For the last five years, ABM Personal has been focusing on refining their approach on LinkedIn, particularly with the incorporation of the book, The Challenger Sale. Before reading the book, they were already taking The Challenger Sale approach, although they did not realize it. The book gave them more insights on how to make their approach stronger and more productive.
They use LinkedIn as their platform to springboard because it is a great way to get access to people, engage with them, and learn more about them.
Account-based marketing to Kristina is the opposite of what most people think it is. She has seen it turn into account-based awareness and account-based campaigns. It focuses on the mass audience and mass messaging versus what Personal ABM likes to do, which is to take on one-on-one rather than one-on-many.
Kristina feels that mass-produced messaging misses many opportunities. And often, the missed opportunities could have been the greatest revenue generators.
Kristina’s approach at Personal ABM to scaling personal interaction involves working with only two to three dozen accounts. They ensure that they have a proof of concept with those accounts, and then they roll out the same kind of strategy to other accounts. But they need to take the personal one-on-one approach for those top accounts, know what is and is not working and what is important to all the buyers within those accounts. You can take a campaign approach with the same kind of strategy provided that it has first been refined, to scale it.
You have to figure out what is important to the company as a whole and each department. Then you have to take it down to a macro level to each individual in that department. You have to find the one or two KPIs that are most important, that each person is responsible for, and address them individually.
Typically, they work directly with sales, so they do their marketing for sales. What the sales customers want and value is not always the same as what marketing talks about. That’s why they work specifically with the sales team. If there are any common themes that a sales solution is filling, that would be something that they would need to address because that will also be important to other buyers.
There will always be pain when it comes to switching. In an example she shared of a case study, Kristina labeled and illustrated the cost of change by addressing how switching would affect the business’s revenue, its customers, and its employees. That created a buying vision for them and showed them a bigger picture of what would happen.
To leverage LinkedIn in a multichannel approach, Kristina typically starts with an invite to make a value-based connection. It is vital to share value and insights for the entire time that you are connecting with someone, and Kristina always shares that value upfront. Once someone connects, she responds by sharing even more value. She ensures that every interaction she has with a prospect is like a mini sales conversation, to give them insight or change their mind. Every conversation has to be personal and tailored to have more relevance to the prospect. The ultimate goal is to take the conversation to other means of conversation like email or one-to-one.
To get more customers Kristina would show up, share value and insights, and reach out to people via LinkedIn. You have to know your ICP, nail it, and make it relevant at every interaction.
To increase the average customer value, Kristina would use her strategy to build consensus internally, to make sure that she is driving conversations with every decision-maker, whether that is sharing information or engaging with them. And she would make sure that everyone that needs to be involved is involved.
To increase the frequency that customers buy from her, she would make sure that everything she is sharing is relevant to the customer.
Links and resources
Connect with Kristina on LinkedIn
Personal ABM website
Book mentioned:
The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation
by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon
