Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused growth strategy for a set of low-volume but high-value accounts.
ICP - Your ideal customer profile (company)
The ideal customer profile (ICP) is usually created using a combination of firmographic, geographic, technographic, and demographic factors and is an essential guide to whether an individual account is one you should target or not. Many companies use ICP tiers to guide marketing and sales tactics & strategies based on tier or how valuable the account is to your business.
TAL - Target Account List
A list of accounts that you have identified as high-value that you will target in your campaigns. This can be done by choosing individual accounts or using your ICP to find accounts matching those parameters. The TAL is a subset of companies identified as ICP, prioritized by attributes such as geography, needs/service offering fit, etc.
Buying Committee
The group of stakeholders and buyer personas you seek to influence within your ABM campaigns because they have a seat at the decision-making table. Potential buying committee members include decision-makers, influencers, budget holders, blockers, champions, legal, and end-users.
Marketing Campaign
A marketing play where you ensure that the buying committee is seeing relevant ads throughout the buyer's journey. Marketing Campaigns are designed to ensure you are omnipresent and to influence the Buying Committee at your target accounts.
Sales Qualified Lead Nurturing
This sales and marketing alignment term speaks to the timing and mechanisms for putting a Sales Qualified Lead in front of your sales team. For example, you may put your tier 1 target accounts in front of sales via a task and a Slack notification when the target account has a company score of 100.
Thought Leadership
This term applies to other forms of marketing, but it is imperative in ABM. Thought leadership is a demonstration of your expertise on a particular topic. In ABM, this expertise is shared via social media posts, video content, podcasts, guides, and other content assets. Thought leadership helps you to position your team of thought leaders while also providing value to your target accounts.
Sales & Marketing Alignment
Necessary for running Account-Based Marketing Campaigns, sales and marketing alignment involves sales and marketing collaborating on accounts to target when to hand off those accounts based on ICP tier, lifecycle stage definitions, what content sales should use for various target accounts, and more. Sales and marketing alignment is about breaking down silos and making your revenue team more effective by working together.
ABM Technology Infrastructure
While there are many platforms out there, HubSpot has many built-in elements to operationalize above mentioned approach.