Many B2B companies focus on targeting their solutions to large, enterprise customers. After all, large customers often have deep financial pockets, will stay with proven solutions for a long time, and are usually open to additional, add-on offerings such as training, implementation, support and even potential product expansion to additional business lines.
On the other hand, getting into these accounts can be much more challenging. There can be a labyrinth of contacts, purchasers and approvers, and long review processes. In addition, large companies are often late adopters and risk-averse to trying, new, unproven technologies.
As such, many B2B marketers adopt account-based marketing (ABM) as a way to target and meet the specific needs of such enterprise accounts.
As ABM can be complex, require longer time tables and more focused resources, savvy marketers are leaning on their strong customer advisory boards (CABs) to kickstart the process, accelerate learning and account penetration.
Here are eight ways CABs support ABM initiatives:
- Strategic alignment: In interacting with your CAB members, your marketing team will learn how they operate, understand their daily challenges and how to potentially help them with their actual needs. After all, many awareness, lead generation and sales support tactics that work for small- and medium-sized business (SMB) do not translate well to large enterprise customers. CAB meetings allow B2B marketers an inside look into their customers’ pain points, and enables them to align their messaging, mediums and tactics to this specific audience.
- Market intelligence: Here too, CABs allow B2B marketers to gain insights into how to reach, convert and sell to large customers. They’ll learn not only why large companies may require new products or services, but also how such companies learn of new market offerings (Search? Articles? Trade shows? Consultants? Referrals?), how they purchase them (In-person demos? Approvers and influencers? Third-parties involved?) and be able to market to facilitate these processes and audiences.
- Content relevance: Leveraging their CAB, B2B marketers will learn and understand the messaging and content that resonates with enterprise buyers. While this may include thought leadership on novel approaches to common challenges, enterprise customers may be more influenced by referrals from other satisfied customers. Whatever the approach, CABs will show the way of what’s working and what’s not from a marketing standpoint.
- Relationship building: People still buy from other people, and CABs are ideal for deepening relationships with enterprise customers. Such relationships are often even more important with larger accounts, as they can involve numerous influencers, approvers, and product users. CABs can also facilitate introductions to other enterprise accounts, as your CAB members often have relationships with their colleagues in similar positions at other large companies.
- Campaign effectiveness: CABs can be used to preview marketing campaigns and messaging before going to market, enabling marketers to validate or tweak them according to what resonates with large target accounts. If a campaign does not deliver as hoped, CABs can evaluate where things may have gone wrong and help improve future campaigns.
- Product market fit: As CABs are ideal for shaping and prioritizing product development roadmaps, CAB members can provide valuable insights into potential different applications or new product offerings. They can help with product positioning and how to create competitive advantage.
- Executive insight: As CAB membership is usually made up of seasoned executives, these leaders are aware of where their companies are going – from a technical, business, geographical and personnel standpoint. This allows B2B marketers to target their messaging to what will resonate with such initiatives; often a bit farther out in time.
- Continuous improvement: CABs provide an engine for continuous improvement on marketing campaign effectiveness, product offerings and positioning, sales approaches and targeting, implementation and service improvements, cross- and up-sell opportunities, system expansion, approaching other companies, etc.
Targeting, reaching and selling to large corporations requires specific approaches for B2B marketers if they are going to make any headway into these hard-to-penetrate accounts. Well-managed CAB programs provide a valuable resource for learning how to get inside such accounts, close the sale, become successful and expand opportunities within.
Ignite Advisory Group is the leading global authority on Customer Advisory Boards and Customer-Led Boards. Ignite’s proven methodology for managing and evolving Customer Advisory Boards includes a 4-stage process, encompassing 48 deliverables and measured by 20 metrics to deliver a clear ROI. To learn more about Ignite, visit our website, read our blogs, and follow us on LinkedIn. To find out how your company can benefit from Ignite’s CAB methodology and process, contact us today.