B2B Revenue NOW E-Book

Atte Sallamo

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 344

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

This book holds the BLUEPRINT for that methodology I've used to deliver measurable revenue growth for numerous B2B businesses. This method has yielded Return on Investment ranging from 324%, to 647% in B2B ROI, all the way up to 900% and beyond in pure profit. What I am describing here is not an alien result, but one your B2B company gets to experience (and should expect) once you get in place this framework that awaits you inside these covers. The process: 1) Find your ideal high-value clients. 2) UNIFY & ALIGN your revenue operations. 3) EXECUTE! Conquer your B2B profit & REVENUE GOALS. The proof and power of this process you'll come to experience firsthand on your own company's balance sheet. How is this possible? In all simplicity, we focus on what matters. on those SPECIFIC revenue-critical actions that scale (80/20 principle in action). We amplify them to work in your favor! Identifying your high-value audience, aligning marketing & sales, data-driven leadership, and the Account-Based orchestration of it all. Once you'll come to graduate from this curriculum, your business has a crystal clear understanding on where to place the energy of your enterprise so it yields the kind of growth that others will envy. This we'll do together by hand-picking the correct alignment processes, leadership practices, and measurement models for your business from the basket that this book is. ...For growth happens when the conditions inside your company support it. That's when you'll conquer your quarterly goals, deliver on your OKRs, and provide measurable (and fresh) revenue inflows that land on the balance sheet fueling your entire business. LEARN ABOUT: Rev Ops roadmap, Team structure, & Leadership.

Leseprobe

LIABILITY

The information contained in this book doesn’t take into account the unique situation and circumstances of the reader, thus the book is for general advice and informational purposes only.

Results mentioned in this book are not typical and may vary from person to person as ultimately the nature of the actions taken will define anyone’s end result. There are no guarantees in life. Any actions taken based on the information provided are at the reader's own discretion and risk.

Before acting on any advice the reader should think through the fittingness of the advice for their unique situation and size their bets vs risks accordingly if they take any action. The author and publisher shall not be held liable for any direct or indirect harm, financial losses, or adverse consequences resulting from the application of the ideas and concepts discussed in this book.

For all those who stood by my side going through this journey… My family, friends old and new, and most of all, to the journey of life itself.

Special thanks to my mother and father who’ve always believed in me, even when I didn’t myself.

CONTENTS

PLANTING THE SEED

Your Account-Based Journey Begins

The Backbone of Account-Based Action & Alignment

Building the Team Behind Your Success

TIME FOR ACTION

Construct the Engine for Growth

Define Your Target (Accounts)

Account-Based KPIs and Measuring Your Success

YOUR ULTIMATE TRANSFORMATION

The Compounding Account-Based Growth

Knowledge into Action

GLOSSARY

IMPORTANT!

Please read before you start.

This isn’t a book about marketing or sales ‘techniques’. No.

Not even though we use marketing and sales as THE ultimate medium to channel in the fresh revenue inflow for your B2B company. These methods stored in this book have allowed me to create +900% ROI in the B2B industry, but even still…

This isn’t a book about flashy ‘techniques’ that work for a week and then the results die off. So if that’s what you are looking for (what's trending this week), close this book right now, and put it back on the shelf you picked it up from for a better day, or get rid of it. Your choice.

This is something bigger we are building here…

To put it shortly, you are about to set up your very own UNIFIED revenue operations team which leverages both marketing and sales, but isn’t limited to just one or the other as your B2B growth driver.

As such, this book isn’t just about “marketing” or “sales” either. No. You already know what those are, because both remain fundamentally unchanged in Account-Based marketing and sales methodology.

This book is about something bigger.

It’s about how you bring those two functions together (in practice) with the world-famous Account-Based methodology that most B2B companies have left very much under-utilised and pay a mere lip service to…

What this book is about is that “Account-Based” part of your revenue operation; what’s unique about it and what makes Account-Based marketing and sales TRULY “Account-Based” in the first place (sneak peek: it has a lot to do with your ideal buyers and alignment processes).

The above is also why I purposefully in this book write “Account-Based” in capital letters, while keeping the “marketing” and “sales” lower case even though a frequently used format for writing them is “Account-Based Marketing and Sales”.

But here, we’ll drill down to the Account-Based part of it all.

We’ll of course dive into this journey of discovery through the topics of marketing and sales which are the core business functions in any company that will benefit from the Account-Based approach, since it finds and facilitates business growth by aligning their actions seamlessly together.

This is our point of focus: The collaborative intersection – in your company – where marketing meets sales and where their collaboration is turned into revenue.

That we’ll achieve with the help of carefully crafted blueprints that set up the appropriate collaboration models, teamwork incentives, and business processes which align your revenue-critical business functions behind a common goal: to serve, understand, and grow those very best clients that your business can only dream of today.

Thus, from this book you are not going to find a single sales technique, marketing psychology hack, or a flashy new ‘conversion gimmick’ that’s hot today and forgotten tomorrow.

What we are about to focus on is something evergreen.

Your company’s alignment to serve its ideal clients who are that apex of our focus in this book. These two are what propel long lasting business growth.

Thus, the meat and bones of this book is 100% about creating and facilitating the collaboration between your different stakeholders and cross-functional teams who act central roles in building your pipeline, influencing the buying decisions of your ideal B2B customers, and serving them in a manner that maximises their lifetime value for your business.

This brings us to my last notice: This isn’t a book about any individual business function such as marketing or sales alone, even though they are the spearhead of your revenue operations that fuel up your business. No. Because no single business function can propel longterm growth alone, since if you can’t retain the clients that your marketing and sales teams bring in, there’s no long-lasting business effect in what you do.

That’s why, even though we mostly focus on marketing and sales, I want the readers to know that everything in this book applies to your other business functions as well. Starting from the product/service team, and extending all the way to your customer service/success unit who are the key players in delivering your ideal customers with the value your company can deliver.

You see, without the ‘value’ your company’s value proposition is a mere ‘proposition’ that’s hollow.

Thus, we are to align all of your revenue-critical business operations to also serve the ideal clients that bring your company the best possible profit margins out there. That’s where the 10x growth curve comes from. From a total customer centric alignment.

But this change doesn’t happen by itself and it certainly won’t happen overnight. It takes action from you, patience, and a reasonable time horizon to make manifest your revenue aspirations into reality.

By the end of this road, if you implement all that we cover, you’ve come to transform your business into a living and breathing Account-Based organization.

So… Now that we are aligned, you and I, does this sound like a journey you are ready for?

If so, then keep reading. This book is for you.

Keep Growing.

-Atte Sallamo

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ATTE SALLAMO

THIS WAS MY JOURNEY…

IN BRIEF

Certified Account-Based Strategistx2, by

Demandbase.

+6 Years in Account-Based Marketing(and growing).

Both in-house & agency.

Performance Marketing Expertwith proven ROI of +900% revenue result.

MY FULL STORY:

(AND HOW THIS BLUEPRINT CAME TO BE)

Who the heck is this guy? Yes, you may not have heard of me before, but I am dead certain that you’ve come across with the B2B passions of mine that I’ve spent my entire career with until this date. That is, all the alignment work in Account-Based marketing, sales, service/product design, and well… everything, that you are about to step into just by holding this book in your hands.

For my entire professional career (of well above +10,000 h) I’ve been in the trenches with B2B sales teams, marketing leaders, product owners, and function directors. We’ve come up with collaboration models for aligning our actions in a smooth manner, so that you end up better serving, reaching and influencing those business-critical eyeballs and brains that make the decision on whether to buy your B2B product or not.

And the bottom line?

Well, what we’ve found is that more often than not, a better alignment of critical-to-revenue actions tends to turn in bigger profits, faster sales cycle, and improved customer satisfaction as the needs of the buyer are now better met. No big surprise there, so let me save you from rambling on about it.

The backbone of improving these revenue operations is to understand who your ideal buyer is.

This is at the heart of “all things Account-Based”, no matter if it’s sales, marketing, product development or even customer service we are talking about. And when saying “thorough”, I seriously mean every single letter of the word. Because those ideal buyers are the people and businesses that decide if yours can exist at all.

See, your ideal clients are those approximately top 20% of your high-value clients who bring in the precious ~80% of your revenue inflows. Now knowing this, just think of what would happen if this stream of income was to be cut in half… or never identified in the first place? Exactly.

This is what often “makes or breaks” a B2B company, as not knowing ‘who to sell to’ sets a hard cap on your growth, or losing those critical clients will lead into a downfall of even the toughest giants when the blood of the business (revenue) is drained from its veins.

The interesting part is, that for many B2B companies this pool of top ~20% buyers can mean just a few individual clients (out of the total customer base you currently have), so loosing just one of them will show a significant drop off in your revenue inflows, but simultaneously acquiring even just one more of them can have a tremendous uplift in your company’s profitability!

Let me repeat this, one new high-value client can make the difference in between hitting your growth target, revenue goal, OKRs, and KPIs.

Now even though this 80/20 principle is for the post part a widely recognized rule of thumb in the business world, it actually holds water fairly accurately most of the time! Often when I’ve seen B2B companies run an analysis on “who their high-value clients are” …or, when I’ve done these myself, most of the time the results mirror the 80/20 principle with an astonishing accuracy.

Now of course the ratio is not always exactly 80/20, but you get the point. This well illustrates the importance of not just putting your customer’s first in your business, but putting your ideal customers even before the rest.

Which brings us to the good news for you. It’s that these “I’d kill to have as my clients” type of buyers, they do exist in every single market there is. You just need to identify them.

Then what follows if you don’t?

What follows is that when you don’t have a true and explicit, well-crafted definition about your ideal buyers (written down) ...you have them covered in a veil of unclarity which hinders your company’s growth together with your marketing efficiency and sales results. That’s when you can’t find those ideal buyers either in the real world, or sell to them, and there’s no way to describe “how they look” to your other business departments which are supposed to solve the problems of your ideal buyers.

Unclarity causes a clear disconnect!

A disconnect that multiplies in its effects and runs through your entire organization from top down and back up again leading into tremendous waste; from the C-suite, to the VPs, Directors, Managers, all the way to the operational people in the trenches doing their best to drive your revenue every day.

When their target (audience) is misplaced, then an equal share of your employees' time and effort will go down the drain into utter waste. This leads into conversations and meetings that shouldn’t happen, actions that are better left undone (with no real business impact), and time put into projects that should never be started in the first place.

An endless sea of waste: in time, money, and effort will follow a misplaced audience that doesn’t resemble your true ideal buyers. At best, here your marketing and sales efforts are placed behind reaching buyers who are at least inferior to what you could have sitting in your order books right now.

This is why it’s crucial to get this one piece right: Know your audience and understand it (we will discuss this later).

Now, one would say that I’m exaggerating, but I am sad to say that I am not. It really does make a world of difference if your revenue-critical players set their focus on a wrong target persona, or they simply don’t know what is that ‘thing’ which resonates amongst your ideal buyers… causing your marketing and sales not to turn in revenue.

Now how does all this relate to me?

Well, recognizing the above is why in my career, I’ve made it my mission to truly understand the ideal customers and target accounts that I’ve had to reach, encounter and influence, since that’s literally the only way to align the revenue operations, marketing, and sales of any business. That’s what creates real-life business impact.

And I mean that literally: not just ‘understand’ them in Excel as rows of data, but what their lives are actually like day-to-day… To relate with them, with their needs, wants, desires, and the psychological hierarchy of all this, so that it’s possible to not only find these buyers, but also craft the message that finds the maximal resonance amongst the B2B audience in question.

While we are on this topic of psychology and human behaviour, let me open that thread from my own past, since interest in psychology was one of the original drives that brought me into the realm of marketing and Account-Based everything.

See, what got me into building Account-Based collaboration models wasn’t my heart burning desire to do so at first, but the need to have those in place. This is because once we (me and my colleagues) started to see that most other levers had already been pulled, put to use, and utilised into their extreme in B2B marketing and sales, we were practically forced to look into other ways of influencing revenue creation.

This is where the Account-Based frameworks and models started to come into the picture. But originally, as said, I was pulled into the Account-Based realm by my interest in social psychology, communication, and marketing which at first opened me the door into the world of ‘normal’ B2B marketing. Those topics were the main focus of my interest back in my days studying at the University of Helsinki, from where I took off and made my way into modern B2B digital marketing.

That walk wasn’t easy, I’ll admit. It included a number of stumbling stones that gave me a lesson after lesson both on the fields of the ‘normal’ B2B marketing and the Account-Based methodology.

Especially in the beginning I was fascinated by a number of digital marketing tools that I imagined would fix all my issues like a silver bullet, but they didn’t. Because even though as powerful as an individual marketing/sales tool can be, it’s rarely enough to fix pressing issues alone if the ideal customer profile is ‘off’.

Let me elaborate.

Like, think that you are in a situation where you see your marketing and sales actions yielding no revenue, absolutely none, while your marketing campaigns are bringing in a nice number of leads who are even proving to be of good quality, and all this is accompanied by the fact that your online campaigns have a nice level of engagement. All that with an affordable cost, but still… no revenue in sight.

What could be the problem?

Now, the numbers don’t lie. Your marketing is doing a kickass job amongst the audience that you are reaching. You do know that you have the killer ad, and the follow-up emails are getting sky high engagement, but still… No revenue, no sales deals, no SQLs, no real results.

Now knowing what I know, I wouldn’t go searching for a silver bullet to fix all this in an instant, but where I would now turn my attention is if the ideal customer profile is actually solid in the first place!

I became sensitive to see insights like this when I realised that if the people paying for my salary don’t make a buck, then eventually that’s going to cause my wallet to dry up really fast as well. Like it’s not ok to ‘explain away’ a bad result with a wave of hand saying “the marketing campaign clearly works” because “the marketing metrics are top notch”, when in reality the big picture analysis would tell you all those sky-high engagement numbers are not turning into revenue… which hints at you that either the ideal customer profile is either off, or just the ad targeting is completely skewed.

So there’s evidently something in need of a fix.

After this realisation there was no going back for me. I had to find and pull those levers which turn ON the revenue inflows reliably for any B2B company out there.

And when saying “had to start finding”, I mean obsessively.

I had to find out how to marry together my clients with their ideal buyers even if they themselves didn’t have a clear understanding on who their ideal buyer is – trust me, there are quite a few businesses out there that have at best a vague idea about what those top 20% customers of theirs look like, just because they haven’t bothered to run the analysis on this.

Thus, I couldn’t just limit myself into doing great marketing, but I had to start aligning myself with the deeper business objectives of the sales teams I was supporting. After all, salespeople are the ones collecting the cash from the people seeing my marketing message, and if I did my job right, this cash could be collected at an accelerated rate.

This is what got me started with Account-Based marketing, even though back then I didn’t know that such a term existed.

Then… a catalyst came rushing at me from the bushes, when one of my early mentors introduced me to the topic of Account-Based marketing after he had visited a Demandbase conference (ABM Summit, 2018) in San Francisco, USA… This is where all of that follows in this book started to happen.

Account-Based marketing intrigued me, it took all of my time and I even ended up getting certified by Demandbase as an Account-Based marketing strategist (twice).

I couldn’t let the topic rest, but dug up all I could find about Account-Based marketing, sales, and everything that was out there. The free stuff, the paid stuff, the webinars, the books, the eBooks and even the simple PDFs that discussed this topic.

I had to formulate a clear blueprint on the entire Account-Based concept in my mind.

What was it, how to use it in practice, how to explain this to others!

Eventually, clear outlines began to emerge. But while the topic made sense, there was something weird about it. Now I don’t mean that there was something fundamentally wrong about it, as it was a solid approach, but it was extremely hard at the time to find any actual real-life examples on what it meant to practise the Account-Based methodology in a real B2B company.

How to run a pilot program, how to align marketing with sales, and how to measure the entire revenue generation funnel as a whole.

I wanted a living and breathing example of a business which was practising the methodology in reality, but such examples were hidden. Yes, some people from different companies were giving out tasters of their Account-Based frameworks in a few webinars but that was about it. No one was featuring their entire Account-Based program as such.

And no wonder, because the ‘best in the industry’ businesses have spent unimaginable piles of money to come up with their tailor-made solutions, and the only outspoken sources on the topic at the time were Demandbase and few other SaaS companies that were trying to sell their own service subscriptions and expensive courses (which I did ended up taking).

