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Some of the nouns, abbreviations, and definitions that appear in this article:

1.ABM:Account Based Marketing, target account marketing, access, activation and conversion through customized content and automated tools based on target accounts

2.SAO: Sales Accepted Opportunity, SQL goes one step further, selling approved business opportunities

3.Customer Journey Mapping Canvas, a customer journey content mapping canvas that assesses whether your content covers the customer’s entire lifecycle and has an effective impact and facilitates conversion

4.SOP:Standard Operation Procedure, the standardized follow-up process, refers to the standardization of pre-content cultivation and transformation for customers with consistent characteristics and similar needs after layering the audience

The “sales funnel” is an ancient concept put forward in 1928. Over the past 91 years, the sales funnel model has guided the generations of entrepreneurs to achieve the mission of user growth. They are obsessed with crazy drainage, and through the spread of the message, the lottery-style mentality to transform the flow, the response to the next layer of the funnel, the non-response is discarded, each layer of funnel has an accurate Digital calculations, how many calls to make, how many calls to make, how many demos to make, and how many demos to make, are counted. You see, in the era of traffic Internet, this concept is simple and rude and fascinating.

Even today, this road has been broken, and quite a few people are still loyal fans of the sales funnel.

Unfortunately, today, when the traffic dividend has long since disappeared, this concept has been more difficult to adapt to the marketing rhythm of the Chinese Internet market. No matter how the new concept of KOC or private domain traffic is hyped, it just confirms that the current Internet traffic dividend disappears. The fact that the sales funnel model has long been unable to prop up a company’s normal user growth. why? We slowly said this.

1. Increased customer acquisition costs: Less than 1% of leads are converted to paid customers

Gartner’s report analysis shows that about 7-12 people participated in the 2B purchase decision process, I don’t know if this number is for SMB or large 2B companies, but 2 -3 people are definitely there

The data given by Forrester is even more cruel, only less than 1% of 2B leads are eventually converted into customers, so the rate of conversion can be more clearly reflected in the real Chinese SaaS vendors. The cost of getting a customer, because no matter how cheap the clue is, you have to multiply it by 100 to get income, not to mention that the clues are generally so expensive.

You can see that 2B’s purchase decision is generally a group decision. We have encountered many times in our own business process that we have to discuss with our colleagues or report to the boss. In this case, we finally won. There are not a few impressions of the case.

So when faced with a purchasing group of 7-12 people, how do you get this order? Obviously we need to think a little bit.

So we heard that the market began to call for the flow of thinking into user thinking, but how to turn? There are not many people who talk about this.

2.ABM is coming: the shift of traffic thinking to user thinking

User thinking is still a very broad concept. I personally think that the typical marketing strategy of user thinking is ABM, Account Based Marketing, which is literally simple, based on user (account) marketing. , that is, target account marketing, but users and accounts still need to be distinguished here. This marketing strategy is not only for a single individual, such as a company that we mentioned above with 7-12 colleagues, we are in marketing strategy. These people need to be treated as the same account, and then different content conversion strategies are targeted for these people:

• You may be looking for a quotation plan for your purchase

• It might be a solution for cio

• It might be a technical white paper for cto

• Looking at the boss may be a success story for a peer-to-peer customer

The purpose of showing different content to different people is very simple, which is to enhance your presence and influence in their entire purchasing team, and finally win this order..

Therefore, we found that it is very different from the traditional sales funnel thinking. The sales funnel circles all the traffic together, and uses the standardized content for simple activation conversion (probably once), while ABM is more For multiple articles on one or more key characters in an account, we compare the following with the following:

Intuitive comparison of sales funnels and ABM

The traditional sales funnel thinking seems proactive, but it’s actually passive, because the funnel screening is based entirely on their existing interest in the product, and the Nurture is placed behind, so each layer of funnel goes down. Very difficult.

A very typical strategy change for ABM is that we first screen out the key accounts, find the key people, and then think about what they want to see, the content team produces weapons, the marketing team replenishes the ammunition, and finally joins Conversion purpose.

