A business without an agile sales strategy is like a house with no foundation; it won’t hold up to any sort of stress or outside pressure. The all-too-common methodology of cold calling as many leads as possible, hedging your bets on the “numbers game” of mass prospecting campaigns, isn’t effective in the current data-rich digital landscape. Consumers are burnt out on poor-fit cold calls and irrelevant emails.
Studies have shown consumers respond to personalized marketing campaigns. According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing report, marketers who create personalized campaigns for their brands were 215% more likely to say their marketing strategy in 2023 was very effective, compared to brands that didn’t personalize their campaigns.
Closing deals also requires personalized communications, as well as a healthy dose of persistence. It takes more cold calls per lead than ever to close a deal - 80% of sales require at least five follow-up calls - indicating that more attention per lead goes a long way. And cold call conversion rates are low, hovering at a dismal 2%. When it comes to selling, it pays to spend more time following up on each lead, rather than cold-calling an increased number of leads.
So how can you ensure you’re able to dish out personalized experiences to your customers and leads? The answer starts with cross-team alignment; keep sales and marketing on the same page so they can work together to target the right prospects and create campaigns that convert. Many business strategies focus on team alignment, with two major ones being account-based marketing (ABM) and Revenue Operations (RevOps).
If your company hasn’t incorporated either of these strategies into its operations, you may be wondering which one is better. What if I told you you didn’t have to choose between them? ABM and RevOps can synergize, creating harmony between sales and marketing and allowing you to effectively drive growth.
Jump to:
What is ABM?
What is RevOps?
How do RevOps and ABM work together?
Getting started with RevOps
What is Account Based Marketing (ABM)?
ABM is a B2B sales and marketing strategy tailored to optimize the time and energy of sales teams by focusing their energy on converting and retaining high-value accounts. Rather than constantly working to expand the pool of prospects that may or may not fit their ideal customer profile, salespeople following an ABM strategy instead spend more time targeting fewer, best-fit leads at a time, and maintaining their relationships with current customers in order to retain and reconvert them. Personalized messaging and precise customer segmentation are core components of ABM.
ABM is powered by customer data, which shows who is converting, how long it took them to convert, and what marketing campaigns drew them in. Data from throughout the sales cycle all factors in, which is why alignment between sales and marketing is a key aspect of ABM.
Sales and marketing teams following an ABM strategy aim to make each customer feel like they’re the sole focus of the company. From the sales team’s personalized outreach efforts with key stakeholders to the social media posts shared by marketing, every communication should feel relevant to the company’s target audience and current customers.
ABM creates an efficient MQL-SQL handoff
When starting out with a new ABM strategy, the first step is to establish consistent communication channels between sales and marketing. The marketing-sales handoff is an integral part of many businesses' lead conversion efforts, but it’s often not optimally structured. Marketing and sales tend to operate in silos, working out of separate systems, referencing different datasets, and having little idea of how their work affects the other team.
As part of an ABM strategy, marketing and sales have to agree on the criteria for MQLs and SQLs, and collaborate regularly to make sure their outreach efforts are targeting the right people. For effective collaboration to be possible, all team members need access to information from both sides of the conversion process. Marketing needs to know the characteristics of MQLs that end up converting, and sales needs the ability to keep track of MQLs, so they can follow up on them in a timely manner.
To enable efficient collaboration, it helps to have a single source of truth; a centralized system where all customer data is stored, often in the form of a CRM. Both sales and marketing will need access to data such as conversion rates, sources of leads, and the engagement rates of current marketing campaigns.
The alignment of sales and marketing has become increasingly important to many business strategies over the past several years, as companies are realizing that silos between the teams that create customer communications cause significant difficulties. Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is another business strategy that puts cross-team alignment at the forefront.
What is RevOps?
Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is a business strategy designed to align all revenue-focused teams - sales, marketing, and customer service - so they are all utilizing the same customer data to work towards the same ultimate goal: Driving revenue growth.
In a RevOps framework, all three teams collaborate to prioritize the customer experience and develop methodologies to increase customer engagement. Each revenue-focused team still has its own set of KPIs and goals, but they’re not chosen in silos; rather, each team’s goals are made to benefit not only their own team, but also the other revenue-focused teams, as well as the company as a whole. In addition, all teams are responsible for contributing to certain shared KPIs, such as conversion rate, to measure how effective the RevOps strategy is at increasing company revenue.
Cross-team alignment cuts down on time wasted targeting the wrong accounts and developing overly broad sales strategies that don’t reach the right people.
RevOps also helps revenue-focused teams understand how their efforts are being measured. RevOps, like ABM, relies on a single source of truth, which stores campaign performance data and allows all teams to monitor their progress and make changes as needed.
RevOps works to address the following issues in a company:
- Low customer retention. Customers churn when they feel their needs aren’t being met, or they can receive better services elsewhere. Every touchpoint, from your website design, to your product or service’s features, to the channels that customers can use to reach out to your service team for assistance, all play a role. When service, sales, and marketing teams are aligned, they are able to more precisely tailor their customer communications to feel personalized, relevant, and helpful.
- Disorganized processes. When customer relationship data isn’t universally accessible by sales, marketing, and service, this leads to poorer customer experiences. Sales should have a record of service tickets, and service should know who is and who is not a customer - or they should be able to find out. Otherwise, customers will feel forgotten, since each time they reach out will feel like the first time. All teams should also understand what marketing campaigns are being run and understand what type of content is resonating with prospects, to ensure consistency in communications.
- Inefficiencies in the sales cycle. Without a single source of truth, marketing will have a more difficult time handing off leads to sales, causing costly delays. Miscommunications between marketing and sales can easily become a huge source of wasted time and interdepartmental tension and conflict.
How do RevOps and ABM work together?
Both these strategies are ultimately focused on driving company growth and enabling customer service, sales, and marketing teams to make data-driven decisions aimed at increasing revenue. RevOps and ABM have similar end-goals, though ABM is more focused on customer relationships, while RevOps takes a broader approach to cross-team alignment.
A RevOps strategy sets the stage for alignment by centralizing customer data and requiring consistent collaboration amongst all revenue-focused teams. From this foundation of customer data, sales and marketing are able to truly go the extra mile when it comes to customer targeting with ABM. Together, RevOps and ABM synergize to create a cohesive customer experience.
In a RevOps + ABM strategy, all three teams understand who the company’s ideal customer is, what strategies work to engage and delight them, and what methodologies have and haven’t been effective in the past. All teams are focused on providing personalized experiences to customers throughout the buyer’s journey. ABM offers the benefit of precise customer segmentation and ultra-personalized outreach to clients, in order to increase customer retention.
Benefits of a RevOps + ABM strategy
Companies following both RevOps and ABM methodologies will see numerous benefits including:
- Efficient use of time and resources. Marketing and sales communications, both inbound and outbound, will be more likely to reach best-fit prospects. Sales won’t have to waste hours each week calling bad-fit leads, and marketing will see higher engagement rates on organic content and email campaigns, thus increasing ROI.
- Happier customers/clients. The special attention and ultra-personalized content provided to clients by sales and marketing increase customer satisfaction and retention.
- No more siloed teams. RevOps is designed to break down communication gaps between a company’s revenue teams, greatly reducing miscommunications, wasted time, and service delays that lead to unhappy customers.
Getting started with RevOps
If you’re looking to increase ROI and eliminate sources of costly miscommunications and confusion among your revenue teams, consider adopting a Revenue Operations strategy. To learn more about this highly effective methodology, download our free eBook, The Beginner’s Guide to a RevOps Tech Stack.
