Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a clear-cut approach to winning enterprise-level business.

Every ABM initiative centers around a narrow list of high-profile accounts and readily eliminates low-value targets—which allows industry players to craft hyper-personalized experiences to enrich relevancy, engagement, and trust.

“Salespeople talk about accounts, they talk about customers… they don’t talk about leads. Salespeople think about how they’re going to win accounts in the first place, then how they’re going to keep and grow those accounts.” —Megan Heuer, Principal at HeuerB2B.
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Industry players justifiably focus less on individual leads and more on account-specific connections: research states that less than 1% of leads generate revenue for B2B companies.

Yet contrary to general belief, leads can fit into an ABM strategy. Only low-value leads will presumably falter ABM’s progress.

Why ABM Strategies Should Also Revolve Around Leads

While ABM is a highly-targeted effort to hem in top-tier accounts, its principles aren’t set in stone—they can be easily adapted to suit various B2B models.

“ABM doesn’t have to be a ‘this or that’ strategy,” as David Pyrzenski, Co-Founder at Stealth Mode, explains, “you can still incorporate leads into your account-based approach.”

Suppose a lead that visits your website expresses an active interest in your offering by watching a product demo. Another visitor fills in a form to request content (e.g. a white paper, webinar, or infographic) and shares the attributes of your existing high-value customers.

All these leads are “from a good-fit account [and] you should think of them as the equivalent of a Marketing Qualified Lead,” David Pyrzenski tells Terminus. More importantly, “switching to ABM filters out bad-fit leads,” he continues. This means that you will focus exclusively on accepted—and consequently, top-quality—leads.

It is true that a lead-based strategy differs from an account-based marketing plan. However, industry experts advise that making a complete transition to either approach is not necessarily an ideal move for every organization—at all times.

Focus on Your Ideal Target Account Leads, Not a Set-in-Stone Strategy

As you orchestrate an ABM plan that is finely-attuned to your most coveted target account leads, it’s important to know if you’re communicating with the right contacts.

All the lead generation tactics that consistently helped you replenish your pipeline and generate new business “lay the foundation for collecting first-party data that will fuel ABM,” reveals Aberdeen.

Vital information is hidden behind the piles of data you’re gathering, including the number of key decision-makers within each account, behavioral indicators of purchase intent, or account-specific interests that make hyper-targeted experiences possible.

Gain access to accurate data on your target account leads to amp up your ABM performance.

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