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Account-Based
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B2B marketers find that
targeting to key accounts
and “flipping the funnel”
drive double-digit ROI
THE POWER BEHIND ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING
T
here’s good reason account-based
marketing (ABM) is top of mind for many
chief marketers: Eighty-four percent of B2B
marketers say that ABM delivers a higher
ROI than any other approach, reports the
­Information ­Technology Services Marketing
Association (ITSMA), a m
­ arketing-insights firm.
ABM, whose beginnings ITSMA traces back 15
years, has been given new life owing to advance­ments
in marketing automation and behavioral data collection.
Engagio CEO Jon Miller describes ABM as turning
the traditional demand process on its head. In fact, the
strategy is referred to as “flipping the funnel.” A typical
lead gen process starts with the offer, moves to how and
where to promote it, and then finally to whom. ABM,
Miller notes, starts with the who, moves to the offer,
and then to where and how it’s delivered.
Instead of looking to attract hundreds of leads to the
sales funnel, ABM promotes a more-­­targeted approach
for B2B firms, aiming to leverage accounts that are
likelier to provide revenue and/or that are strategically
important. ABM practitioners ditch the marketing
approach that looks to impress by amassing a large
quantity of leads, using time and energy to focus on
crucial contacts and accounts.
AMB’s advocates stress that by leveraging its key
strengths — highly effective targeting to a company’s
most impor­tant client accounts — ABM offers a
strategy that is both profit­able and sustainable. Many
of ABM’s key strategies, such as targeted marketing,
are already in play at many B2B firms, which means
that you may currently have some of the key technology
components in house. And, with all the chatter about
tearing down silos, it’s interesting to note that ABM’s
success rate depends on collaboration between various
functions within a company, most decidedly marketing
and sales.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
3
Understanding
Account-Based
Marketing
5
The Magic of
Account-Based
Marketing
Learn more about ABM in
this eBook, specifically:
■
Why
ABM delivers such stunning results
■
A
BM best-use scenarios
■
T
he challenges of ABM
■
T
ools you’ll need to build a scalable ABM system
■
P
itfalls to avoid
9
Why the Pendulum
Is Swinging Back to
Outbound Marketing
dmnews.com | The Power Behind Account-Based Marketing 2
THE POWER BEHIND ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING
Understanding AccountBased Marketing
Building in-house relationships in order to reach
target audiences is key. By Kim Davis
W
hy is everyone suddenly talking about
ABM? After all, it’s
hardly a new concept. The reason is
that marketing automation technology
is just catching up with it.
If you’re a B2C marketer, then most
of the time you’re targeting individ­ual
human beings — whether in store, on
a billboard, or online. You want to engage with Jack or Jill and start them
tumbling down the funnel.
For B2B marketers, matters have
always been a little more complicated. Jack may be one member of a sixperson purchasing team. Perhaps he’s
trapped in mid-management between
an executive setting his budget and
end users grumbling about the products he buys. What’s more, maybe
next week Jack will have moved on to
new pastures, to be replaced by Jill.
As a B2B marketer, you’re not really selling to an individual — although
there will always, of course, be a role
for personal contacts and relationships. You’re selling, by definition, to
a business, or more likely to specific
accounts within that business.
A vital strategy
The concept of ABM was codified by
ITSMA some years ago. ABM, according to ITSMA, “provides a vital
strategy for companies that want to
create sustainable growth and profitability within their most important
client accounts. ABM focuses explicitly on individual client accounts and
their needs. More importantly, it is a
collaborative approach that ­
engages
sales, marketing, delivery, and key
exec­
utives toward achieving the client’s business goals.”
In ITSMA’s view, ABM helps marketing and sales teams work together
to build relationships with the key
players in the accounts that generate
the most revenue.
Obviously, B2B marketers have
long understood the importance of
accounts but have had to rely on outmoded tools to engage with them:
spread­sheets, telephone ­conversations,
random meetings at events, and email
chains (which may or may not be
shared with the sales team). Increasingly, however, marketing automation
platforms have honed and launched
ABM offerings to take the pain and
strain out of managing relationships
with multiple accounts and increase
opportunities for personalization.
