Focus Article
Mastering Account-Based Marketing: A Path to Stronger Client Relationships Heather Tice and Stacy Dreher
In today's business landscape, it is more important than ever to cultivate and maintain strong client relationships. One strategy that has gained traction is account-based marketing (ABM), a targeted approach that tailors marketing efforts to engage specific high-value clients. The key difference between ABM and traditional marketing is personalization and customization. Traditional marketing leans more generic, with a mass appeal, while ABM requires marketing, sales and client service teams to work in tandem to create personalized
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Growth Strategies Fall/Winter 2023
experiences through content, events and solutions.
with multiple departments and providing several services.
A recent McKinsey study shows that personalization improves both customer loyalty and a company’s gross sales. This is because personalized marketing can help businesses in building stronger relationships with customers, leading to higher lifetime value and increased revenue.
To do this, it’s important to look beyond just revenue. “We’ve found some clients had great revenue, but poor utilization, so we reevaluated that,” Suzanne Reed, CMO, LBMC, says, “We used revenue, potential and realization as our guiding factors.”
Identifying Strategic Accounts The first step to ABM is one that many firms have already taken: identifying key accounts to nurture (such as a Top 100 client list) with customized engagement and support. Building these strategic client ranking systems requires understanding which clients could benefit from a broader range of services, as the most valuable clients are the ones where a firm is working
Leveraging Technology to Streamline ABM Efforts Gathering the information needed to develop ABM strategies can be a manual process, and the ongoing nature of tracking interactions time intensive. For many firms, this limits the potential for making this a repeatable process. “Cross-selling and ABM, however, shouldn’t be a one-time initiative,” explains Tim Keith, CEO and founder