Qualifying leads, validating contacts, profiling accounts, curating content, communicating, researching: these are a few of the ingredients that go into the sales lead management process to achieve a successful ABM campaign, so when you finally get to reap what you’ve sown, it’s a rewarding feeling.

In spring 2016, MRP was fortunate enough to be able to speak with some of the brightest marketing minds in the field of Account-Based Marketing. Our guest, Jill Kaplan is the Director of Marketing at Cisco and helped build the company’s pipeline in the Americas.

Outbound sales and marketing tactics are integral to any type of marketing campaign, but it’s no coincidence that ABM is far and wide considered to be so valuable. Consider this: in a survey by Forrester Research, 86% of marketers attributed their ABM success to predictive marketing. Pinpointing key personas at target companies and then tailoring their content strategy to those personas using predictive data is what gives ABM tactics a big performance boost.

Thanks to the onset of new-and-now digital marketing channels, today’s B2B marketing strategists have begun shying away from direct mail marketing as their platform of choice. Because it’s a traditional platform in a sea of new and exciting digital marketing media, it gets a bad rap. If you’re forgoing direct mail in your B2B marketing campaign, you could be costing your company valuable leads.

You’ve hit your stride in targeting the right accounts and closing high-quality deals, but your job isn’t done yet. Reflecting on how far your campaign has come can help you to not only celebrate your successes, but also to identify and explore whitespace.

When the deed is done and you’ve curated a highly-targeted list of accounts, some of which are at just the right stage in the buying process, what comes next? The execution stage is critical in your ABM strategy, so now is the time to push forward. This is your checklist for using your list of targeted accounts wisely.

In a marketing landscape that’s focused on quality over quantity when it comes to securing leads, this is not an option: the sales and marketing departments need to be operating in perfect tandem. Endearingly nicknamed “SMarketing,” this workplace harmony offers a lot of benefits, such as syncing the quantifiable goals in each department, fostering communication and accountability, and promoting integration – and that’s just to name a few.

Creating a custom sales pitch for every account you’re targeting is a practice that may feel daunting in theory. It means sinking more time into fewer prospects, and that seems like a risky trade-off. But there’s evidence to suggest, to strongly suggest, that fewer prospects can deliver more conversions if you leverage customization opportunities.