ABM does have its critics. Some
say it’s an overhyped marketing term
for a long-established practice. But
there are more substantial criticisms:
It mainly supports outbound efforts, it
puts sales in the driver’s seat, and its
benefits are hard to measure.
There’s some basis for those complaints, but first, here are ABM’s
strengths, when it’s ­automated.
“If you’re selling to a team, then
you’re selling to people with different
roles in the process across multiple
touchpoints, channels, and devices,”
says Kevin Bobowski, CMO of ActOn Software. “These people need
content personalized to their needs at
various stages in the purchase jour-
The Facts Behind
the Hype
Account-based marketing
lives up to its promises
97% of marketers
who try ABM report
higher ROI with ABM
than with any other
marketing tactic.
MID-MARKET ACCOUNTS
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
ENTERPRISE ACCOUNTS
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
Contract value for ABM-targeted
accounts increases an average of
40% for mid-market accounts
and 35% for enterprise.
ABM is linked to improvements in
close rates approaching 300%
according to one study.
Source: Act-On Software
Source: Act-On Software
dmnews.com | The Power Behind Account-Based Marketing 3
THE POWER BEHIND ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING
If you’re selling to a team, then you’re
selling to ­people with different roles in
the process across ­multiple touchpoints,
­channels, and devices
— Kevin Bobowski, Act-On Software
ney. You can market to all these folks
differently, and you should.”
That assumes that ABM can be
embedded in a m
­ arketing-automation
solution. Indeed, Bobowski thinks
that marketing automation is ABM’s
natural home.
Act-On Software has an automated
ABM offering, as do other players in
the space. “The solution makes it possible to do ABM at scale,” says Steve
Pogorzelski, CEO of Avention, which
also offers ABM technology. Scale is
the key for the modern B2B marketer.
Yes, it’s primarily an outbound
tool. It’s more suited for chasing accounts in a defined market than for
lead gen, “with the caveat that it can
help businesses understand what their
market is,” Pogorzelski notes. At the
same time, a more-evolved under-
standing of account personas can inform inbound marketing content.
True, a sales team can dominate
ABM efforts by ensuring that businesses they’re comfortable selling to
make up the bulk of the accounts on
the list. A more-positive view is that
ABM can help align marketing and
sales around common goals.
Think that might prove hard to
measure? What isn’t? But an a­gile
marketing automation platform ought
to offer good visibility into accountbased activity. What’s more, vendors
will affirm that relationships with ac­
counts rather than with individual pur­chasers facilitate retaining business.
One outstanding reason that ABM
is suddenly on everyone’s radar is that
it comes down in the end to good data
and a dashboard. n
The Numbers
84%
of B2B marketers say that ABM
delivers a higher ROI than any
other approach (ITSMA)
+80%
of marketers said that ABM had
significant benefits to retaining
and expanding existing client
relationships (Alterra Group)
+90%
of marketers worldwide believe
that ABM is essential to B2B
marketing (SiriusDecisions)
41%
of B2B marketers worldwide
said they would increase
spending on ABM (ITSMA)
dmnews.com | The Power Behind Account-Based Marketing 4
THE POWER BEHIND ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING
The Magic of AccountBased Marketing
From building personas to improving sales alignment to increasing
lifetime value, ABM may be the B2B marketer’s panacea. Here’s how
to decide whether it’s right for you. By Jason Compton
A
ccount-based marketing
may not be new, but its
recent rise in popularity
is capturing the attention
of B2B marketers who are
looking for innovative ways to increase
marketing performance.
“At face value, ABM sounds easy
to understand — the term is descriptive,” says Mark Ogne, EVP of partner marketing at Demand Metric and
founder of the Account-Based Marketing Consortium. “But it’s not just a
tech platform or a marketing activity. It
involves changing the campaigns, content, and audiences that marketing is
known for.”
These characteristics prequalify an
organization to look deeper at ABM:
A keenness to understand the buyer’s individual experiences and challenges as they are, not as you hope
they will be
■
“You can’t just name 20 accounts and
then throw generic marketing and advertising campaigns at them,” says
Beverley ­Burgess, senior VP of I­ TSMA
Europe. “That is not ABM.”
