A step-by-step guide to ABM for line-of-business success

Lately, many of our clients have been asking the same question: How can we expand our footprint or wallet-share with existing customers, particularly when moving out of the data center and into lines of business (LoB)? My answer: You need to make yourself relevant to LoB buyers. While Account-Based Marketing (ABM) can seem overwhelming at first, there are straightforward ways to get started.

If you’ve been delivering IT solutions for years, you ARE a business expert. Yet, so many technology sellers hesitate to speak with line-of-business buyers. They feel uncomfortable and slightly out of their wheelhouse.

While you may not know every detail of your customer’s business, you do know they need to reduce costs, improve visibility across their value chain, enhance customer service, integrate AI and GenAI into workflows, and engage employees and partners. It’s easier than you think to take these high-value concepts and craft industry-specific language that resonates with LoB decision-makers.

How I became a financial services/public sector/manufacturing <InsertAnyIndustry> expert

In my 20 years of selling technology solutions, I quickly learned that getting inside the head of my customer’s business was key to climbing to the top of the vendor list and closing more deals. For example, when I sold CRM to Wealth Managers at a major bank, I discovered several important factors:

1. 1. They were always remote—so the solution needed to be mobile.
   2. They were paranoid about security—we needed encryption and other measures right from the start.
   3. They were suspicious and intolerant of technology—so we recommended a super-simple interface with minimal data input.
   4. They were constantly under time pressure—so we ensured the CRM auto-updated with valuable information that they normally had to get from other systems to provide immediate benefits.

In our meetings during the sales process, we focused on these business challenges, not the technology. Within weeks, other vendors were out—they only wanted to buy from us. We then took the same approach to expand our footprint at this bank from Wealth Management into Retail Banking, Insurance, Mortgages and Lending, Commercial Banking and more.

By leading with industry-specific knowledge rather than tech jargon, we soon became known as “industry experts who understand the right technologies for your industry,” instead of just another tech vendor. This approach is a big part of making your ABM plan work.

The 5 steps to building an ABM program

Here are five steps to building an ABM program that will help grow your business:

Step 1: Identify industry-specific line-of-business use cases

First, understand the needs of LoB decision-makers. This means identifying industry-specific use cases that address their pain points. Dig deep into the personas you’re targeting. What are their challenges? How can your solutions help? Ideally, tailor your use cases to be as relevant to their industry as possible. The goal here is to establish you and your experience, to make it clear why you could be the right partner in helping them meet their business outcomes. Most technology companies are excellent at helping to drive great business outcomes, even when they don’t see themselves as business experts. If you’ve been implementing solutions for years, you understand exactly how you are helping a customer’s business grow.

Step 2: Map your industries to your client base and start your bill of materials

Next, align your targeted industries with your existing clients. Take a good look at how many customers you have in each industry. Do you want to tackle every industry at once, or focus on just one or two to start? Narrowing down helps you create more tailored, effective content for those industries. Once you’ve identified your target industries, you will need to build out a bill of materials – think blog posts, infographics, webinars, or how-to guides – that speak to those specific use cases, and begin to build your footprint as an industry expert.

Step 3: Expand your list of potential buyers

You’re likely already working with a handful of people in IT, but an ABM approach allows you to identify additional buyers within those accounts, particularly LoB leaders. Instead of focusing on just a few contacts, use list-building programs or ABM platforms to uncover new decision-makers. For instance, you might have 5 contacts in IT today, but with ABM, you can expand that to 30 or more by adding business stakeholders.

Step 4: Launch targeted campaigns

Once you’ve identified potential buyers, it’s time to reach them. Create customized campaigns—whether through LinkedIn, content syndication, or other channels—that speak directly to the needs of these buyers. The goal is to get them to opt in so you can nurture those leads. By addressing their specific business challenges, you’re much more likely to see engagement and, ultimately, pipeline growth. Your investment in the beginning can be fairly small while you test the viability of ABM and see how your new messaging and approach is resonating.

Step 5: Equip sales with offers to engage line-of-business buyers

Finally, give your sales teams something fresh to take to these LoB buyers. Whether it’s a new offer, a targeted solution, or just a relevant case study, sales is always looking for ways to re-engage or open new doors. I remember from my days selling financial services solutions, I would often start with a lunch meeting with a current buyer. At the end, I’d ask for an introduction to a line-of-business buyer somewhere else in the organization. Those warm intros led to bigger pipelines and faster deals because the conversation was already sponsored. You can enable your sales teams to get more comfortable with enabling conversations with LoB buyers by preparing them with an industry battlecard that will define talk tracks, research, proof points, expected business outcomes, industry trends, target buyers and more.

By following these five steps, you can leverage ABM to expand your presence within existing accounts, increasing pipeline and accelerating deal velocity. Remember, it’s about becoming relevant to your customers’ business challenges—and when you can do that, you’ll become a trusted partner far beyond the data center.