B2B SaaS demands a hyper-targeted, customer-centric sales strategy, dialled in with what your ideal customers need. But you know that – you’re here for a reason.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is the best way to make that happen (you’ve probably figured that out, too). However, as pressure mounts for SaaS to grow profitably, ABM programmes must shift to engage only accounts that will remain and grow with you.

Getting the ball rolling on an ABM programme requires budget, and that requires a thumbs-up from the powers-that-be. You’ve got to build a concrete business case. Seeing as our primary purpose as an ABM agency is to give you the extra help, expertise, and people on the ground to ‘move the needle’ and make that happen, the least we can do is help you put a business case together.

Plus it helps us get hired – some of us have Lego Bonsais to feed.

Read on to get everything you need to put together your business case for an ABM agency. Everything your stakeholders need to hear, like the problems it will solve, and the benefits you will reap. And everything your teams want to hear, like how it makes their lives easier, takes some of the pressure off them and helps grow your pipeline.

What problems does hiring an ABM agency address?

The price of ‘business as usual’ is too high. However, the macro-focused all-seeing eye of Those Who Hold the Pursestrings rarely has the luxury of time necessary to truly understand the details.

Big-picture stuff is their wheelhouse. So if you zoom out, ABM addresses these big problems that B2B SaaS C-Suite cares about:

• An inability to win/keep clients who have the ability or desire to continue working with your business
• Consistently high marketing spend, which delivers inconsistent results
• Insufficient resources to break into new territories
• Being reliant on the next big deal to stay afloat

However, these are the symptoms, not the cause. And we’re willing to bet that if you’re considering hiring an ABM agency, it’s because you’re already aware of the problems that you can’t address by yourself in-house.

Truly effective, diligent account-based marketing addresses the deeper problems, such as:

• Uncertainty that your business's value proposition is accurate
• Your ‘traditional marketing’ isn’t generating enough high-quality leads for your sales team
• Your current marketing strategies are not effectively targeting or engaging your ideal customer profiles (ICPs)
• You lack the specialist skillsets/tools/knowledge to effectively nurture accounts once you have engaged
• Pressure to close deals and build pipelines has created a quick-win, ‘buy or goodbye’ culture in your sales teams
• Sales and marketing do not communicate (or they do, but it’s usually to slag one another off)

Whether it’s because of your over-reliance on traditional marketing activities that get no results or spray-and-pray lead-generation efforts that only piss people off, the core stimulus is the same. Sales leaders at SaaS companies choose account-based marketing because they understand quality engagement is the only way to reliably win target accounts that will remain and grow with you.

Building your business case: the benefits of account-based marketing

Time, money, and return on investment. Breathe these buzzwords toward your stakeholders like a sultry whisper on a breeze, then back them up with undeniable proof, and they’ll be playdough in your palms.

Building a business case for ABM is no different to any other business case. You need concrete, quantifiable data, with context. Here are some benefits of ABM that your stakeholders won’t be able to ignore.

How ABM saves you time and money

Account-based marketing is known for its precision. With survival for B2B SaaS heavily tied to profitable growth, ABM programmes are crucial to winning target accounts that can grow with you. We relentlessly research, understand, and pursue only high-value target accounts that have the appetite and the means to remain your clients.

By channelling resources and efforts into accounts that matter the most to your business, we save time and ultimately save money that would other be wasted in hours working on pitch decks that were never going to lead anywhere.

Recruiting and building teams in new territories also represent an immense cost for B2B SaaS. An ABM agency like Buyingtime offers a cost-effective alternative for local sales and marketing support as you expand.

That’s what we did for retail technology company NewStore. We helped them expand into Europe from the US, building out a set of target accounts and engaging with those accounts to generate new meetings through content, persistent messaging, outreach and in-person events. Not only did we save NewStore time and money by acting as a valuable supplement to their new UK team of one, we also:

• Handed over 29 1:1 meetings with target accounts
• Built nearly 500 accounts across the UK, DACH and Australia (with contacts)
• Generated 10+ accounts for their pipeline

NewStore have since closed/won four accounts, with an ARR of $1.8m.

