Account Based Marketing
Content Marketing

Getting Started with ABM: ABM Program "Carve-Out"

He talked about three typical patterns for ABM deployment that we have seen.

1. Account-based tactics for a leads-based funnel
2. ABM program “carve-out”
3. Account-based demand generation

We have already talked about account-based tactics for a leads-based funnel, which tends to be the starting place for a lot of marketers because it is simply applying account-based marketing tactics to the top of an existing funnel. The ABM program “carve-out,” however, works with an alternative funnel.

Some marketers implement ABM by creating a separate account-based program for a subset of strategic accounts. This is what we call an ABM program “carve-out.” The subset for this kind of program is typically high-potential accounts or enterprise accounts. After creating the list of strategic accounts, usually between ten and a hundred accounts, marketers essentially begin using a separate funnel to market to the chosen accounts and measure their engagement.

As an example, our client Clarabridge, a customer experience software company, typically runs a lead-gen model using email marketing automation. With ABM, they created a list of key enterprise accounts to target, and they cataloged the accounts into industry segments. Then they ran inbound and outbound campaigns based on each specific industry segment. So they were able to target their key accounts with industry-specific images, terminology, and content. With this program, they added two additional industry segments every quarter.

As a result of their ABM program, they influenced 96 deals in their pipeline, which totaled to $24 million in revenue.

This second tactic allows you to run a full-fledged ABM program without the confines of the lead generation model on your strategic accounts, but with the challenge of managing both leads-based metrics and engagement metrics. Take a look at both the benefits and drawbacks of this second ABM tactic.

Benefits:

1. By targeting strategic accounts with this ABM program, marketers are able to shape the different buying experiences for accounts.
2. Marketers can really target and shape the buyer’s journey, but without having to entirely shut down an operational leads-based demand engine.

Drawbacks:

1. Since marketers who pursue this ABM tactic typically choose enterprise accounts, it can take a lot of time to see value from those kind of accounts. The problem then is that the program can outlive a marketer’s stay without having yet produced the long-term value.
2. Again, with two funnels, marketers have two sets of metrics to manage and communicate, which means getting visibility for the program from corporate can be difficult.

Stay tuned as we cover the details of the last tactic for marketers getting started with ABM.During FlipMyFunnel’s Virtual Engagement Bootcamp, CEO and co-founder here at Triblio, Andre Yee, presented about getting started with ABM, the question we are most frequently asked by marketers.

About the Author

Jason Jue

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