What is ABM and why it is introduced?
Salesforce on June 8th 2017 announced Einstein Account-Based Marketing (ABM) solution built using artificial intelligence platform. ABM is an end-to-end B2B marketing solution. It facilitates the marketing and sales professionals to emphasize on the valuable accounts, personalized campaigns and readily engage with their customers to improve sales funnel by converting the hottest leads into business.
What issues are encountered by sales and marketing professionals?
When it comes to B2B companies they are highly tilted towards account-based marketing. This is because, they have less amount resources allocated to their imperative sales opportunities. Usually, sales and marketing data, tools and process within these companies are not integrated uniformly. This results into poor communication and collaboration between teams which impedes the entire lifecycle. At the end, teams then prefer manual methodology to focus on the customer accounts. Eventually, this becomes a challenging process for them to personally focus on each and every campaigns and target individual customers. In the worst case, companies make use of various mediocre platforms to engage with their customers resulting into poor customer satisfaction and experience.
How Salesforce ABM can help?
Salesforce introduced ABM that brings together all Salesforce capabilities to empower B2B companies and channel the marketing and sales processes across the customer journey. With ABM, companies can line up their sales funnel and engage with customers by providing personalized content.
Here are the features of Salesforce ABM:
- Classify right accounts: With Einstein lead scoring, companies can automatically contemplate accounts that are most likely to convert based on the factors such as past purchases and relationship history. The Advertising Studio enables the companies to market and advertise to new similar customers by classifying similar profiles based on online behaviors.
- Improve lead engagement: Salesforce’s Engagement Studio, a lead nurturing solution, allows the marketing and sales professionals to send personalized emails and content depending upon the buying history. Similarly, the Einstein Opportunity Insights tool lets the marketers and sales reps to analyze customer sentiments, customer involvement and overall engagement to verify how leads moving ahead.
- Sync marketing and sales functions: The Einstein Account Insights tool provides sales professionals with latest information on prospect actions such as M&A and financial information in order carve the engagement strategies. The professionals can utilize the Salesforce Engage to leverage this information and provide personalized content within desired time. The sales people can also make use of interactive dashboards to track the quality of sent messages and also click-through rates of content to know whether they were opened or not.
- Optimize, modify and measure the campaigns: Companies who are willing to determine the performance of their marketing campaigns can leverage B2B and Sales analytics. They can also find out the targeted sales opportunities using a single dashboard and discover insights via which campaigns perform the best. Meanwhile, the Multi-Touch Campaign Insights arm the marketers to find out attributes responsible for driving highest sales for specific customer accounts.
Lastly, the Salesforce AppExchange partners provide B2B companies an access to ABM solutions for all marketing and sales needs. Other tool such as Bluewolf is also available in the App Exchange to ensure customer success with Einstein ABM. Features such as additional data sets provide intent and firmographic data to further improve the account targeting.