03.The advantages of ABM: higher conversion rates, better user experience, and shorter sales cycles

The superiority of the ABM strategy is very obvious. It means that we have to change the mindset of buying lottery users, and to develop a follow-up strategy for key customers. It used to be a mess, and now it is targeted. There are many intuitive changes brought about by the ABM strategy:

• ROI is easier to calculate because the customer accounts are there, and the output and benefits of team resources are easy to measure

• There is no need to follow up on the clues of the miscellaneous, the team morale is high

• A better user experience, because the content is tailored to the customer’s situation, and the customer will feel that what you are sending is what they want and want

• Higher conversion rates and shorter sales cycles are very important

• Combined market and sales collaboration mechanism, there is no gap between the two departments

• ……

The benefits of ABM I can continue to fill the entire screen. How hot is this strategy? There are at least 40 SaaS companies abroad that have made vertical segmentation tools around the ABM methodology. This is detailed in the martech 5000:

But it is clear that the ABM wind has not yet blown to the domestic market. Even in foreign countries, the penetration rate of companies that can mature the ABM strategy is less than 20%. Explain that this is still a threshold.

In Chunyang, I believe that the prevalence of private traffic will force business owners and advertisers to be forced to apply ABM. The reason is simple, traffic is getting more expensive, and conversion is getting harder and harder. ABM is this. The best choice in an intensive environment, I made an ABM overview to showcase the core steps of ABM:

ABM Process Overview Map

Next, let’s disassemble a few core steps of the ABM strategy.

4.ABM’s account (customer) screening

This is a decisive step in the entire ABM strategy, because what kind of customer you choose, your next marketing resources and product resources will be tilted towards this customer, which will result in the opportunity cost of the team.

The West has a standardized ABM account screening process, scoring, data collection, customer research, user portrait analysis, etc. These specific details will not be introduced one by one, I will follow the ABM white paper* (Egg 1) Detailed interpretation. In an early SaaS or 2B project, we generally don’t have to follow the strict process of customer screening. From our own business perspective, generally choose the well-known waist or head customers in the industry, which is not only Can verify and polish products, but also for subsequentTuoba provides a very powerful stepping stone and produces a persuasive customer case. Business in China, endorsements are sometimes more important than the product itself. A customer who can’t get it by product, a back book can.

But the question is, if the waist head customer we want to convert is not in our lead list, we need to look for a third-party data source for ad serving or content streaming. We will disassemble it in detail below.

5.Two marketing contacts for ABM

In the specific ABM implementation process, we first divide the customer contacts into two categories, one is marketing touch points, the market contacts, the other is sales touch points, sales contacts.

Market contact and sales contacts and examples of subsequent actions

After that, we put various marketing actions based on these two contacts. The above figure shows the sequence of contact actions of a foreign manufacturer. A typical sequence of actions consists of contact + time stamp + data + content. + (Distribution) tools and other elements.

In the market contact phase, the main task of this phase is to get sales leads. We generally reach potential customers through various social advertisements. In China’s marketing environment, Baidu, WeChat circle of friends or today’s headlines are good choices. The traditional idea is that the audience enters relevant information in Baidu and other search engines. Keywords, through the auction ranking to display relevant advertisements, the user clicks into the landing page, and then the landing page needs to bear the key points of click + retention + guidance registration. Therefore, SEM is the marketing focus of most of the market contacts of the company. And the headline and WeChat friends circle ads are a bit of a spring, I want to brush to the B ads in these places? I don’t even think about it. Is it because it is expensive? No, it is because it is not accurate enough.

But there is a way for manufacturers in Beijing to solve this problem. It is worthwhile to refer to them. They can provide similar crowded packets with precise targeting and one-stop delivery services. Simply put, they are related to big data collection and matching. The company, relevant key people and related contact methods, then placed in the crowd package, handed over to these advertising platforms for delivery.

This idea is very amazing, because to B’s paid delivery is different from to C, to C probably only needs the background label system to filter it, but to B pays attention to the key decision makers, you put oneAdvertising does not have much meaning for the grassroots employees. It must be the core management or the boss. This threshold directly determines the final effect of the to B paid advertising.

When the eyes of the fire are dead, the crowd packs this point, and from the customer’s point of view, it also directly solves the core pain points – no key decision makers can be found.

We assume that at the market contact stage, whether you find your ideal portrait user through bidding or crowdsourcing, things are far from complete, because it is a more important transformation.

5.WeChat as an automated strategy for marketing contacts

In the sales contact phase, email marketing is still effective in certain industries in China (such as foreign companies and manufacturing), but most of them have been transformed into WeChat.

The action sequence of Sales Touch Point shown in the above picture is basically email-based, which is of little value to local marketing. We need to replace the content carrier with WeChat.

