Something all B2B marketing and sales teams have in common is an abundance of CRM data and challenges around how to make the most of it. Also, the pain of CRM data hygiene, but that’s a topic for another time. There are so many ways to leverage your CRM data—especially in Account Based Marketing (ABM). Here’s some of the top ways we see marketing and sales teams using CRM data to move the needle on pipeline and revenue.
Top 5 Ways to Leverage Your CRM Data for ABM
1. Customer Retention and Expansion
As budgets continue to be tight in 2023, it’s more important than ever to make sure current customers are at the center of the organization and well cared for. Two fantastic ways to leverage CRM data with your ABM program are retention and expansion.
Retention is a great use for ABM where you are able to set triggers based on CRM opportunity renewal dates and ensure the months leading up to those dates include automated ad air cover to key influencers in the organization, customized website experiences to ensure white-glove service is being provided, and intent monitoring to get ahead of any competitive research that may be happening behind the scenes.
Expansion is another area that ABM can be utilized to generate upsell and cross-sell opportunities. A good ABM solution is able to cross reference current product use and divisions in an organization and then monitor intent for activity outside of this. This is a great opportunity to target new divisions in a current customer that is showing intent and might not know you are already an approved vendor, or similarly, give the ability to proactively offer additional support on areas of research falling outside the current engagement.
2. Pipeline Aircover
Another strong use of Account-Based CRM data is in creating highly personalized aircover programs for pipeline accounts. Not only should a strong ABM tool be able to feed actionable insights to the sales rep about account and contact activity, competitive research, and new contacts to engage, but should be able to automate engagement with those prospects. A great way to do this is to orchestrate multi-stage campaigns based on opportunity stages in the CRM where the platform can target and engage key stakeholders in early stages, then expand to executive and procurement coverage as the deal progresses forward. This can even move beyond advertising aircover and include customized landing pages, personalized website experiences across the team, and even connection to email!
3. Alignment Around Unified Data
Demand Generation is one of the most common uses for ABM, but if poorly aligned to sales, can often result in low conversion or regression into basic “MQL” programs. A better approach is to feed data from ABM programs into fields and dashboards in CRM while pulling sales updates back into the ABM platform to keep coverage of both teams closely aligned. An excellent way of doing this is to feed account and contact updates to CRM fields that can automatically prioritize important outreach and follow-up based on engagement while also syncing messaging between marketing outreach and sales follow-up around the same points of interest. This allows for a unified experience between channels and reduction of the common dissonance that so often drives low responses.
4. Stale Lead and Lost Deal Re-engagement
The fourth area where CRM data can be greatly leveraged in ABM is in re-engagement programs. Most CRM databases are heavily bloated with stale leads and lost or churned deals. These are ripe opportunities for intent monitoring and re-engagement targeting. Heavily introducing your brand, messaging, and content to cold prospects daily has been proven effective in driving strong upticks in consumption, responsiveness, and conversion, or in many cases, keeping a lost deal interested until they are back in a buying cycle and ready to engage again. Lead or opportunity status can be fed to ABM audiences for tracking and targeting, while signals of fresh activity can trigger new prioritization and follow-up from sales.
5. Email Marketing Segmentation
Another way to make the most of your CRM data is to influence your email marketing. There’s a lot of rich information about current and prospective customers. It’s an opportunity to divide the data based on account-level information or personas, then write nurture emails that best fit the audience. There’s also a lot of account data that can determine whether your product/service dominates a specific industry and you can prioritize content based on that information.
CRM + ABM = Winning Combination
To wrap things up – there are so many ways to leverage your CRM data, especially to boost your ABM programs. The use of CRM data is also a great way to connect sales and marketing teams. It’s easier to connect over common ground, and being data-driven is often the best foundation for marketing and sales to come together.
SugarCRM partners with Triblio, so you can integrate your CRM data and execute ABM programs. Triblio’s ABM platform orchestrates marketing and sales campaigns at every stage of the purchase journey. It 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. To learn more about Triblio, a Foundry company, visit www.triblio.com