It wasn’t that there was no information out there about Account-Based marketing and sales, but the quality of the information varied a lot as (understandably) the forerunner businesses practising the Account-Based approach weren’t too keen on letting competitors copy-paste their solutions in place.

As a result, the big picture of “what’s Account-Based” had some evident blank spots in the equation.

Then it hit me.

Like obviously no business is going to open source their top-secret formula for the wider world just so they could get financially murdered by competitors who take their Account-Based strategies and make them their own. But this didn’t mean you couldn’t deduct the formula from what I already knew and had learned.

You know, I already knew where the ‘blank spots’ were, so it was just a matter of “fill in the blanks”. This is where I put my mind to it, and even worked with colleagues to develop a holistic Account-Based blueprint almost any B2B business can deploy.

And I do want to highlight that it wasn’t me alone who came up with the contents in this book, but this blueprint consists of numerous frameworks I’ve come across in discussions with multiple people. So no, I didn’t fabricate all this from thin air.

You see, me and my colleagues had built a vast sea of resources, skills and frameworks that just needed some parsing together so that the big picture could be completed.

Now all that was needed was for us to battle test the earlier hidden blueprint we had made visible.

The output I can say was jaw dropping. Any time I’ve presented this blueprint, or even just flashed parts of it to anyone, no matter if a colleague, client, or senior manager, the reaction was always the same… “I want that”, “We must do this”, or “We need this”.

And here… you are holding it in your hands.

The best kept secrets of the Account-Based business world.

Through the years, I’ve of course had to develop the blueprint further. To the point that today it holds the frameworks for practical transformation of any B2B business that wants to take their ‘normal’ B2B marketing, sales, and other revenue-critical functions, and turn ON the Account-Based mode in each of these.

This blueprint, I am here to share in public with you.

But first, a few last words about me, the author (hey honestly, who doesn’t love to talk about themself).

Through my +10,000 h career I’ve worked under numerous titles that include Account-Based Marketing Strategist, Performance Marketing Manager, Digital Marketing Strategist and even managed a company of my own as a CEO.

So I’ve absolutely been through the trenches together with sales and marketing teams driving B2B revenue (both in-house and as a consultant) where we’ve spent countless hours to come up with smooth alignment processes that help us execute our mission efficiently.

I was also part of the core team working to evangelise the Account-Based philosophy and thinking in my home country of Finland. The company I worked for was even the first Finnish agency partner of Demandbase which is the crown jewel of Account-Based marketing in the modern online world of marketing and sales.

So as you might imagine, the bulk of my skills are focused on creating lasting business impact online. This I’ve coupled with my ‘offline ability’ to facilitate the creation/deployment of operational models that drive alignment of marketing, sales, and other revenue-critical business functions.

In my career, I’ve worked with enormous international B2B enterprises and brands that I am 97% sure you’ve come across in your life and are familiar with… More than likely you’ve even used some of the end products made by these brands who produce equipment, tools, technology, and machinery being used in the D2C, B2C and B2B environments.

Maybe the flashiest organization I’ve worked for is a unicorn space technology company that’s a world leader in building satellites which see through clouds, smoke, and darkness of the night in any weather.

While all that, through my multi year career I’ve built a strong background in the field of Account-Based performance marketing and strategy. With well over $1,000,000 of marketing investment in my name, I’ve driven world class lead/MQL/SQL generation and brand activation campaigns that have reached business decision makers across the globe on all continents except Antarctica (sadly penguins haven’t made their way to any of the ideal customer profiles of my employers).

I’ve run digital Account-Based campaigns on all of the most powerful programmatic online advertising platforms out there that include: LinkedIn, Account-Based advertising networks such as Albacross, Google Ads, Twitter Ads, Meta, world famous tier #1 media publications (on their online advertising networks), you name it…

But as no ad campaigns alone can deliver you nurtured sales qualified leads and revenue, a great chunk of my time in my Account-Based career has been about nurturing those precious contacts.

But enough about me, I think you now have the feel of who I am as the author.

The rest of this book is about you, and getting your business to that place where each and every person and department practises the modern way of driving B2B business growth.

…It’s time to turn ON the Account-Based mode in your company.

Let’s get started.

PART I

PLANTING THE SEED

#1

YOUR ACCOUNT-BASED JOURNEY BEGINS

WELCOME TO THE REALM OF ACCOUNT-BASED… WELL, EVERYTHING.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight.

