Survival in the B2B landscape is guaranteed by one key aspect: maximum ROI. That means prudently cutting costs wherever you can in the production and sales pipeline to increase revenue maximisation. One way of being prudent is by adhering to Account Based Marketing(ABM). 

In ABM, you focus on providing a high-value experience across the sales funnel to target accounts without wasting time and effort on irrelevant leads. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can be your greatest ally in this process. 

If you can implement ABM and CRM integration, CRM systems can help you isolate your target demography in a flash and are your eyes and ears when it comes to socially or literally listening in to consumer interactions. This improves customer touchpoints, ensures customer satisfaction, and pushes you closer to your end goal of attaining financial nirvana.

Let’s deep dive into the A to Z of ABM and CRM integration and learn how to generate winning strategies and staggering revenue!

Intersection of ABM & CRM

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is highly praised for its strategic approach. Imagine the effort required to meticulously analyze thousands of profiles in hopes of pinpointing those precious few with the highest potential to become loyal customers. Extensive market research isn’t simply a choice; it’s a necessity.

Consider the task of personalizing marketing efforts for each prospective client, tracking their engagement, and staying ahead of ever-evolving industry trends, not to mention scrutinizing competitors’ every move. It’s an endeavor that demands tireless study and the ability to handle and interpret massive data sets swiftly and efficiently.

To tackle this, you cannot overlook the power of automation. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems emerge as the smart solution to this challenge. They simplify data management, providing the insights needed for smarter, faster business choices without burnout. With a CRM, you can turn complex data into actionable strategies, ensuring that your business stays ahead of the curve.

Here’s what you can do with a strategic ABM CRM integration:

• Automate workflows, freeing up your sales team to focus on the only thing that matters: customer conversion.
• Create customized promotional campaigns for high-value clients so that they know you’re the right choice.
• Track the response on those marketing campaigns and smoothen customer touchpoints as required.
• Remind customers that you care. Schedule texts or emails on key events of their life, like birthdays or anniversaries. 
• Have an ear to the ground. Know what your competitors are doing and outdo them.

There can be countless other utilities. The crux of it, though is that it proves if you can enhance your ABM campaigns with a nifty tool like CRM, you are bound to dominate the business landscape in no time.

Integrating CRM Data into ABM Strategies

The indispensability of seamless ABM CRM integration is clear to us by now. Let’s look at some tactics on how you can leverage CRM data to successfully execute your ABM strategies:

Enhancing ABM campaigns with detailed customer profiles from CRM: In ABM, first, you have to isolate your target accounts. Your CRM system has a vast repository of consumer data containing lead lists, prospect preferences, etc. This data can help you map an Ideal Consumer Profile (ICP). Once a buyer persona is decided on, you can match those characteristics with existing customer profiles in your CRM system and finalize target accounts. 

For enhanced personalization of sales approach, your CRM system can help you segment your clients based on industry, company size, revenue, etc. Hence, integrating CRM data into ABM campaigns can help you enhance targeted reach and prevent waste of effort or resources.

Tailoring communication and building personalized experiences: CRM systems catalog the pain points of your target accounts when they isolate them. Since they come equipped with marketing automation tools, they can craft personalized marketing campaigns tailored to the needs of specific target accounts in a jiffy. To increase the chances of conversion, you can also schedule customized communication like drip campaigns or personalized emails to key stakeholders of your target accounts.

Measuring ABM success with CRM analytics: You have to socially listen in to the response of your ABM campaigns. Your CRM system can streamline this listening process. CRM systems usually come with lead-scoring capabilities. It can monitor the degree of engagement a lead has with your site and, based on that, score them. 

This helps you single out leads that are most interested in your products and nurture them further into making a buy. With this monitoring, you can also locate lead drop-off points and smoothen those bottlenecks to reduce attrition rate, thus improving sales with ABM-CRM alignment. 

Streamlining sales and marketing efforts with ABM-CRM integration: One of the key benefits of ABM CRM integration is ensuring alignment of marketing and sales teams. By syncing your ABM software with the CRM, both teams get to collaborate on one platform, sharing insights and strategies effortlessly. 

Sales teams gain insights into marketing’s plan and have a voice in the lead nurturing process. This clear line of communication means they can weigh in on marketing plans from the start, fostering teamwork and fueling joint efforts to attract prospects.

By recognizing sales as the champions of strategy execution, the marketing team can cut down on conflicts and missteps. This synergy not only saves resources but also smooths out workflows for better business outcomes.

Implementing ABM within Your CRM Framework

If integrating CRM data into ABM campaigns can unlock your brand’s potential and increase turnover, aren’t you curious to know how you can set this whole thing in motion? 

Here is a step-by-step illustration of how you can effectively use CRM data to manage your ABM  campaigns:

• Step 1: Integrate your CRM software with your ABM platform.
• Step 2: ABM is all about pitching to the right audience without wasting your breath on the wrong ones. So, use the data stored in your CRM systems to create an ideal buyer persona. Isolate your target demography with that.
• Step 3: Design targeted ads in an instant with CRM. This makes crafting compelling campaigns hassle-free and increases brand relatability.
• Step 4: With CRM, track customer response to your marketing initiatives. Set up a dashboard to efficiently monitor KPIs such as engagement level, conversion rates etc.

Challenges in Integrating CRM Data into ABM

Yes, the dollars are at a striking distance with a seamless ABM-CRM integration, but nothing is without its challenges. So, let’s look at some common hurdles on the path to this integration and ways to overcome them!

Ensuring data quality and completeness: If you’re relying on CRM systems to ensure the success of your ABM campaigns, you can’t have them riddled with incomplete, duplicate, or missing data. To ensure data integrity, you must keep updating your CRM contact lists, add new contacts vetted by both sales and marketing teams, remove cold leads, etc. Data management tools can supplement this process, but remember, the majority onus is on you.

You can further enrich data quality by asking your sales team to keep refining your data lists with observations from prior consumer interactions so that anyone can pick up where they left off. This helps provide potential consumers with a consistent buying experience.

Securing organizational alignment and buy-in: Your ABM approach and consequent ABM and CRM integration need funding and the assent of both sales and marketing heads since they’re the ones approving the budget. Often, because of sales and marketing misalignment, you cannot reach a common consensus. So, make sure you have their approval in your corner to make any sort of progress. 

Conclusion

With the rising relevance of ABM, industry-specific, niche CRM solutions have taken over the market. Also, with employees gravitating towards remote work, cloud-based CRM solutions have become a necessity. So, it’s no wonder that revenue in the CRM software market is projected to reach $88.19 billion in 2024. 

If you’re new to the business and still grasping at straws about ABM, allow Marketboats to step in! We understand that the B2B purchasing cycle is more elaborate than ever before! So, through our account profiling and research services, we execute detailed stakeholder mapping to help you identify key stakeholders in your target accounts to fast-track the conversion process. 

Our fully automated contact discovery process also delivers you customized, error-free contacts within 3 days! Not only that, our platform integrates with leading CRMs so that you’re flush with qualified leads at all times.

So, why wait any longer? Contact us now!