B2B Account-Based Marketing: How to Build Long-Term Relationships with Key Accounts

Trust is the most important factor for any long-term relationship with your key accounts. When a key account trusts you, they are more likely to continue doing business with you and even refer your business to others. Account-Based Marketing is that strategic approach of personalised marketing that helps you do that successfully. 

In our blog last month, “The 5 D’s of ABM: How to Master Account-Based Marketing”, we discussed the 5D framework of ABM and how a B2B business should leverage ABM to grow. And, in this blog, we go a little deeper and discuss how you can build strong long-term relationships with your key accounts.

How to Build Long-Term Relationships with Key Accounts

Build A Strong Alignment Between Your Teams

As B2B marketers, we’re often eager to jump into new things. We get excited about new marketing ideas, and lead-generation strategies. But the one thing that can mess it all up is a misalignment of your teams.

But misalignment can confuse your incoming clients which directly creates several other issues such as lost sales, wasted resources, and inconsistent messaging. 

Aligning your teams is critical for successful ABM because it ensures that everyone on the project is working towards the same goal; in this case, building a long-term relationship with your clients. This highlights the fact that account-based marketing is a team sport which needs collaboration between sales, marketing, and SEO to target high-value accounts that are most likely to convert. And, to achieve this, you must educate, communicate, and involve your employees in cultivating your organization’s goal and purpose.

Check our guide on Account-Based Marketing, to get a deeper understanding of how you can actually align your teams.

Deliver A Personalised Experience

One-to-one, One-to-few, One-to-many – they all have their differences, but there is one thing that ties them all together. And that’s relevancy.
– Nickey Kemp

No matter the size of your campaign, or account-based marketing program, it’s critical that you tailor your campaign to serve the relevant target audience. This means that you need to have a deep understanding of their goals, and challenges. Your goal should be to deliver a personalised experience for every key account, rather than getting swallowed by the same generic content. 

And, that’s difficult. But trust us, it’s worth a lot in the long run, especially considering the benefits of long-term relationships with your clients. And, to effectively deliver personalised experiences, you don’t just need to understand what your key accounts are trying to achieve, you also need to understand them on a personal level. Their language, fears, passions, etc. When you deliver messages after taking the time to really understand your key accounts, you show them that you share the same values and you build trust. And, this trust, brings you closer to building a meaningful relationship.

How?

Tailoring your messages for account-based marketing will increase the relatability of your content for your key accounts, which increases engagement, and your conversions. Consistency in this creates a strong relationship between your key accounts and your brand.

Provide Ongoing Support And Value

Account-based marketing is more than just closing deals. Somewhere down the line, in ABM every transaction is personal, so it’s also about going above and beyond to deliver your promises and exceed their expectations. 

The most successful ABMers think of their clients as humans and not just business partners. They take time to nurture their relationships. This could include supporting their clients with webinars, workshops, joint press releases or simply helping them overcome a challenge. 

By investing in such client relationships, you create a long-lasting partnership that benefits both parties. A few tips to remember, 

• Be responsive in a way that their issues are resolved quickly and efficiently.
• Give them onboarding training on how they can use your product at its best. 
• Help them identify and resolve their areas of improvement. 
• Provide additional exclusive resources, webinars and other resources.
• Be invested in their success and show that you’re more than just a vendor.

Your these little investments will make them want to refer you. That’s where your strategy for referral marketing will work.

Encourage Feedback and Collaboration

When you actively seek and incorporate your client’s input, it demonstrates your genuine commitment to understand their needs and exceed their expectations. For this, you can leverage surveys, reviews, case studies and even testimonials. All of this, to be honest, helps you in improving your products, services and processes as well. 

One more thing apart from simply collecting feedback that you can actively do is create an online community and invite your customers to join in, online or offline. This gives them a platform to share their experiences, insights, best practices, etc. Thus creating a collaborative environment that encourages co-creation and even referrals. Additionally, at times you’ll need to provide direct assessment to ensure your client’s satisfaction. 

This approach towards feedback and collaboration by default enhances your your products and services, but it also fosters trust and loyalty; two important things that lead to a long-lasting relationship.

Now, 

How to measure and optimize your relationship even more?

To ensure that you are building long-term relationships, you need to measure your performance to effectively optimize the impact of your efforts. And, you do that by tracking key metrics like account engagement, revenue growth, pipeline growth, and retention rate.

When you’re finally armed with this data, you can make calculated adjustments to your content and offerings and even parts of your strategy if needed. And, this is a cycle. A cycle of measurement, optimization, and adjustments. 

This shows that you as a B2B business can’t actually succeed in account-based marketing if you don’t,

• Have your cross-functional teams on the same page
• Deliver a personalised experience
• Provide ongoing support
• Encourage feedback 
• Track your key metrics. 

And that’s a lot of work, time and resources. But, it won’t be if you outbound your account-based marketing efforts. ABM is one the most difficult, yet one of the most powerful strategies to grow your B2B business. And, at Trinity Global Technologies, we are experts in implementing account-based marketing for B2B businesses like yours.