10 things to research when you’re building an ABM company profile

10 things to research when you’re building an ABM company profile

A Guide to Account Based Marketing Company and Executive Research

Building comprehensive ABM company profiles, executive profiles, and personas for Tier 1 strategic accounts is a time consuming and laborious process. We created an ABM company research guide for our own internal researchers because it helps them work more efficiently and check off the boxes as they work their way through the research process. As we continue to develop this ABM research guide internally, I thought there was a tremendous amount of value for those who want to do the ABM account research on their own, so I’m putting it out there to download for free.

Marketers and the entire account management team can use this ABM company research guide to stay focused on the customer’s business issues and to create more consistent personalized messaging & value propositions that resonate with the customer’s business priorities, challenges, and personal agendas.

What the ABM company research guide will help you do:

• Treat each target account like a market
• Collect valuable and relevant company insights
• Personalize the prospect’s experience with your company
• Communicate specific offers to your prospect
• Design sales propositions to get meetings
• Create content, events, and campaigns targeting personas
• Write emails that are personalized and tailored to a specific executive

Some of the common places we visit to collect account intelligence include the company website, the annual report (10-K), SEC filings, the latest earnings call, analyst reports, press releases, blog posts, industry media, financial press, speeches (sometimes recorded on YouTube) and conference sites, product and technical literature, case studies, success stories, and documented executive interviews. We also research other deep web sources not indexed by the major search engines.

10 things we look for when we’re building an ABM company profile:

1. Size of the company, growth trajectory, market disruptors, and competitors
2. Company details including financials, acquisitions, mergers and history
3. Leadership team, buying teams, culture, values, tenures in roles, attitudes, preferences, and affinities towards competitors
4. Company’s priorities, challenges, pressing issues
5. Organizational structure, reporting structures, power centers, and buying teams
6. Connections of people working at your company to people working at your target account from the board of directors down to individual contributors
7. Detailed executive bios for a few chief level execs
8. Organizational personas for decision makers, influencers, and recommenders
9. Competitor’s solution installed in the target account
10. Other connections including sponsored sports teams, conference attendance, university alumni, and hometowns

We hope this helps your Account-Based Marketing Research efforts. Please download the free ABM Company Research Guide to see all of the sections and websites we visit to gather account intelligence.

Please complete the Contact Form below and request the "ABM Company Research Guide" in the Message section of the form.