Have you ever received a solicitation for a product or service offering that you have less than zero interest in or isn’t even demographically relevant? I’m talking about things like a free membership to gym that is 20 miles away, or lawn care services when you live in a condo complex. It’s annoying, right? You want to do business with companies who take the time to get to know you. Spray and pray marketing, where a company promotes its business to everybody anywhere, is ineffective in the long run. It’s a numbers game, and no one wants to be treated like just another number. The same is true in business. How can B2B marketers treat their prospects as individuals?

You can do a little upfront work to determine who really is an appropriate prospect. When you define your target market and select your sales prospects more intelligently, your marketing campaigns are much more likely to succeed. By taking an account-based marketing (ABM) approach to prospecting, you’re going to find people from organizations who are the right fit for your offering, and you won’t waste anyone’s time (yours or others’) pursuing the wrong people.

ABM uses persona creation to help you and your sales team to focus on your ideal audience and what matters to them. An organization doesn’t take actions, make decisions, or engage in conversations – it’s the people within those organizations who do these things. You can count on a buyer to bring their personalities, their perspectives, and their biases to the decision-making process.

Focusing on the buyer’s persona will help you get to know your prospects. For example, what is their role? What are their responsibilities? What keeps them up at night? What are their goals at work? B2B target marketing messages must appeal to the emotions, in addition to the more common use of rationale and logic to make the business case.

Getting the answers to psychographic questions like these gets to the heart of why someone would be interested in what you’re offering. Gaining insights to your buyers’ attitudes, values, pain points, and fears will help you uncover what their motivators are and how that will affect their purchasing behaviors.

Understanding personas helps marketers craft their messages and target their audience correctly. It informs sales on the best approach to take, whether it be leading with a similar prospect’s success story, appealing to one of their target persona’s value drivers, or instilling a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out, e.g., “Your peers are using xyz, wouldn’t you like to give it a try, too?”). When prospects feel that their attitudes, values, and fears are addressed and validated they are more likely to listen to what you have to say and be receptive to your offer. This is what ABM is all about.

ABM is the approach we’ve been taking at SimplyDIRECT for over 20 years and what we recommend our clients do as well.  We call this research-based selling.

Incredibly simple, remarkably direct. To see how our process works view our 90-second demo.