So, you’ve decided to incorporate an account based marketing strategy.
You’ve heard about how it can increase conversions, reduce ad spend, and delight your highest value customers. You are all-in on the benefits of personalization. You want to start treating your VIP prospects more like old friends and less like faceless members of a generic crowd.
But now what?
It’s time to select the right account-based marketing software tools to help you do the job. By mixing and matching the following ABM software tools, you’ll be able to make the most of your customer data and start using it in high-impact marketing campaigns.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Account based marketing (ABM) is the process of developing a marketing strategy that focuses on targeting your highest value prospects in a personalized and engaging way. Sometimes called one-to-one marketing, ABM is an analytics-driven approach to marketing that embraces the fact that there is nothing more valuable to your bottom line than attracting VIP customers who are going to be a good fit over the long-term.
We have a comprehensive post on account based marketing to check out if you want to do a deep dive into all things ABM.
What to consider when buying ABM software
The main thing to consider is whether you want one piece of “do it all” software or you want to build your own ABM strategy a la carte.
There are some full-stack ABM focused software tools that can do almost everything for you. They are a one-stop-shop for organizing your contacts (a CRM), creating custom audiences, enriching data, generating lead scores, and sending out marketing material. These services are convenient because you don’t have to manage multiple pieces of software, but they also have downsides.
They tend to be expensive, for one thing. You also might not need to use all their bells and whistles. Bigger pieces of software also tend to have less responsive customer service and they don’t play nice with integrations or customization.
The a la carte approach is appealing for precisely the opposite reason — you get much more fine-grained control over the ABM software tools when you buy from smaller ABM companies. These ABM companies generally produce tools with a narrowly defined use case, so they can be used in a more targeted manner. These more niche tools excel in a particular area, such as landing page personalization, and they are designed to work well in conjunction with other ABM software such as a CRM or marketing automation platform.
There’s no right or wrong way to go about it, so take the time to analyze all your options and decide what’s best based on your unique needs. We think the following are some of the best ABM tools on the market.
The 13 Best Account Based Marketing Software Tools
These are the account based marketing tools that will help with finding your ideal customers, creating segments, enriching leads, team communication, and much more.
1. Proof
We launched Experiences because we know first-hand how important site personalization is to a successful account based marketing operation. As the saying goes, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression,” so you want to wow your audience at the moment they arrive on your site.
A great way to do that is by customizing your entire marketing site and web app to each different person that visits your site. Not only does it wow customers, it also helps with conversion.
Consider the example below of a marketer from a company called Social Click visiting the webpage. With Proof, you can tailor an otherwise generic, boring landing page to call out a visitor’s unique properties. In our example, the headline, subheadline, CTA, and testimonial are all personalized to call out the visitor’s unique wants and needs.
By showing something more personalized, you’ll see a boost in conversions and revenue.
One app development agency, BuildFire, used Experiences to increase their MQLs by 46%.
You can even personalize your CTAs across the entire customer journey — and create unique customer paths. Good CTAs are crucial for boosting conversions, and now it’s never been easier to create them. The best part?
It can be implemented with drag and drop templates, so you don’t have to know how to code or bother your tech team to get started.
Price: Experiences is in Early Access. But we’re always looking for B2B marketers looking to increase their on-site metrics. Request a demo here!
2. Marketo
Marketo is a popular full-stack marketing automation platform that offers some of the most robust account based marketing services available.
Their proprietary AI can scan your contacts and generate lead scores, which can be used to determine your best fit accounts. Then you can set up automated campaigns that send targeted messages to your ideal personas, all right from Marketo.
Pricing: Contact their sales team for a custom quote.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is another giant sales and marketing platform that packs some serious ABM firepower. Their ‘HubSpot Insights’ feature enriches all your accounts with data from HubSpot and third-party vendors, providing information like industry, employee count, revenue, and location and appending it to your contacts.
That is all invaluable for identifying target accounts.
HubSpot also acts as a one-stop-shop for marketing automation in general and it can be used as a CRM and email marketing platform.
Pricing: $50/month for Starter, $800/month for Professional, $3200/month for Enterprise
4. LeanData
LeanData is a tool that allows companies to better match their leads to accounts. A lead is great and all, but if you don’t have the surrounding data points to match that lead to an account, you won’t have a holistic view of who you are targeting.