The willingness to look for prospects and opportunities outside the
traditional funnel
■
ABM represents a deliberate shift away
from the ­
standard marketing auto­
mation practices of recent years that
focused on giving prospects abundant
opportunities to raise their hands and
opt in to the funnel.
That last point is crucial. In fact,
■ A business-to-business model
ABM expert Jon Miller says he became
Although households can have multi- a proponent of the approach precisely
ple stakeholders in large purchases, the because he had hit a wall with standard
account concept is most applicable to marketing automation.
Speaking of his time as VP of marB2B firms.
keting at automation vendor ­Marketo,
■ High-value products or services
he says, “We got well known for being
extraordinarily
with a lengthy consideration-to-­ a company that was ­
good at demand generation, but when
purchase cycle
“If you’re highly transactional and your we tried to move up-market, that
customer lifecycles are fast-­
moving, playbook just didn’t work with larger
it won’t work,” says Micky Long, VP named accounts.”
Developing an account-based stratand practice director at digital agency
egy ultimately inspired him to co­Arketi Group.
found Engagio, where, as CEO, he’s
■ An account-based sales model
trying to do for named-account marAlthough not mandatory, it usually in- keting what he once did for large-scale
dicates that the other characteristics of marketing automation. “We want to
the company and its customers war- get B2B marketers to the point where
they’re not waiting around for the right
rant the adoption of ABM.
people to swim into their net but can
reach out to them.”
Take, for example, SheerID, which
helps clients like Spotify and Expedia
instantly verify consumers’ eligibility
for special offers. Instead of focusing exclusively on driving leads with
­acquisition-marketing programs, they
began targeting prospects they knew
would both benefit from their products and provide them with long-term
revenue. And they identified and built
individual relationships with everyone
involved in the buying process while
simultaneously tracking and responding to accounts as a whole.
They also started using Act-On
marketing automation software to
drive this approach. Act-On serves as
their command center, allowing them
to precisely target all the decision-­
makers with relevant content, record
individual responses as part of the big
picture, and provide both marketing
and sales with the account-wide insight
they need to effectively lead a company to purchase. This allows SheerID to
deliver a strategic and unified nurturing experience — and to enhance the
overall value it provides customers after the sale.
Acquiring enterprise customers
Big-ticket B2B purchases typically
need the involvement, support, and
approval of multiple stakeholders. For
years account-based sales techniques
focused on the approach of maneuvering between business ­users, champions,
and executives. ABM brings a similar
dmnews.com | The Power Behind Account-Based Marketing 5
THE POWER BEHIND ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING
We want to get B2B ­marketers to the
point where they’re not waiting around for
the right people to swim into their net but
can reach out to them
— Jon Miller, Engagio
approach, aiming to engage, educate,
and activate the right individuals within a viable prospect organization at the
right time. It doesn’t mean forsaking a
one-to-one approach to marketing. It
simply addresses the complexities of
the considered purchase.
“ABM recognizes the B2B reality
that organizations purchase through
buying centers” says Jerry ­
Rackley,
chief analyst at Demand Metric. “There
are ­individuals involved, and it’s good
to identify them, but ABM offers a
more holistic process than finding a
name or email address, firing up the
nurturing process, and aiming all the
guns at that one lead.”
Video advertising platform vendor
Vidyard recently switched to ABM for
large accounts. The drive started, as it
often does, in sales, where the company added enterprise account represen-
tatives and implemented a territoryand account-based sales model.
Marketing then followed. “Twelve
months ago the focus was on lead vol­ume and flooding the sales team. Today
we’re driven by pipeline and revenue,
not by volume of leads,” says Tyler Lessard, Vidyard’s CMO. “We care about
lead quality and the kinds of com­
pa­nies we think our people can sell into,
not just finding everybody connected
to sales and marketing activities.”
Vidyard works with Terminus and
the Big Willow to identify patterns
of intention and then targets messages into those accounts. The firm
­regularly monitors for companies that
are actively hiring video-­
marketing
professionals, performing high search
volumes on related terms, or s­caling
up the activity on an in-house YouTube channel. Vidyard automatically
Six Steps to Kick-Start Your First ABM Program
■
■
■
Develop specific measurable business goals. Know who your best and
most profitable customers are and identify any strategic new markets.
Based on your business goals, choose the accounts on which to focus.
