Lead Generation vs Account Based Marketing

Lead generation is a strategy that has been used in B2B for years. Since a few years, Account Based Marketing has also made its appearance as a successful strategy. Both strategies are perfectly applicable in the B2B manufacturing industry, only when is it best to use which strategy?

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Platform model

To determine the best strategy to use, the Mercuri platform model is an ideal model for analyzing where your opportunities lie. The platform model was originally designed to analyze how to plan your sales activities so that you achieve your sales targets.

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The model has three areas on which you can focus; existing customers (customer platform, follow-up of offers & recovering lost customers (work platform) and as a last area developing new markets (market platform). To perform the analysis properly you need data, for example from your CRM or ERP.

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Customer Platform

In the plane customers, you look at the sales and potential sales you can generate from existing customers. You can classify these customers based on both data into D C B A and Key accounts. Once classified, it is interesting to see how your customer base is divided and where potential lies. From this comes, for example, the question: how will you ensure that B customers grow into A customers? And perhaps grow further into Key Accounts.

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Work platform

An important part of achieving your sales target is the quotation process and winning back lost customers. You can generate a lot of leads that request a quotation, but if these quotations are not converted into orders, they are of no use to you. The same goes for your lost customers. Acquiring new customers takes a lot of time, money and energy. By ensuring that customers keep buying from you, you can save time and money. There can always be a natural turnover in your customer base, that's not a bad thing either.

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Market Platform

Developing new markets actually speaks for itself. You get to work with the products/services you provide and find potential customers/target groups that suit you in new markets (Germany for example) or new application areas outside of your existing industries you already supply. If you want to be successful focus on one or two new markets.

Connection between marketing strategy and sales activities plan?

And then what is the connection to marketing? From the analysis come the parts you want to focus on with your sales activities. These activities can very well use the support of marketing. And here then is the connection with Lead Generation and Account Based Marketing.

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Lead generation in the B2B market

Lead generation strategy we at TMC Media often use for penetrating a new market or area (the market development plane). This is a number game, where you want the message to land in as large but targeted an audience as possible. You can do this by using LinkedIn campaign manager, for example. This allows you to specifically proclaim a tailored message in a selected target audience in order to get downloads or traffic to your website and thus start filling your sales funnel. When starting lead generation you (often) do not yet know the company names, potentials and contacts. Gradually during the campaign you try to gather this information to transfer it to Sales so they can get started.

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Account Based Marketing in the B2B marketplace

ABM is 1-to-1 marketing. Here you target a company or business unit of a company where there is potential to sell more. These interesting companies come from the analysis of classifying your customers. Here relevance and connecting with the right contacts is crucial. A tool that can help with this is Hubspot combined with LinkedIn sales navigator. You want to deliver the message to the right person at the right time, helping them further in their challenge or work.

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ABM could also be used in relation to lost customers. You want to get back in touch with customers who are interesting in terms of turnover, but haven't bought anything for a while to prevent them from buying from the competition. By communicating periodically and maintaining contact with multiple contacts, you can prevent customers from walking away from you.

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Offer Trail

In this plane, it is important that the customer has received all the information in order to make a sound choice in the quotation process. Ultimately, this is the positive result of your marketing and sales activities based on your strategy.

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Conclusion

In short, Lead Generation you use to develop new markets and outlets, while you use Account Based Marketing to develop sales with customers where there is potential. Important for both is to be relevant and with the right timing.

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Do you want to work more efficiently on your sales activities to achieve your targets? Contact us via the form or send me an e-mail

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