ABM Marketing for a B2B Company

The Challenge

Dealership employees are oftentimes available with good Linkedin profiles with their job titles clearly spelled out. Therefore, the Linkedin platform is a useful source for finding the target audience.

One could opt for doing LinkedIn paid advertisements to get the attention of the target group. However this tactic is expensive and may not yield a strong return on investment (ROI).

• Dealership auto transport business opportunity is fragmented because of the franchise and owner-operated model of the dealerships.
• A large portion of the independent dealerships go directly to Central Dispatch looking to ship their cars using self service portals.
• Large dealership groups such as Pensky try to build their own logistics departments.
• A smaller group of these dealerships are partnering with brokers.
• Very few of the independent dealerships have direct relationships with the carriers who ship the vehicles.

The Strategy

One team focussed on striking direct deals with large dealership groups.

Second team was set up as an inbound marketing team that ran ABM marketing campaigns at scale. We would launch a campaign that focussed on onboarding dealerships to a personalized portal and manage their own transportation needs independently at a dealership level.

We would like to implement a scalable solution. We adopted a two pronged approach to make it suitable for different customer segments.

• One team focussed on direct deals with large dealership groups.
• A second team ran ABM campaigns at scale.
• The solution was designed for different customer segments.

The Execution

We provided a dealership portal that offered instant quotes, bookings for single as well as multiple vehicles, tracking of all shipments, payments and reporting all in one simple and easy to operate portal.

On the backend we provided a white-glove service for dealerships together with guaranteed pickup.

The ABM team onboarded anywhere between 5-10 dealerships with marketing automation and inbound marketing techniques using LinkedIn, email and phone calls as the primary channels.

The direct sales team targeting the larger dealership groups has worked their accounts using targeted account based inbound marketing campaigns using content to drive customer interest. We developed a digital product that offered significant value to this group of customers.

A weekly primer on pricing was developed and sent out to this group. Customers loved to read the weekly primer and in return showed loyalty by subscribing to the weekly primer. Weekly primer campaign was instrumental in developing top of the mind awareness.

• The team identified data from LinkedIn and other 3rd party sources to enrich the campaign.
• An inside sales team was created to tackle the volume of meetings with the ABM marketing.
• This team is scalable based on market demand.

The Results

After the first 6 months we are moving close to 1500 cars using the 2 strategies to acquire transportation deals.

We developed a proforma to develop this at 60% CAGR for the next 3 years.

The client was able to develop a sustainable and growing dealership auto transport department.

• Close to 1500 cars moved after the first 6 months.
• 60% CAGR proforma for the next 3 years.
• Sustainable and growing dealership auto transport department.