Set up account-level intelligence on incoming leads.
Define your messages and create content targeted to buyer and influencer personas.
■
Determine which channels to use to reach your targets.
■
Choose the corrent metrics and apply them.
■
Observe your results. Is the approach working?
Source: Act-On Software
tailors content to suit those signals and
performs coordinated sales and marketing outreach behind the scenes.
Lessard credits the ABM approach
with the recent signing of a global ­
insurance company — a vertical
to which the company had paid little
­attention in the past. As a matter of
fact, the client was once rejected as a
qualified lead under conventional marketing metrics.
“Everything we knew about their
business had them below a [quality]
lead score, but the real-time intent
information tipped them over and
spawned a campaign,” Lessard says.
“Once we saw data around the technology they were thinking of using,
we put them in our account marketing
and signaled our sales team to actively
start the process.”
Anticipate, identify, and attack
ABM forces marketing o
­ rganizations
to set aside their usual points of
pride — like keeping the funnel full
— in ­favor of approaches that focus
on quality over quantity and reaching prospects before they even know
they’re in the funnel. “It’s a change of
mind-set from what B2B marketers
have historically done, like focusing on
getting people to come to events and
put business cards in fishbowls or buying random lists,” says Doug Bewsher,
CEO of Leadspace.
Associating individuals with accounts rather than thinking of them as
a stand-alone lead is a major first step.
Taking a page from account-based
dmnews.com | The Power Behind Account-Based Marketing 6
THE POWER BEHIND ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING
sales, and staying in alignment with the
approach to the prospect, is the next.
“If a lead comes in from a certain
account,” Bewsher says, “are you making sure you route it to the relevant
salesperson assigned to that account?
It’s simple, but very few are doing it.”
Technology’s role
On the technology side, ABM-­focused
vendors are hitting the market with
new tools for prospect identification
and targeting. The usual focus is to
deliver targeted display advertising
and content to organizations that are
showing signs of being in the market even if they haven’t begun a formal evaluation process. One typical
approach is to pair IP addresses with
corporate identities, making it easier
to identify when a particular company
is searching for or engaging with relevant content.
“Display ads for B2B are traditionally a huge waste of money because
you reach people who may or may not
be buying what you’re selling,” says
Demandbase CMO Peter Isaacson.
“With ABM, if your target audience
is 500 companies and you only want
to target those 500, you can now purchase advertising to display only to
those companies you’re interested in.”
Think of that aspect of ABM as
branding at a highly refined level.
There are no billboards or TV spots
during sporting events, just a steady
stream of messages reaching only the
screens of the ­decision-makers at relevant likely buyers.
“We’re actually taking a page from
the B2C world, where big brands like
Coca-Cola and Pepsi work to create
shelf space in our heads as part of their
brand awareness,” says Sangram Vajre,
cofounder and CMO of Terminus. “In
B2B, you know which companies are
going to buy from you and who the
decision-makers are, so why wouldn’t
you do everything you can to get in
front of them when they’re making the
purchasing decision?”
The importance of marketing’s
alignment with sales cannot be overstated. In the Demand Metric study
Account-Based Marketing Adoption, conducted in partnership with
Demand­
base, 60% of organizations
using ABM report a revenue increase
attributable to the strategy, and most
of those reporting success enjoyed
a boost of at least 20%. The laggards
hadn’t put their houses in order first.
“When we looked at the 40 percent
using ABM but not getting a revenue
lift, all rated their sales and market­ing
alignment poorly,” Demand Metric’s
Rackley says. “Alignment matters.”
In B2B, you know which
companies are going to
buy from you and who the
decision-makers are, so why
wouldn’t you do everything
you can to get in front of them
when they’re making the
­purchasing decision?
The Numbers
66%
B2B marketers who claim that
ABM is favorably impacting
their revenue
80%
Marketers who use ABM that say
it’s the most or one of the most
important revenue-generating
strategies they use
84%
Users of ABM with mature
programs who collaborate closely
with their counterparts in sales
63%
Users of ABM with mature
programs who use data to
drive account selection
60%
Users of ABM with mature
programs who use it for both
prospecting and
customer retention
55%
Users of ABM with mature
programs who use it to support
account profile development
— Sangram Vajre, Terminus
dmnews.com | The Power Behind Account-Based Marketing 7
THE POWER BEHIND ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING
Marketing’s job is to listen, to advocate, and to add insights to the process
at every step of a sale. ABM also relies
on marketers to help sales take a longer-term view rather than narrowing
their focus on quarterly results.
