Account-Based Marketing For Dummies

Chapter 7

Qualifying Your Target Accounts

IN THIS CHAPTER

Marketing activities in an account

Evaluating BANT criteria

Creating revenue opportunities

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) stated that, by 2017, as much of 90 percent of the account’s journey to making a purchase decision will be complete before they first connect with your company. Salespeople will evolve into order-takers, closing new revenue from accounts that already know they want to buy from your business. Based on these statistics, it’s clear how marketing has an integral role to play in education, because marketing will be solely responsible for bringing in new customers. This is part of the reason I’m such a fan of the term “smarketing” to show sales and marketing alignment.

Traditionally, marketing has lived in a world of leads. Marketing owned all the leads, then turned them over to sales after they were qualified. Now, with account-based marketing, the “smarketing” team starts by determining whether your accounts fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) and whether contacts in those accounts align with the personas you created for your best-fit users. After marketing qualifies these accounts, it’s up to sales to determine whether the accounts are ready to do business with your company.

In this chapter, I tell you how to ask the right qualification questions to determine whether your accounts are ready to move to the next stage of the purchase decision. I discuss ways to look for “triggers,” or buying signals, ...