Account Based Selling Using LinkedIn
Account Based Selling Using LinkedIn
Account based marketing is a great strategyfor MSPs to concentrate your marketing resources to target a particular set of named businesses within you overall market.
In other words, ask your CEO or sales director or your marketing team “Which accounts would you love to win?” It’s very likely these are the kinds of customers that are going to have the kinds of characteristics your business wants to serve. Perhaps it is in a market you understand particularly well like automotive, finance, legal, or manufacturing. Perhaps they are businesses that typically commit to high value contracts, or you know that they highly loyal to their provider. In any event, you understand their needs.
If you need help getting started with this process, your very first step should be to review my Creating Persona’s for MSPs that I published on our website. I’m sure you’ll find it helpful.
And also run through my suggestions for Developing Your Sales Teams LinkedIn skills.
And then you are then going to create apersonalized campaigns in LinkedIn to target those particular customers.
Why should you use Account Based Marketing?
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Your business will realise 3 distinctbenefits by implementing an Account Based Marketing strategy in Linkedin.
1. You will achieve a much higher returnon investment compared to other marketing activities. If you stop and think howmuch you spent attending exhibitions or sending out direct mail shots in thepost, I’m sure you would be surprised how high your cost per lead is.
2. Once you won a customer, yournext most important step is to retain your customers. Many business like yoursface what I call the leaky bucket. Youwin a new customer only to find that they leave you in a year or two. Using ABMwill ensure you are keeping in touch with your customers, and indeed always onthe look out to upsell or cross sell your services. Not only are yougaining additional revenue, but you’re reducing the risk of defectingcustomers.
3. And finally, and mostobviously, using ABM will help significantly to win new customers. Your salesteam think they need an every replenishing pool of leads into their salesfunnel. With ABM what you want to do is target fewer, better leads and ensurethe likelihood of winning them.
Because Account Based Marketing offers anumber of benefits it is worth starting the process by deciding which are yourtop priorities. Which one of these goalsdo you want to focus on?
1. Identifying the correctinfluencers and decision makers in the accounts you want to target.
2. Securing a greater number ofappointments and meetings
3. Accelerating your sales cycle
4. Growing revenues in yourexisting accounts
5. Reduce your customer churn, andpromote customer loyalty
One way to get started using Account Based Marketing on LinkedIn
Your first step is going to be to drilldown and start doing research to identify your key influencers anddecision makers using LinkedIn’s search facility.
I think it is useful to give you a liveexample. Let’s assume my company specializes in supporting businesses in thepharmaceutical sector. I’ve created mylist of companies I want to target, and top of the list is MorningsidePharmaceuticals.
Using the LinkedIn search facility, I’mgoing to find the Boots LinkedIn company page, go to the People tab.
Next, I’m to filter out just the employees that I want to be contacting in mysales and marketing strategy. I can search through the contacts using keywords,and I’m going to try the very broad, very simple keyword “IT.”
If you are using your free LinkedIn you canstill search by location and keyword, but LinkedIn premium does give you moresophisticated searching and the ability to see more profiles.
I’m not going to share the name of the Headof IT at this company, but I found him. And I’m able to see where he workedpreviously, where he went to university, what groups he belongs to, and eventhe Cisco courses he is accredited with.
If you have produced a useful white paper,are holding an interesting webinar, want to invite him to a golf day, here isyour chance to get acquainted with this indidividual by providing somethinguseful. You want to be building arelationship. This is not the time to start selling to him.
The LinkedIn secret weapon for Account Based Marketing
You can take the individual approach, butit is much more effective and powerful to use LinkedIn advertising to target theAccounts you want to work with.
LinkedIn advertising allows target yourspecific prospects using a wide range of criteria including
· Company name
· Job Title
· Industry Sector
· Company size
· Specific skills
Once you are ableto identify your account influencers and decision makers, then you need todecide what is going to be of interest to them. Personally I have found whatworks a treat is an invitation to exclusive event. I know other companies thatoffer a free health check on their systems, or a useful free whitepaper thatwill help them out.
Also keep in mind that LinkedIn advertisingoffers a number of great options to reach the specific individuals you have inyour plan. Website retargeting and email contact targeting are also hugelybeneficial ways of getting your message in front of your most desired target customers.
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So…what’s next?
If you found the whole idea of Account Based Marketing and Selling, I have lots more information I can share with you. Reach out and we can arrange an informa lchat.