“You’re hardly ever going to get a
good hunter to nurture a lead,” says
Dan McDade, president and CEO of
marketing services firm PointClear.
“They don’t like to do it, perceive that
they don’t have time to do it, and are
probably no good at it.”
A new alignment
When collaboration software vendor
PGi diversified its solutions and widened its appeal beyond IT-­
minded
buyers into sales and marketing departments, it needed a new sales and
marketing strategy. The expanded
solution set and buying audience left
the sales organization off-kilter; under
conventional practices, marketing was
ill equipped to help.
“It was up to sales to figure out
who the best contact was to try to sell
the product to,” says Jennifer Zember,
PGi’s senior director of digital marketing. “Sales would think they weren’t
getting enough leads, but we felt we
were sending enough leads and they
weren’t following up.”
PGi’s sales and marketing departments had always reported to a single
EVP, but a shift to ABM made that
alignment much more meaningful.
“Today we work with sales leaders to
understand what kinds of accounts we
should be targeting and which roles at
those accounts are going to be the best
for them to speak to,” Zember says.
“And we know how to target the right
roles in each organization and make
sure the salesperson is equipped with
the right content for any buyer.”
That approach is table stakes for
marketers using ABM. Marketing is
responsible for identifying and under­
standing the triggers that indicate
a prospect in the making, such as a
company hiring a particular role or
suddenly entering a new marketplace.
Developing content that can be customized in an automated fashion is essential, primarily to avoid the need for
an impractically large marketing staff
to serve each account.
As useful as ABM is for customer
acquisition, the approach also creates
opportunities to engage in a meaningful fashion with existing accounts
in ways that increase future lifetime
value. To be truly successful, how­ever,
this strategy requires compensating
marketers for ongoing conversions.
“Often, your most valuable accounts are your current customers,”
Engagio’s Miller says, “but the traditional marketing model is focused on
generating net new leads and some
marketing departments don’t get credit if they generate a campaign response
from a current customer.”
Core Technologies
Required
Many of the core technologies required to run a successful ABM campaign are
already well in use by B2B
marketers. According to the
ABM Leadership Alliance,
these include:
Customer Relationship
Management
Marketing Automation
Data-Management
Platform
Content-Management
System
Greater opportunities
Shifting to ABM presents B2B marketers with a raft of new opportunities
for engaging current and prospective
customers in new ways. But some
relationship-focused marketers wor­
ry that the approach may appear to
be forced or impersonal. In fact, the
­opposite is true.
Using ABM doesn’t mean abandoning the one-to-one connection
marketers have been striving for decades to create. It simply pairs that
mind-set with the complex realities of
the considered-purchase buying cycle.
“People, not companies, buy things,”
Miller points out
According to Leadspace’s ­Bewsher,
“The magic of ABM is being able to
connect the people to the company,
understand the personas, and engage with the different individuals in
the accounts.” n
Tag Management
Live Chat
The Numbers
When ABM has been in
use for at least a year ,
of users reported a revenue increase
of at least
and
reported a revenue impact of
Source: Demandbase
or greater
60%
19%
10%
30%
dmnews.com | The Power Behind Account-Based Marketing 8
THE POWER BEHIND ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING
Why the Pendulum Is Swinging
Back to Outbound Marketing
New approaches for ABM allow B2B marketers to join forces
with sales and reach key target audiences at scale
W
ithout doubt, there’s
a continuing push
across B2B industries to align the
goals and strategies
of marketing and sales teams. Along
with new technologies designed to
help achieve that goal, there comes
renewed hype around ABM, which
­
over the past 15 years has shown
promise to help marketers meet this
often-elusive objective.
“While ABM is a hot topic, it isn’t a
new strategy,” says Emily Sue Tomac,
research manager and lead analyst for
research firm TrustRadius. “Rather,
it’s a swing of the pendulum back to
outbound marketing, from marketing
automation and social media marketing’s focus on inbound efforts.”
