How to set up ABM in HubSpot?

How to set up ABM in HubSpot?

Video transcript

Your B2B sales cycle is long, you have large and complex deals and are facing multiple decision makers? ABM might be a good strategy for you!

Welcome to HubSpot Tips and Tricks! I'm Jasna from Actuado and in this video I'll explain How to set up ABM (Account-based marketing) in HubSpot.

ABM: account based marketing. HubSpot's definition is that it is focused growth strategy in which Marketing and Sales collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts.

Usually with ABM we get a smaller number of leads, but more qualified. We personalize the messages for a small market or company.

The tactics we use are for example high value offerings (such as valuable small-scale events, gifting), we create custom sales enablement content (like personalized videos or demos, custom pricing documentation, and we create custom web content like Landing Pages, Microsites, Chatflows. We also use personalized ad journeys for an account or individual stakeholders.

Of course for these tactics to work we need to have all these data points for a company that fits our ICP – ideal customer profile. And we need a lot of content that resonates because as mentioned the sales cycles are long.

HubSpot includes ABM in their Sales and Marketing Pro and Enterprise plans. Don’t be confused by the labelling as it doesn’t say ABM, it says Target Accounts. You go to Contacts and choose Target Accounts.

I already mentioned that the deals are complex and require multiple decision makers. Here you can see what their roles are: blocker, budget holder, champion, decision maker, end user, executive sponsor, influencer, legal and compliance or other.

Of course, you don't necessarily have all these roles for a certain company. You need different information as they have different pain points. You probably wouldn’t address legal & compliance and the champion if you had them on a call with the same information. So you want to craft the messages for each of those roles especially re objections they might have. HubSpot target accounts helps you deliver those messages to the right place (in these roles) at the right time. If you have a list of contacts in legal & compliance you can direct them to a page with additional smart content added. And  that content addresses the pain point of a typical persona in legal & compliance. But a prerequisite is, of course, that you have them in the CRM.

You may have just one role in the CRM and you can add other roles in the CRM based on the information you get from LinkedIn. To get them in HubSpot you could start a conversation on LinkedIn or perhaps as a follow up email or an in person association event and then try to lure them to your website where they would be able to sign up for a relevant ebook, a webinar, a report, a checklist or something else they would find relevant and since they are your target account these assets might be created just for this company or a particular industry you are targeting.

Let’s take a look what we can see. On the top you can filter by the owners, the team you created in HubSpot and your ICP: you have 3 tiers, so you can segment them further. You can also choose the industry and the lifecycle stage and I can’t stress enough that without data in the CRM, you can’t have segmentation.

We are on a demo account, so some data is missing, but we can see if we take a look at Coca-cola, that there are five contact. Four of them have a buyer role and one doesn’t. We can change that (if we have information) quite easily. You can also see that I am an internal stakeholder, the only one at this account. So you know if there are several people in your company working on the same account, you would see them here. You also know what their activities were, so it’s really transparent. If this was a real account we’d also see their engagement: when these contacts were last on the website, replying to our email or booked a meeting.

Adding a target account is easy. You can go to the page, click on this orange button and choose the company. For those of you familiar with HubSpot properties, you can also change the target account property on a particular company to true. Finally, you can also create a workflow based on the criteria that changes this property to true once the criteria are met.

Here is an example how it would look in real life on an active HubSpot account. You can see the new contacts, one-on-one emails sent, logged calls and meetings. You also have all the roles on the dashboard and you can see both the last touch and the last engagement – their engagement with you.

For two contacts you don’t have the role or any information on the last touch or engagement as you probably don’t have them yet in the CRM. What you could do is add their role based on their job title that you can find on LinkedIn, but there are also some platforms that integrate with HubSpot and would fill that out for you.

Another bonus for the target accounts are also the target account reports you can find in the report library in HubSpot. Currently there are 26.

And an additional tip: even if you don’t execute ABM yet, you can set it up in HubSpot for more important accounts or companies you want to sell to. This will enable you to track them and their contacts in different roles on one dashboard in a more efficient way.

Do you have any questions?

Send an email to hubspot@actuado.com.