They also focus on automatic lead routing, meaning the assigning of leads to the right sales rep. A fumbled handoff from marketing to sales is where a lot of leads are lost, so the ability to do this automatically and seamlessly is highly valuable. Finally, they provide their own reporting tools to help you gain insights into your ABM process.
Pricing: Contact their sales team for quotes (some 3rd party sources report that plans start at $10,000 per month — but there’s no explicit pricing on their site)
5. DemandBase
DemandBase is a full-featured ABM company geared toward B2B businesses. Their platform is designed to be especially useful for marketers interested in targeting prospects across the entire customer lifecycle.
This means you can send different messages based on a prospect’s stage — whether they are, for example, a net-new lead versus a prospect deep into the buying process. It can be complicated to set up a system that does that seamlessly, so DemandBase is worth a look if you find you are wasting ad spend targeting folks with ads that are irrelevant based on their buying stage.
Pricing: Contact for a quote
6. Engagio
Engagio is all about aligning sales and marketing. If those two departments can’t seamlessly share information, revenue will suffer.
So instead of just focusing on audience creation and lead enrichment, they emphasize sales and marketing collaboration through automation and lead management. It’s as much a framework for a RevOps team as it is a singular piece of software.
Pricing: Contact for a quote
7. Uberflip
UberFlip is all about content. Their focus is on helping companies optimize what content they show based on who the visitor is and what has performed well in the past. When you have the data to know which headlines, blogs, and CTAs lead to higher conversions, your ABM process will be greatly improved.
Pricing: Contact sales for a quote (a third party says their offerings range in price from $1200 to $3500 a month)
8. 6Sense
6Sense has a bold tagline: “Know everything. Do anything.” While that’s a bit ambitious, their service does do a good job of helping you learn a lot more about your audience so that you can take more targeted actions.
They focus on illuminating all the different buying and intent signals that often go unnoticed by traditional marketing automation tools. This includes things like identifying anonymous visitors, incorporating third-party data, and tracking forms that are left incomplete.
Pricing: Contact them for a custom quote
9. Segment
You probably have the sense by now that your account based marketing process will only be as good as the data that you use to power it.
Segment helps make sure you have clean, accurate customer data that can be pushed where you need it, when you need it. They make it easy to pull out characteristics from your first-party data and use them to build custom audiences.
Most importantly, they make it dead simple to share that information with all your other tools.
Pricing: Free, $120/month, and custom plans
10. Datanyze
If you are trying to sell a company a piece of technology, it’s essential to know what their tech stack. That way you know whether to pitch your tool as an improvement or a compliment to their current situation. You might have a software that you can only sell to companies that use, say, Salesforce.
If you’re in that camp, DataNyze can help. They specialize in determining the tech of your target accounts and using predictive analytics for lead scoring and prospecting.
Pricing: Contact for a quote
11. Terminus
Terminus is an account based marketing software tool that does what you would expect in terms of helping you determine fit and intent in order to get more granular with their targeting. What makes them really interesting is their consulting service.
If you want help from real people to set up an ABM campaign, the team at Terminus will do consultations with you. That could be a huge help to people who are new to ABM.
Pricing: Contact for a quote
12. Drift
A chatbot is becoming an essential feature of a robust account-based marketing campaign, and it was a tough call between the two big players, Intercom and Drift.
Both offer a wide range of highly useful ABM capabilities, from chatbots that personalize their messages to target accounts to alerting sales reps when VIP accounts are on the site. Drift gets the edge for offering a more robust free plan and unlimited contacts on any plan.
Pricing: Free, $50/month, $400/month, $1500/month, and custom
13. Zapier
Any ABM company’s program will be less effective if your different account based marketing software tools can’t sync with one another and share information. Zapier allows you to create APIs tailored to even the most niche use cases, and it’s renowned for being easy to use and scalable. If you are taking the “a la carte” approach to buying ABM software tools, it’s worth looking into whether you can use Zapier to keep your team organized.
Pricing: They offer usage-based plans ranging from free to $600/month.
Your account based marketing software stack matters
In an increasingly SaaS-based world, picking the right software tools is becoming a valuable skill. Whatever account based marketing software you purchase will likely be with you for a good while, so take your time, engage in a few different free trials, and talk to your network.
That will give you the best shot at finding the account based marketing tools that best fit your needs, and you’ll be well on your way to impressing your top prospects with relevant and engaging content and messaging.
