Last updated: June 26, 2020
If your business uses an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy or is suited for ABM, HubSpot offers out of the box features that helps you execute the strategy.
Learn more about account-based marketing and how to adopt it.
Activate your ABM tools
Only Super admins and users with Account access permissions can activate the ABM features in your account.
To activate your ABM features:
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to Contacts > Target Accounts.
- Click Get started.
You'll be brought to set up your target accounts home. Once activated, all features below will be enabled in your HubSpot account.
Properties
Data in the following default properties will be used in the ABM dashboard and its reports, ABM lists, your target accounts home, and your Account overview.
Contact properties for ABM
Buying role: identifies the role that a contact plays during the sales process. Contacts can have more than one role, and they can share the same role with another contact. Example property options are Decision Maker, Budget Holder, and Blocker. You can edit this property to add new buying roles, but the default values cannot be deleted.
Company properties for ABM
Target account: identifies the companies that you are marketing and selling to as part of your account-based strategy. This is a single checkbox property. Update a company record's Target account property value to True, so it is identified as a target account in your HubSpot account.
Ideal customer profile tier: represents how close a company matches your ideal customer profile in three tiers. Companies that are Tier 1 should be a great fit for your products/services, where Tier 3 might be acceptable, but low priority. You can edit this property to match your business strategy.
Learn how to assign values manually to these properties, or create a workflow to automate the process. You can also create custom score properties for companies and build it for your business processes.
Target accounts home
Your target accounts home helps you with keeping track of the accounts you want to work on. Learn how to access and use your target accounts home.
Account overview
If you have a Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise seat, you can view the Account overview for a company record:
- in your target accounts home;
- in the right panel of a company record; and
- in Salesforce if you installed the Salesforce-HubSpot integration and added the HubSpot Visualforce window.
The overview displays:
- activities associated to the company;
- contacts associated to the company;
- internal stakeholders, which are HubSpot users who have created or been part of activities associated to the company;
- deals associated to the company; and
- tracked page views from the associated contacts.
Reports
HubSpot has a library of dashboards and reports based on the ABM properties.
To create and save the ABM reports dashboard:
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to Reports > Dashboards.
- In the upper right, click Create dashboard. You'll be brought to the dashboard library.
- In the left panel, click Target accounts to view all ABM dashboards.
- Click the dashboard that suits your business strategy.
- Continue setting up your dashboard.
To view and access individual ABM reports:
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to Reports > Reports.
- In the upper right, click Report library.
- In the left panel, select the Target accounts checkbox to view all ABM reports.
- When you've decided on the report you want, save the report.
Lists
Once your ABM tools are activated, your HubSpot account creates contact lists based on ABM contact and company properties. You can view these lists in the Account Based Advertising list folder.
These lists will help to segment your contacts and can be used when creating ads audiences, sending marketing emails, and customizing smart content on your site:
- All contacts labelled as an Influencer
- All contacts labelled as a Champion
- All contacts labelled as an Budget Holder
- All contacts labelled as an Decision Maker
- All contacts with a Buying Role
- All contacts associated with Target Accounts
Workflows
The default workflow template Sort companies by ideal customer profile fit is designed as an example for ABM. This template demonstrates how you can assign a tier value based on a company's Annual revenue value.
You can select this template when creating a company workflow:
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to Automation > Workflows.
- In the upper right, click Create workflow.
- In the left panel, click the Templates tab.
- Click the Type dropdown menu and select Companies.
- Select the Sort companies by ideal customer profile fit template as a possible demonstration for an ABM workflow.
Ads
If you've connected your LinkedIn Ads account to HubSpot, you can create a company list audience to automatically sync companies from your target accounts or a specific company profile tier to the matched audience in LinkedIn.
When creating a contact list audience, you can also select the default ABM contact lists as stated above.
Playbooks
When creating playbooks, you can select the Account-based selling playbook type for a default template. You should edit the template to fit the sales strategy for your business.
Slack integration
The Slack and HubSpot integration has certain features that can help your ABM strategy, including:
- creating deal or company-based Slack channels through a HubSpot workflow;
- entering a /hs-report-company Slack command to receive metrics on a target account; and
- sharing notes in HubSpot to Slack immediately.
