But what does it mean to align Marketing and Sales? In short: involving both areas in strategic decisions, establishing common objectives to launch the strategy towards the company's market, exploring formal and informal communication channels and, finally, making commercial and marketing information on both accounts and contacts accessible so that it can be analysed and decisions can be made.
And why align both areas? Fundamentally, to provide a faster and higher-quality response to changes in the environment, the market and the customer that B2B companies face and to impact the bottom line.
Once the environment and the client have been defined, we focus on the marketing strategies that are being implemented today , which are fundamentally demand generation strategies, such as Inbound Marketing . Using this methodology, the target audience and buyer personas are thoroughly studied and a “network” of content is created where they are “educated” and attracted to the company. It is a good strategy that bases its effectiveness on customer knowledge and the generation of high-quality content, but what to do with those target accounts of great economic or reputational value that do not “fall into the company's networks”?
In the second part of the Webinar we describe the fundamental characteristics of an ABM Program (Account Based Marketing) . ABM is a methodology whose main objective is to capture (but also to retain) those accounts that are of strategic importance to a B2B company, developing personalized marketing strategies to meet their needs. ABM is therefore a very attractive methodology for B2B companies that have high-value customers for some of their product or service ranges, with relatively long sales cycles or where the purchase decision is relatively complex . It is in these customer profiles where an ABM strategy can be very efficient.
