing (ABM) platform orchestrates marketing and sales campaigns at every stage of the purchase journey. In a single platform, Triblio combines account-based advertising, web personalization, and sales activation features to orchestrate campaigns across multiple channels. These campaign tools and analytics run on a proprietary AI-powered purchase intent engine that scores account interest during the buying journey. With Triblio, customers can orchestrate ABM campaigns to grow awareness, engagement, and pipeline within their target accounts. Users cite the wider suite of ABM features and the integrations with other tools such as HubSpot as differentiators for Triblio.

6sense

6sense’s ABM platform works to reinvent the way organizations create, manage, and convert pipeline to revenue. 6sense Revenue AI captures anonymous buying signals, targets the right accounts at the ideal time, and recommends the channels and messages to boost revenue performance. Removing guesswork, friction and wasted sales effort, 6sense empowers sales, marketing, and customer success teams to significantly improve pipeline quality, accelerate sales velocity, increase conversion rates, and grow revenue predictably. 6Sense users cite the ability to ’get the most out of their existing customer data’ as a differentiator for 6sense.  

Demandbase

The Demandbase ABM platform uses Account Intelligence, rich and reliable account-level insight, to help you orchestrate sales and marketing moves and inject relevance into every stage of the B2B buying journey. You'll get a single pane of glass that connects every source of intelligence and insight — and every sales and marketing play — so you spot opportunities earlier, engage with them more intelligently, and close deals faster. Demandbase users cite Demandbase’s account matching as a differentiator.  

💚Bonus (And Free) Tool

We thought to include a few bonus tools to add to your tech stack, even better, they’re free!

Pipeline Velocity Calculator

Triblio's Pipeline Velocity Calculator is a tool to help you make smart budget and strategy decisions.  

Pipeline velocity is a metric used by go-to-market teams to measure the speed at which opportunities move through the stages of a sales pipeline. It is typically calculated by taking the total value of closed deals in a given period of time and dividing it by the number of days it took to close those deals. This gives an average velocity for the pipeline, which can be used to track the performance of the sales team and identify areas where improvement can be made to the sales process. Additionally, pipeline velocity can be used to forecast future revenue. We wanted to make calculating pipeline velocity easy and fast, which is why we created this calculator free for you to use whenever.  

IntentBot

Foundry’s IntentBot is a free intent data tool that allows users to see a snapshot of accounts showing intent by simply entering a website domain and selecting a topic. IntentBot also enables users to request IntentBot reports to see up to 100 companies showing intent in a shareable PDF.

Conclusion

Setting yourself up for ABM success starts with your toolbox, since your strategy can only be as good as your execution allows. Maybe you already use some of these tools in your tech stack, or maybe you are looking to add some. This only scratches the surface of all the possibilities ABM and integrations can create. Nadia Davis, Director of Revenue Marketing and an expert at setting tech stacks up for ABM success says,  “If you follow the integration strategy where it’s a holistic ecosystem of every tool integrating with everything else that is around it - this is like 90% of your success.” Want more? Check out our list of Top Tools for BDRs. Or want to talk to an ABM expert to learn more about ABM integrations? Book a meeting with Triblio.

‍