Account-Based vs. Volume-Based Marketing

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is the latest trend in the constant chase for better marketing strategies. Its hyper-customized, person-specific approach promises to woo customers with high levels of personalization. 

But ABM isn’t the best choice for every organization. Instead, many people want to speak to large volumes of customers at once without the time-consuming research that ABM requires. A Volume-Based Marketing (VBM) approach allows customization at scale, balancing the benefits of personalization with the need for a wide approach to outreach.

What is ABM?

Account-Based Marketing is a highly focused marketing strategy that will typically deliver highly customized marketing to all key decision-makers at a certain company. These focused campaigns allow marketers and salespeople to make their pitches as relevant as possible to the accounts’ and customers’ specific needs.

Account-Based Marketing is usually performed by experienced go-to-market professionals with considerable resources for doing in-depth research. Without those resources or experience, it becomes prohibitively time-consuming and difficult. But experienced salespeople and marketers aren’t free, and the research tools they use can be expensive by themselves. This makes ABM a high-risk proposal: if it doesn’t pay off, it can be a serious misallocation of resources.

How to Beat ABM

Seeing ABM’s flaws, marketing professionals have found ways to see many of its benefits without costly, long-term research. This new approach is called Volume-Based Marketing (VBM) and it allows for customized outreach at much larger scales.

How to Personalize at Scale

Personalized messaging depends on good, clean data. If you can pull a single, key data point on your prospects, you can create powerful outreach targeted at the highest levels. It’s all about knowing what research you need to do, and completing it at scale.

One of the easiest ways to personalize at scale is with numerical fields. For example, knowing the approximate revenue of an account you’re targeting can let you categorize it and customize accordingly. For example, if you’re selling different products to accounts in different revenue brackets, that simple categorization can let you create a highly personalized sequence at scale.

The exact type of personalization will vary depending on the data you have access to and what you’re selling. For help with targeted sales strategies that scale, you can also look to outside sources like Salaria’s prospecting services.

Don’t Spam Prospects

This should go without saying, but spam doesn’t help anyone interested in doing serious business. Good VBM involves customization at scale, not untargeted, poorly-written advertisements for dubious products. 

Spam emails are untargeted emails that don’t do anything to help their recipients. They don’t have a place in a VBM strategy because their low-quality, untargeted nature alienates prospects instead of enticing them. Instead of sending low-impact spam emails, just a little personalization and targeting can help you follow the best practices in email marketing.