Improved deal velocity

Notice the use of the term ‘deal’ - not ‘lead’. Lead generation is a fine art, and certainly plays its role. However, as SaaS businesses pursue profitable growth, winning deals that last is more important than just winning deals. Recurring revenue is king.

ABM ensure that your messages resonate deeper with your target audience, which serves to not only increase the number of vetted opportunities your sales teams get, but also their quality.

Marketing platform Emarsys experienced a similar problem. Sales had a very high close rate, but marketing struggled to deliver the quantity of high-quality leads sales needed. Buyingtime helped to vastly improve the quality of Emarsys’ data and the quality of target account contacts in the database. Then, through diligent outreach, we went on to deliver a 28% uplift in high-quality lead flow for the Emarsys sales team.

Greater competitiveness

With an updated and rigorously tested value proposition, businesses become nearly instantly more competitive. Buyingtime starts every ABM programme with an unbiased accounting of your value proposition. We research you, your competitors, your place in the market, the problems you solve and just about anything else you can think of.

It’s our experience that nailing your value proposition is the biggest area B2B SaaS businesses fall short. Our aim here is not to tell you you’re wrong. Ideally, we arrive at a value proposition that is very similar to yours. Sometimes this is not the case.

So often, businesses suffer from the “We have clever people…what is your challenge?” syndrome. That was certainly the case for ​The App Business (TAB).

A division of the leading Kin & Carta digital agency group, TAB is an award-winning mobile solutions company. With TAB, Buyingtime dug into the value proposition to understand what was missing. We swiftly discovered that the messaging wasn't there to unlock initial engagement – no one saw TAB as anything unique or special. Our ABM team created meaningful content for all parties, and focused on generating valuable connections and conversations with the right people in target companies.

With a newly refined value proposition and faith in this new messaging, Buyingtime delivered TAB:

• 32 meeting with target companies
• Winning £13m of work over two years working together
• Which TAB doubled in the following year from connections we forged for them
• Winning a single contract worth £18m

Most of this is down to their re-vamped value proposition.

Additional benefits of ABM programmes

Saving time and money, winning more deals and enhancing your competitiveness may be some of the most important benefits for building a business case for hiring and ABM agency. But they’re far from the only benefits.

Account-based marketing also helps:

• Align sales and marketing, letting marketing hold onto leads longer to make it easier for sales teams to connect and convert customers later down the line

• Build long-term relationships. ABM relies on multiple, high-quality touchpoints to win deals that last - It’s the work sales teams should be doing

• Boost your current client growth – ABM is about nurturing relationships, even after the sale is made. Communities, advocacy groups, advisory boards; they’re all present in true ABM

• Improve brand awareness – account-based marketing pulls all marketing levers, and a true ABM strategy will involve a well-thought-out approach to every marketing channel that’s relevant to your business

• Strategic alignment – back to that value proposition again. ABM programmes are built from the ground up to align your growth objectives with your marketing strategy.

Where Buyingtime stands out

ABM agencies need to change the way they operate in B2B SaaS. With a new emphasis on profitable growth, ABM programmes must pivot away from just a more involved way to market products/services, toward a holistic approach.

Account-based marketing has the privilege of pulling any marketing lever.  Where Buyingtime differs is that we do it all. We pull every lever: email, social media, outbound calling, events. We even have a thriving Commerce Futures community, exclusively for eCommerce and digital leaders (your audience). We protect this group of incredible leaders ferociously; in return, they keep us current and on the pulse. Where appropriate, we use what we learn from this community (how they feel toward vendors, what they’re looking for in the market, what they’re interested in) to inform how we approach people like them on your behalf.

No other ABM agency does this. Yes, that is a brag…but we don’t do it often. And I (the person writing, not Buyingtime the entity) am slightly cringing at doing so.

Once that value proposition is done (we will never stop harping on about the VP!), we get to work designing a programme that covers everything.

Fed up of your outreach efforts falling short? Get in touch!

‍