Opening deals become critical like anything in mid-market and enterprise sales.

Most sales teams are stuck with low pipeline coverage as they largely follow generic SDR outreaches and lead-gen tactics to create sales opportunities.

You might be familiar with the below,

1. 📩 Low Reply, Interest Rates
2. 📩 Low no. of demo bookings
3. 📩 Low to no need or urgency for the solution
4. 📩 Dozens of meetings before you close a deal

It is extremely clear that buyers in 2023 expect to buy from people who can listen and act according to their problems,

“And so it becomes essential to add value and build trust before you tell them about your software/solution.”

This is where relationship-building campaigns in account-based marketing come into the picture.

Relationship-building campaigns help you:

1. ✅ Build authenticity and warm up decision-makers
2. ✅ Accelerate buying amongst high priority/top tier deals
3. ✅ Amplify all other demand generation campaigns for conversions

While building relevant relations overall is great for b2b growth, account-based relationship building is slightly different than generic relationship-building campaigns.

You don’t want to,

1. ❌ Do it for the Brand or Community
2. ❌ invest too many resources in low-priority accounts/deals
3. ❌ Use methods that take too long to convert into ROI

Who can I target with this?

1. High-Priority Deals from Sales Teams
2. Lookalikes of the biggest closed deals
3. Lookalikes of fastest closed deals
4. Promising MQLs from other campaigns

Ideally, we push for creating a defined system to qualify accounts as high, medium, and low priority when we craft the ABM Strategy.

Okay, let’s dig into this.

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We have arranged the below campaigns in order of increasing the resources allocated.

1. Community Meetups

Meetups are light and effective ways to build good relations and authenticity in a one-to-many arrangement.

It gives you the chance of letting people know of your unique approach/vision regarding the problems in the space and build authenticity without much time/resources to be invested. 

We recently created a qualified pipeline of $40,000 for one of our clients in Transport Management Software within a week by doing a meetup on their unique framework to solve for enterprise logistics efficiency.

2. Report Invitations

Featuring prospects in reports is one of the best ways to warm up and engage target accounts.

Just choose a topic that resonates with the core pain of the industry that your product/solution solves. After that, make a list of decision-makers of these target accounts and invite people to contribute to that report.

The clear objective here is to build authenticity among prospects and position yourself as an authority in the space.

We did similar efforts with our 2022 State of b2b growth report.

3. LinkedIn Content Collab

B2B is inclining towards social every year and LinkedIn has become the center of b2b social. Hence, featuring people in LinkedIn content pieces can help you build an awesome relationship with buyers.

A LinkedIn resource is more inclined towards building 1-1 relations than the report(which is a one-many collab aimed at building authenticity).

4. Blog Post Quote Feature

One of the more conventional but effective tactics is to feature people in your blog post.

Just pick one of the core pains you solve for, add some industry trends to write a decent blog on your website, and then invite prospects to give their quote on it.

This builds an even more meaningful connection with the invitees than the Report or LinkedIn content collab.

5. Webinar/Podcast Guest Invitation

Makes sure to be picky for this one, as it involves a lot of resources, effort, and brand association with the guests.

This campaign involves at least 2-4 weeks of planning and execution, after which you can hope for the sales cycle to start properly.

This campaign provides a huge incentive to the target prospects and hence works in most cases to ‘open dream deals for the sales team’.

Final Words

Account Based Relationship building is one of the amazing campaigns to use in ABM. It builds personal but relevant relations, and provides great value to prospects, builds authenticity which all amplifies your b2b growth efforts holistically.

We have built some amazing processes and playbooks to work alongside our clients, you can read more about what we do in our content hub section or can schedule a call with us if want to onboard these campaigns for your sales and marketing team.