From traditional marketing to account-based marketing (ABM)

Challenge

Organisational Consulting firm, Korn Ferry, works with clients across the globe, consulting in talent acquisition, retention, reward and development. Korn Ferry’s mission is to serve its clients to enable people and organisations to exceed their potential.

A fast-growing organisation with a number of recent acquisitions, Korn Ferry found that its marketing activities were fragmented, compromising the ‘One Korn Ferry’ brand.

Korn Ferry recognised the need to transform its go-to-market approach and engaged Green Hat to help guide a bespoke account-based strategy to reinstate the client-first view.

Solution

The Korn Ferry Marketing and Sales teams worked together to identify business challenges and articulate new business objectives based on insights from the 6sense ABM platform. The group defined an ideal account profile and was able to identify best-fit accounts, including members of the buying party.

Through in-depth interviews, Green Hat created detailed persona profiles and used a customer-centric Message Framework to capture primary buyer motivations. We aligned customer needs with the benefits of the Korn Ferry solution. We created hero assets backed by proof points to appeal to buyers at the relevant stage of their buying journey.

The team shifted the focus from securing individual marketing leads to recognising the importance of the buying committee reviewing and selecting solutions in the enterprise buying process. During our analysis, we found that marketing and sales underplayed the influence of the procurement role.

Using these insights, we have designed and deployed orchestrated experiences across multiple channels utilising the 6sense ABM platform.

Using 6sense, we can identify where accounts are in the buying stage and target specific personas with customised messages. The program adapts depending on the persona’s engagement.

Results

Malte Weyhe, Global Field Marketing Director and Head of ABM at Korn Ferry says “This first round of results has validated the content-driven account-based targeted approach by persona and funnel stage. The program has been a big shift in the way we go to market and a huge change for Korn Ferry. As a client-agency team, we have expanded how we view our target accounts, and have developed a more personalised strategy for the different roles in the buying party. The Green Hat ABM blueprint process helped us to place our customers at the centre of the story.”

• Within 6 months of being in the market, Korn Ferry has experienced an increase of 3.83X in target account engagement.
• The CHRO and Talent Acquisition Leader influenced more opportunities than Procurement buyers.
• The deal value was 1.13x higher when procurement was involved
• Accounts scored in Purchase funnel stage are 5x more likely to open an opportunity within 3 months compared to all accounts.

Green Hat - Integrated B2B Marketing Agency