Who are the primary decision makers you are targeting

In Account Based Marketing, “decision-making units” consist of the key stakeholders involved in the buying process and are sometimes referred to as a buying center or demand-unit. This unit can range from one person to dozens, depending on your customer and the type of product or service that you are selling.

Índice Show

Use AI to Discover Roles and Personas
Manual resourcing of decision makers
Social media
Business networking
Marketing to decision makers
Buying data
Telemarketing

Figuring out who is on the decision-making unit at your target accounts can be challenging. But you need to discover who is in this unit in order to ensure the right people are targeted in your marketing campaigns.

Each decision-making unit has certain personas in it. Knowing who these personas are can help frame sales conversations to the pain points of the person you’re speaking with, and empower you as a marketer to craft high impact campaign messages that speak to the right people at your target accounts.

So how can you figure out who comprises the decision-making units at your target accounts?

Don’t go by job title alone. Job titles can be the same across companies, but the role may be very different. Look at the typical deal persona involved in your sales and map each person to a standardized identifier.
Develop personas based on the pain points and behavior of each individual involved in the buying process.

Examples of personas that might be in a decision-making unit:

Champion
Primary Contact
Decision Maker
Business User/End User
Economic Buyer
Influencer
Veto Power

Use AI to Discover Roles and Personas

You don’t have to do this all manually. You can use a tool like People.ai to leverage the power of AI to automatically surface how sales is working deals, who they are engaged with at accounts, match contacts to the correct sales opportunity, and what is happening at each stage of the sales pipeline. With insights from the People.ai platform, marketing and sales get a clear visualization of who is involved in the opportunity and which roles might be in the decision-making unit. This gives you clear insight into the personas involved in decision-making units — and lets you define a profile of your “ideal customers.”

Once you know the personas, you can partner with sales to drive more effective marketing at the right stages of the sales opportunity.

Ready to learn how to get clarity on the decision-making units at your target accounts?

Download The Marketer’s Guide to Identifying Decision-Making Units at Target Accounts to learn:

How to discern which personas are in your target accounts’ decision-making unit (and what they need you to solve for them)
Why you must align sales and marketing on the same target accounts (and how to do it)
What to measure to ensure you’re on target and on track
How AI can do the heavy lifting for you and free up your team to focus on creating high impact marketing campaigns

Get this free ebook and improve your targeted marketing today.

The goals of marketing generally boil down to a number of different things –

Raise brand awareness
Build product desire
Reaching decision makers
Informing and educating
Increasing leads or sales

Depending on your sector the order of priority shifts. The standard argument is that developing leads and sales is the primary function of all marketing and maybe at a simplistic level this is true.

However without the education why would someone want your product? Without building a level of desire why will they want to learn about your product? Ultimately though your marketing needs to reach the decision makers.

The masters of B2C marketing are the likes of Apple who have built such a strong brand following that even when the latest release may not be considered up to par, they still willingly upgrade every time. As I write this, I have even heard from a developer friend of mine that he is going to a privately hosted Apple announcement party tonight for the eagerly awaited iPhone 6!

However within B2B this is far less likely to happen and as such your priorities may shift. You may not have the luxury of taking the time to build a following or create that desire, and let’s face it how often does desire come into the business decision making process. Especially with industries such as IT, law or accounting.

So how can you go about targeting the decision makers? As this is ultimately the strongest opportunity for building new qualified opportunities for leads and sales.

Manual resourcing of decision makers

Whilst laborious this will return the exact lists you want to target in addition to the opportunity to build relationships in the process, but what are the options for this?

Sites such as LinkedIn or Twitter can provide a great opportunity to identify the exact targets, you can see the company they work for, personal and or business website, industry data, personal interests, recent status updates and more. The insights to be gleaned here are potentially staggering but time consuming.

Business networking

This has been a firm favourite within the business sector from CEO’s and Managing Directors to sales executives. Always the opportunity to build up contacts and develop relationships is powerful, even if the decision maker doesn’t attend the same events as you, one of their team may and they will be able to arrange the introductions. Just remember networking is not about the hard sale, it is about people.

Contacts

Leveraging existing contacts is always another positive way of reaching decision makers, because again it involves people and real relationships. Over the years you will have built up a large contact base whether you realise it or not. Family, friends and business associates will all have contacts they can introduce you to, but the number of favours you can ask is often limited.

Marketing to decision makers

The problem with manual resourcing as we said previously is that it is either a time consuming process or has a very limited window of opportunity.

At this point stepping up to a dedicated marketing strategy is the logical choice, even if you are already in the marketing cycle going back to manual resourcing is always an option.

CRM

Scour your CRM for the most likely prospects and look at the information you have on that business, review past contacts as they may have received promotions or had additional responsibilities passed their way. Essentially keeping your CRM up to date will pay off.

Database

Always check your database, keep it up to date, buy new data to add to it and use a data verification service to ensure the data is valid.

Buying data

This is a great way to give your marketing database a boost with fresh opportunities. New companies are being started all the time, companies that may have been outside your target market due to size or turnover could now be prime for contact.

Email

This is the perfect match for your database and CRM. By tailoring your message to meet your criteria and align with the selected prospects you can deliver the exact message to the right person at the right time.

Events

We have talked about how events can help to build your marketing database before, but they are also a great way to deliver your USP in person to your key prospects. They can interact and ask questions allowing you to explain exactly why they need your product or service.

Telemarketing

Telemarketing doesn’t have to be a one size fits all approach, but using the data from your other marketing activity (such as those listed above) you can define a very clear demographic for your telemarketing agency to target.

In doing so they will also improve the quality of your data and also develop new opportunities by bringing that human touch back to your marketing strategy.

You can either target for leads and sales or use an appointment setting service to keep your sales team on the road maintaining that human relationship.

Tags: data, decision makers, social media, strategy, Telemarketing