Align to Thrive: Uniting Your Revenue Engine with Account-Based Marketing in Financial Services

If you’re in sales or marketing in a financial service organization, you confront numerous challenges. Clients increasingly demand personalized service and solutions tailored to their evolving needs, competitors are multiplying and more focused than ever, while traditional go-to-market strategies are becoming less effective over time.

But there’s a new approach to engaging customers that’s uniting teams around shared data, driving organizational alignment around client needs, and delivering better client experiences and superior revenue results—it’s called Account-Based Marketing (ABM).

ABM isn’t just another marketing or technology trend. It’s a proven strategy for breaking down silos and aligning every move your organization makes toward the ultimate goal—addressing the dynamic needs of high-value accounts as those needs arise.

This guide will show you why ABM is perfectly suited for financial services, how it builds trust throughout the buyer’s journey, and how it can transform your teams into a unified revenue engine.

What Is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-Based Marketing turns traditional lead generation upside down. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping for the best when you spend your budgets chasing after anyone and everyone, ABM prioritizes focus – of your people, processes, technology, and investments – on the most promising accounts, those that align perfectly with your ideal customer profile (ICP).

With the focus ABM provides, sales and marketing don’t operate separately. They join forces to:

• Define and target key accounts,
• Share client-related data (including behavioral intent signals),
• Drive tailored engagement strategies.

Engaging the right accounts with the right messages (and tailored offers) at the right time actually moves the needle on revenues, unsurprisingly. Coordinated campaigns and strategic interactions fueled by real-time client intent data are designed to resonate with your accounts, building relationships that lead to meaningful outcomes.

ABM is a business strategy that delivers higher ROI, shorter sales cycles, and enhanced lifetime customer value/loyalty.

Breaking Down Silos With ABM

One of the biggest challenges in financial services is the traditional lack of alignment between sales and marketing teams. Marketing often focuses on generating as many leads as possible, passing them off to sales without a clear understanding of whether those leads are ready—or qualified. What happens next? Leads go cold, sales teams get frustrated, and opportunities are missed.

The blame game and the finger pointing triggered by disjointed teams and traditional lead generation silos serves nobody, least of all the clients who can see the gaps and who experience the disjointed outreach. And confused, frustrated clients won’t blame marketing and not sales (or vice versa), they’ll justifiably blame the entire organization.

Lack of internal alignment is a massive source of churn for your clients.

ABM changes this “blame game” dynamic. Instead of working in isolation, sales and marketing collaborate from day one in focusing on prospect accounts that are most likely to want your offerings. Both teams align on:

• Which accounts to target,
• How to engage those target accounts with shared insights, and
• How to measure success using shared KPIs.

This unified approach ensures that everyone is on the same page and working toward the same goal. Your sales team becomes noticeably more efficient because they have a much deeper understanding of their target accounts when armed with personalized insights and marketing support that helps them personalize engagement, tailor messaging, and customize solutions.

Alignment Drives Better Results

The Numbers Don’t Lie. Organizations that align their sales and marketing teams gain revenue-generating benefits, including:

• A 32% year-over-year improvement in growth rates, according to an Aberdeen report
• A 67% improvement in closing deals
• 36% better customer retention rates and a 30% reduction in customer acquisition costs, according to an InsideView report.

Put simply, alignment enables marketing and sales teams to jointly focus on what matters most: engaging customers in a unified way that delivers value throughout the buying journey and turns prospects into revenue.

Why ABM Is Ideal for Financial Service Organizations

Financial services are inherently relationship-driven. Whether you’re working with multinational corporate clients or high-net-worth individual investors, success comes from building trust, demonstrating value, and understanding the unique needs of your customers over the long run.

Here’s why ABM is particularly valuable for financial service organizations:

• You Focus on High-Value Accounts: Not every client and/or prospect is equally valuable. ABM helps you zero in on the accounts with the highest growth potential, ensuring your resources are invested wisely, rather than wasted on chasing leads willy-nilly.
• You Personalize the Approach: ABM emphasizes tailored strategies that reflect the specific goals and pain points of each account. For an industry that prizes personalized service, this approach creates a strong competitive edge for your brand.
• Data Drives Your Decisions: Financial services generate vast amounts of data of all kinds. ABM platforms turn this data into actionable insights that sharpen strategies and deliver results.
• You Improve Compliance and Risk Management: With ABM’s granular targeting, campaigns can be engineered to meet stringent compliance and regulatory requirements—critical for those in banking, insurance, and investment services.

Simply put, ABM amplifies and scales up what financial service organizations do best, helping them foster meaningful client relationships while driving revenue.

Building Trust Throughout the Buyer Journey

Financial services clients aren’t just buying a product—they’re investing their money, their time, and their trust. To them, every decision carries weight. They’re not looking for partners who take a “one-and-done,” short-term approach. A “transactional” partner is actually a contradiction in terms.

ABM aligns perfectly with this reality by delivering personalized, relevant, and timely experiences at every stage of the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness Stage: Introduce your brand expertise and demonstrate your authority with targeted content that addresses specific market challenges.
• Consideration Stage: Personalized demos, case studies, and insights show your understanding of their unique needs, making the decision-making process easier for them.
• Decision Stage: ABM ensures that every interaction reinforces your value proposition, creating confidence in their choice to work with you.
• Post-Sale Stage: ABM doesn’t stop at signing contracts. It helps deepen relationships with ongoing engagement strategies and tailored customer success plans. This ongoing trust-building paves the way for long-term client retention and cross-sell/upsell opportunities.

Elevate Your ABM Strategy Today

ABM is not a one-size-fits-all approach. A successful ABM strategy is built on understanding your unique business goals, aligning your internal teams around the evolving needs of your clients, and leveraging the right tools to continually “read and respond” to the signals your clients are giving.

To elevate your ABM strategy, you’ll need to:

1. Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and identify accounts with the greatest potential for revenue growth.
2. Foster alignment between sales and marketing teams, creating shared goals and metrics.
3. Create personalized, engaging content that resonates with target accounts across their buying journey.
4. Invest in an ABM platform that provides actionable insights and seamless campaign management.
5. Continually analyze performance and optimize strategies based on results.

The financial services sector and its clients aren’t standing still, and neither should your organization. ABM offers a dynamic path forward that is strategic, scalable, and perfectly suited to the challenges of this fast-evolving industry.

How Demandbase Powers ABM Success

Demandbase is the trusted partner for hundreds of organizations looking to transform their revenue engines with ABM.

Unlike other platforms, Demandbase is built to handle the complexities of enterprise and financial service organizations. With tools that consolidate data, deliver actionable insights, and foster collaboration across your teams, Demandbase empowers your business to engage clients and drive revenues with confidence.

Here’s what sets Demandbase apart:

• Dynamic Targeting: Easily adjust campaigns for specific accounts or industries, ensuring precision.
• Integrated Data: Gain a 360-degree view of every account with unified data across platforms.
• Scalable Solutions: Whether you’re managing 50 target accounts or 5,000, our flexible platform scales with your business.

The financial services market demands bold, informed action. Demandbase equips your organization with the tools needed to not only meet these challenges but thrive in partnership with your clients.

Transform Your Revenue Engine

Demandbase is here to help you take the first step—or refine a strategy already in motion. Our platform isn’t just about marketing; it’s about confidently transforming your entire organization. We turn your teams into a unified, customer-centric revenue engine.

The time to act is now. Join the many financial services leaders already achieving success with Demandbase.