Even though this book is primarily about running and setting up your operational blueprint for Account-Based marketing and sales, they are not the only business functions that should be benefiting from the Account-Based transformation you are about to push into motion.

That’s because as a whole, the Account-Based approach is an overarching company-wide ‘way of operating’ which means you leave a lot laying on the table if you only apply this book with your marketing and sales teams. This is why it’s far better to talk about Account-Based Everything, rather than Account-Based marketing or sales.

So this isn’t just a book about the two revenue and demand generation departments of your business. No, this is a book that guides you into activating the Account-Based genome in your company’s core DNA in a holistic manner. So that you’ll realise the true nature of your ideal clients that your business was born to serve in the first place: That they are not only important, but CRITICAL for your company’s entire existence and longevity.

This means bringing also your customer service, product development and other key business functions in direct connection with your clients… or rather, at least these functions need to internalise who those ideal customers are, so that they may take it into account in their own work which centres around serving the buyers. Because what’s in strong correlation with your company’s revenue inflows is the value extracted from your product/service by your buyers. That’s where long-term business growth originates from: from value delivered and experienced.

This growth farming isn’t just about marketing and sales alone. It’s about all-encapsulating cooperation within the company to serve those who are most important to your business.

So as you see, since these ‘other’ functions are already by nature in connection to your revenue evolution, they do have their natural place in your plans of becoming an Account-Based organization as well. In this book, we are simply making this relationship visible, the transformation actionable, and get you started in making that into reality.

Sounds like a lot? Now, no worries.

You’ll get all the help as you advance through the book, and by the end of it this all will come together. Even the parts which at first feel hard to comprehend will open up as we open all the Account-Based threads one by one and tie them together in the last chapters.

On our journey, we are going to direct the bulk of our attention to the Account-Based marketing and sales parts of it all, because those indeed are the two major areas which can most benefit from the Account-Based approach, and reap the benefits the fastest. But what I want to get across here in the beginning, is that “going Account-Based” isn’t about marketing and sales solely, it’s about organising your entire business around your ideal B2B client.

This involves having in place those subtle cultural practices that bring your ideal customer to the forefront of your business, because as Peter Drucker so well put it “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

One enormous business giant called Amazon has well realised this principle (yes, I know it’s a B2C brand, but a good example) as they’ve truly made it their hearts mission to focus obsessively on their customers. Even to the extent that every meeting in the company should have an empty chair at the table reserved for the end customer who is the most important person in the room.

One empty chair! What a powerful symbol, cultural practice and a manifestation that centres everyone’s attention not just around, but exactly and directly at the customer… making it explicit under whose terms your business is run. That empty chair speaks louder than any powerpoint slide, a deck of them, a manifesto, or a list of principles that are preached till boredom. The practice runs through the entire business hierarchy, it’s visible to all people working for the company no matter what they do, and it’s imprinted into the absolute core DNA of the company.

This “empty chair strategy” shows beautifully the thinking we are after in the Account-Based approach. Even though we focus heavily on the actual processes here on how to run your Account-Based operations and alignment, you should allow these cultural manifestations to be born when one raises its head, because they are the signs that this new approach is ‘sinking in’ with the people.

Now, reading this book, you don’t need to be a business owner yourself to get this new way of working in place at a company (even though the authority may help), but you can be anyone who wants to run world class B2B revenue operations that your company lives and thrives by (or without them dies by).

You can be a CMO, CSO, CRO, CEO, even part of the extended management team, middle management or a lower ranking operative employee who wants to introduce better team collaboration and effective cross-functional alignment between business functions.

No matter where your rank lands in the business ladder, this book delivers you the best-in-class frameworks on how to set up and run your Account-Based operations, collaboration, alignment, and the entire Account-Based Program you are about to give birth to.

That’s why, as you’ve already come to learn… I don’t want you to think of anything we discuss in the coming pages as only ‘marketing’ or ‘sales’ related, because in truth you are about to set sail on a journey of discovery where you’ll equip yourself with learnings to organise your complete company in a truly customer centric way. This is what the Account-Based blueprint is all about, as no individual department alone – or even two – could unlock the jammed locked-in energies which keep up the siloed corporate structure that’s causing tremendous waste and disconnect in any organization.

