Sales & Marketing Software for
ABM Strategies on LinkedIn

It’s well known that B2B marketing is most effective when sales and marketing are in alignment. When done right, it helps to increase conversion rates by ensuring a coordinated, cohesive approach to account targeting and engagement through the buyer journey and customer lifecycle. With the evolving online experience driving behaviors throughout the buyer’s journey, this alignment now matters more than ever. There’s no room left for silos.

There are already resources available to guide teams through transitioning their people into strategic alignment, but what about the tools needed to drive leads through the sales funnel?

Let’s examine what today’s sales funnel looks like and how integrating with the right solutions can make the partnership between marketing and sales a real powerhouse.

How Leads Enter the Sales Funnel

 

The sales funnel has evolved, and it’s important to understand that the new funnel functions as a framework of processes and systems that guide leads along their buying journey.

Marketing to buying committees

B2B purchase decisions are made by increasingly broad and diverse buying committees. This move is largely due to companies understanding the value of sharing data between departments, and therefore needing to invest in tools and services that have value across the organization. 

Sales and marketing need to be in alignment to understand who these decision makers are and what unique problems they face that your solution can help with.

Multiple entry points into the sales funnel

Because there are multiple parties involved in these decisions, there are also several entry points to the sales funnel.

Each of these prospective customers needs to be nurtured where they’re at in the buying journey – and it’s likely that they’re not all at the same place at the same time. Teams need to be aligned on their approach and agile with their strategies to ensure they are getting the right content and information to their leads at the right time.

Leveraging account-based marketing (ABM) will engage the accounts that matter most, build relationships with decision makers, and create targeted content throughout the buying journey.

Integrations That Bring Sales and Marketing Together on LinkedIn

The goal of unified sales and marketing is to optimize efforts around a full-funnel strategy. This approach fuels both demand and brand marketing in balance for a sustainably healthy funnel. This course on building a full-funnel content marketing strategy on LinkedIn is a great place to start when setting new goals.

CRM integrations such as HubSpot give B2B companies a single, comprehensive view of accounts and contacts, which allows them to engage their prospects and customers with a unified experience across marketing, sales, and customer service. The ABM and Target Accounts features within HubSpot increase account intelligence – bringing in every contact, open deal, deal value, marketing engagement, and sales touch point for each account – to better align marketing and sales teams around a strategy to attract their ideal customer.

Once your unified team sets aligned goals, it’s time to look at sales and marketing software that enables sharing of data and resources at various stages of the funnel.

Awareness

Brand awareness nets long-term sales growth. By investing in a service that amplifies your brand marketing efforts, you increase the pool of potential leads who will move in-market in the future.

The optimal sales and marketing software solution at this stage will facilitate building brand awareness while delivering metrics that matter to both teams.

Another way marketing and sales can work together at this point of creating brand awareness is to elevate sales team members as thought leaders, creating a go-to source for industry knowledge that is linked directly to your brand.

LinkedIn Marketing Partner Spotlight: Transmission
This global full-service B2B marketing agency is dedicated to creating content that is based on data-driven research and is fit for the LinkedIn feed. Transmission specializes in the creation of personalized and customized messaging and applying the right ABM framework to the right campaign.

Transmission is adept at bringing together sales and marketing teams and through their dedicated focus on producing engaging content, they’re highly experienced at driving awareness and brand mindshare amongst your target accounts.

Consideration

At this stage of the sales funnel, unified sales and marketing teams need insight into which customer profiles are moving in-market. This is the entry point into the sales funnel, where momentum picks up and leads start seeking more tailored content to help them make a purchasing decision, such as case studies and white papers.

The optimal software solution for the consideration stage draws on past sales data to create a targeted marketing strategy.

LinkedIn Marketing Partner Spotlight: 6sense
6sense is a provider with features uniquely tailored to this stage of the funnel. Their platform captures intent signals from a wide pool of anonymous sources and connects them to your prospect accounts.

This degree of intent insight helps your sales and marketing team deliver the best content possible to active buyers, regardless of their entry point into the sales funnel.

Conversion

Capturing lead data is the most crucial step in the sales funnel. This is a transition point for the unified team, where the balance shifts and sales members may open dialogue with leads.

A solution that integrates your lead generation platforms with your CRM software ensures your sales team reaps the benefits of all those marketing efforts.

LinkedIn Marketing Partner spotlight: Integrate
Integrate’s software solution allows marketers to easily target key accounts in LinkedIn campaigns and then ingest, enhance, and route leads from LinkedIn to their CRM or Marketing Automation platform, which helps drive smarter marketing decisions and illuminates the impact and value of LinkedIn leads.

Retention

Retention is a task that has historically been in the hands of sales or customer success teams. However, with the new expectations of online customers, marketing is playing a larger role in keeping existing clients informed and interested.

At the retention stage, sales team members elicit feedback from clients and the marketing team develops content that responds to that feedback with educational content and upselling opportunities.

The unified software answer for this stage offers sales and marketing members the opportunity to explore the ROI of their strategy across the sales funnel, and see which paths create customers who remain engaged.

LinkedIn Marketing Partner Spotlight: Datorama by Salesforce
Datorama is a unified marketing intelligence platform that helps teams connect, analyze, and act on all of their media, marketing, customer, and sales data.

As a part of the Salesforce suite of sales and marketing solutions, Datorama integrates with some of the most powerful tools available to see insights across channels and the customer journey.

A full-funnel approach requires internal alignment and the right tools to execute. Learn more about LinkedIn Marketing Partners that can help streamline your sales and marketing strategy.