We mentioned above that a typical sequence of actions consists of elements such as contact + time stamp + data + content + (distribution) tools, and the contacts are nothing more than two, marketing contacts and sales contacts, time stamps The customer’s life cycle, the data is generally from external vendors (such as the crowd package provided by Fire Eye Cloud), the content needs your own team to prepare, to the distribution tool level, you will find that this piece is currently missing. Even if you send emails, foreign EDM tools are too dazzling, webpower, hubspot, mailchimp are more than one, but no one manually sends them.

So switch to WeChat scene? WeChat itself has its own group of tools, but there is no tracking system, and the second can not be combined with the label (this basically ruined the marketing value of manual mass), so there must be tools to make up for this vacancy. One of them is Shanghai’s native WCDMA SCRM vendors, who have developed a very SOP implementation strategy based on the ABM marketing model, building customer portraits and customer tiering through a labeling system, tracking SOP effects and customer lifecycles through a sales funnel.

In fact, it is not difficult to find out here that the sales funnel and ABM are not mutually exclusive relationships but complementary relationships. The sales funnel can still be used as a statistical concept to control the overall situation, while ABM needs to be a strategic concept to guide day-to-day business operations. The sales funnel can clearly and intuitively demonstrate the performance of the marketing team and the business team, and ABM is the first fire output point.

In terms of clues, our industry is often divided into MQL and SQL. The former is a clue to the marketing screening conditions, while the latter is a clue to sales recognition. How to unify and synchronize the two, has always been a business One of the pain points, because marThe assessment criteria of the keting department and the business unit are usually different, which will result in a disconnect between the quality of the leads. The marketing department has filled the business department’s funnel with clues that do not meet the standard or have no intention to purchase. The whole funnel will be polluted, the data is extremely ugly, and the business department should not have clues, and it will not be digested.

After the implementation of the ABM strategy, although the KPIs of the two departments are still inconsistent, in the customer screening, research, content preparation, distribution and final transformation, everyone needs to be consensus. This will not happen in the past marketing department to put all kinds of clues that are not adjusted into the funnel, and the sales are transformed into a bitter situation.

So the ABM strategy execution effect is considered?

6.ABM assessment

The tracking and recording of marketing and sales contacts is an important part of the ABM process.

The first thing to be sure is that ABM’s assessment criteria must not be set as clues, as the clues are likely to drop for simple reasons. Those unreliable clues are directly screened out. We need to assess more practical process indicators.

We use the horizontal axis time as a measure of the customer’s life cycle, and use the waveform diagram to reflect the customer’s response intensity to different marketing content. This will help us understand what customers are more accepting:

But the question is, how does this waveform, which is the response intensity of the audience to the content, is reflected? Quite simply, we only need to calculate the proportion of people who get positive feedback from the audience after the content is sent out. For example, a customer case group sent 87 people to the “price consultation” label, and 17 people responded with further requests to see the product, while a company introduced The documents were sent to 52 people who signed the “Preliminary Consultation” label. Only 6 people responded positively. It is obvious that these two contents must be more stimulating in the customer case. We need to focus on the customer case to customer leads. Carry out cultivation.

Lay the customer through the business opportunity of Whale’s SCRM and directly perform group sending action

Having a contact-content intensity map is not enough, because all the characters in the same account must also be considered. At this point, the contact-audience-action graph shows value:

This image vertically arranges all the characters in an account. Horizontally, there are two activation contacts for sales and marketing. For example, each time a sales message is sent to a customer, it means activation once; the marketing department publishes a paid advertisement every time. The exposure to the customer means activation once. From our experience, the blue circle and the yellow circle total more than 6 times, and this customer has the possibility to sign it.

This is called “6 touch laws” internally, regardless of whether it is to B or to C. Below this number, it will definitely lead to a bitter loss. Either the customer has forgotten you, or the customer has been taken away by other sales, or they are too busy to see it last time. In short, they ran.

When we open a sales meeting every week, we look at the number of yellow and blue circles behind the business opportunities assigned to each sale. This is one of the most intuitive basis for us to determine the customer’s activity. If you find that the customer’s circle is zero, this means that the thread has not been effectively followed up.

So ABM’s assessment must examine these more realistic indicators. How many times does each customer touch through several contacts? What is the usage rate of the content? Is the content strength in place? This involves the core influencing factors of ABM: content.

7.Bam feeding:Matching the intensity of content required by ABM