Unlocking these revenue driving synergies, that belong to your business by birthright… that’s what we are after in this book.

And our tool again? To centre your company’s attention where the highest quality revenue originates from: Your ideal B2B client. There’s no better way to conquer this beast of a goal than to formulate a true understanding about that profile.

Who are they? What are they like? What do they struggle with? What fixes have they tried already? What emotions are they going through? How can you help them? How to explain this in an understandable manner? What alternatives (to you) are they considering? How to win the client over to you! And how to keep those crown jewels as part of your court for good…

This knowledge about your ideal customer empowers you to employ some of the most underutilised marketing and sales tools that most companies only pay lip service to: Customer specific storytelling, which makes its way to the primal brain of a buyer, and makes your company the go-to-choice for anyone that notices you. Because as many of you readers know, people (and businesses) buy stories first, solutions second, and only then the perceived value of your offering which is to be proven real by delivering your very best.

A good story is what sticks. It’s what ranks you as the top result in your customer’s mind and internal search engine that the prospect relies on when the ‘time to buy’ comes. This story is what highlights to your audience that they have an unnoticed problem in the first place, and not only that, but it’s actually a burning hot issue in need of an urgent fix which you happen to have a solution for.

That’s what pushes your prospect into the ‘buying mode’, makes them rush into the market, and choose… guess who. It’s why your business needs a story that resonates with the key customers, makes the home run in the sale, and is matched with the real-life value you can provide.

All this obviously takes a few steps, time and effort. That’s a fact I am not going to cover up, but it’s achievable with a roadmap that I can condense into the few major steps below.

How you find your way there is, that you:

Align your organization

: marketing, sales, product/service development, customer success/service.

Understand and address the client problems

‘dead on’. (Per target segment)

Communicate and prove

the above bullet point clearly. So that it leaves no room for misinterpretation amongst your ideal clients.

This is what you will achieve with the Account-Based blueprint at the end of all this.

Now what you’ll come to see in this book, is that the recipe above is actually quite simple indeed once you have the correct grand formula to follow. Because just having a battle tested model for alignment of the organization, together with a clear and explicit definition on your ideal customer will take care of the majority of this work.

What this means is that this entire process requires less management of the individual day-to-day execution and details, but more masonry on the grand scheme of getting in place the repeating operations which begin to serve your business as foundational infrastructure.

So nothing we do here is a ‘quick fix’, but rather we are implementing big picture frameworks that make the individual puzzle pieces fall into their places almost by themself. You know, similar to how building a puzzle gets easier once you have the frame pieces connected and locked-in together at first. We want to place our focus on that correct big picture stuff which organises all operations inside the frame in an efficient manner.

This is what the book at hand is about. All about.

By the end of the last page, I promise you’ve come to internalise this thinking and the models that come with it, so that you can be the first pebble of transformation that’s swinged into the pond (named your company) causing ripple effect of Account-Based waves reaching through your entire company.

This is my explicit goal and I aim to achieve it.

That’s why I want to be brutally honest about one thing.

What you are about to learn is a powerful blueprint for any B2B business, but as such, if it’s not actually applied with real-life action, the entire framework is going to be completely useless. A mere one new thing that you learned, but never applied. And as I am not here to entertain you, but help you turn in actual revenue, please treat the blueprint with the respect it deserves.

Apply it. Make it come real in your company, a living and breathing piece of your business. Otherwise, this book is not for you.

Or at least it’s not how I intended this book to be consumed.

This book took a lot of work (in hours, weeks and months) that I’ve put into it, and all that so you (the reader) could really turn your company into a thriving Account-Based organization. One, that has found its very best clients… Those top 20% of businesses that bring in 80% of your revenue. That’s the pool of B2B buyers you want to double down on!

But that takes work. Knowledge alone is not power if never put to use.

Just think what would have happened to the Gotham City of Batman, or the Metropolis of Superman if these heroes never put their powers to use through taking action… See, no superpower is useful if never used.

Similarly, knowledge is only as good as you make it be through your actions. That’s why you should take this book as a guide, or the manual for building something concrete in real life. An engine that operates by certain algorithms to align your revenue driving activities together.