Why Understanding your Customer’s Pain Point is Crucial in ABM Strategy?

 In my last post around account based marketing (#ABM), I talked about importance of content and how can one measure it. In this post, I intend to take a step back and discuss about how crucial understanding your customer’s or prospect’s pain points is for your ABM strategy.

For our messages to be relevant, it must literally shout out the solution to the pain points or problem statement that the respective account is facing. So, now the question is - How would you know the problem statements or pain points for your target accounts?

For existing accounts, talk to the customer success manager or account manager who interacts with the client on a timely basis. A good account manager would list down what’s bugging the client – it could be issue in the product or process or SLAs/ delay in service or cost etc. It’d also be wise to refer customer satisfaction survey reports too. If you were to cross-sell to an unhappy client, then know that any promise about the product might not go well with them unless you solve for existing issues.

For new accounts, this information is with sales, inside sales and marketing team who do prospecting, account mining and secondary research activities. They know what product/ solution that account is already using and for how long, issues that they might have faced with existing service provider. Social profiling of key decision makers in the account would reveal any issues that client was vocal about, it might also provide clues to key drivers for the decision makers in the account.

For practical ease, below template can help document things to create appropriate ABM strategy:

While some problem statements could be generic, some could be very unique. Solutions to unique problem statements can best be done in one on one conversation by one to one email, phone call, message etc.

Broad problem statements for all decision makers can be grouped at an account level and should be used in your account based marketing promotions and campaigns on appropriate channels for that respective account. Since you’re talking about solutions to your prospect’s pain points in your ads and content, it’s bound to do well as compared to generic messages. Why? Because they see you as a problem solver instead of a company that always talks about itself.

If you don’t know the customer’s pain points, then you’re missing a key aspect of ABM strategy and then you’re limited to traditional approach which is to advertise your product’s best features and problems it solves for in account based marketing campaigns.

Hope you find this post useful !