According to TrustRadius, technology that enables ABM is the sixth-­
fastest-growing marketing-tech category. Tomac warns, however, that this
renewed interest stems more from
companies that offer technology that
enables ABM strategy than it does
from B2B marketers themselves. But
she acknowledges that increased options do indeed allow marketers to
have an even bigger impact on sales
than earlier.
“There are different categories of
software that can contribute to a com-
pany’s ABM strategy. Predictive analytics, sales intelligence, marketing automation, lead management, content
personalization, and ad serving and
retargeting software number among
them,” she says. “We believe that ABM
is more of a philosophy or strategic
approach than a fully fledged software
category. But this could change moving forward.”
Sangram Vajre, CMO at ABM platform provider Terminus and author of
Account-Based Marketing for Dummies,
insists that ABM will move from experimental territory into a marketing
must-have. “A few years from now
this will be the standard B2B market-
dmnews.com | The Power Behind Account-Based Marketing 9
THE POWER BEHIND ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING
ing playbook,” he says. “The reason
it’s exciting today is because there are
technology solutions that can finally
help B2B marketers execute ABM at
scale, just like email campaigns.”
Vajre points out that ABM breaks
down the silos that have been dividing
marketers and sales for years by recognizing that most B2B buying decisions are not made by a single person,
but rather by a group of people, and
then marketing to that group as one
account or audience, not as a group.
“ABM starts by identifying the
best-fit accounts for your business,
expanding the target audience within
those accounts with contact data, engaging those contacts — your audience — on their terms across multiple
channels, and then turning your customers into advocates,” Vajre says.
Five ABM Pitfalls to Avoid
■
already have, noting you’ll
probably see results fairly quickly.
Then you can build on your
success. That said, the technology
landscape keeps changing, so
make sure to stay on top of
developments that can help
drive your program.
Just because ABM is all the buzz,
don’t assume it is right for your
company. ABM makes sense for
B2B companies that exist in a
defined customer universe, be it a
specific vertical or customer type
that your company targets.
■
Same old marketing mind-set:
Your marketing team will require
a new mind-set to run ABM. For
one thing, it is a more complicated
campaign to run than a typical
lead gen program. It’s not just
about filling the funnel with leads.
It requires careful orchestration
across the account as you nurture
leads and more content and offers
directed to different accounts and
personas. It’s a not a one-size-fitsall type of program.
Steps for success
Whether a marketing team is just
launching ABM or has been using it,
there are crucial universal steps to help
ensure success.
Peter Isaacson, CMO for ABMsoftware provider Demandbase, insists that fostering collaboration is an
imperative first step to ensuring that
ABM actually works.
“ABM requires a shift in thinking
in how a company approaches leads
and generates revenue,” says Isaacson,
“so it’s important that the entire company be on board. Success comes from
collaboration across teams.”
Success also comes from having
shared goals — not only between marketing and sales but also across the
organization. Doing so is necessary to
track and demonstrate the effectiveness of ABM.
“The only way to measure true
business impact is to grade your performance on metrics that are tightly aligned with your overall business
goals,” Isaacson points out.
A collaborative environment along
with shared goals can also help marketing leaders achieve a third element
ABM isn’t right for your company:
■
Jumping in feet first: Act-On
recommends that you start small
by using the technology you
needed for effective ABM: shared customer insight.
Customer attributes
Jennifer Pockells-Dimas, VP of marketing and business operations at
Plex, knows this firsthand. She says
that to succeed everyone on her team
needs to understand the makeup of
a media-streaming company’s audience. “Understand the attributes that
describe your most successful customers,” Pockells-Dimas says. “Then
build a list of accounts that meet that
same criterion. It’s then that you’ll be
able to focus on delivering targeted
messages to those accounts that honors who they are and where they are in
their buyer journeys.”
Despite ABM’s history, many mar-
■
ilos in full force: Before impleS
menting an ABM program, make
sure sales and marketing are
already aligned in the effort.
Without close collaboration
between these two areas, your
ABM is destined to fail.
■
ustomers falling through the
C
cracks: Use ABM to expand your
business with current clients, not
merely to acquire new clients.
Also, don’t broadcast your team’s
devotion to key accounts, because
doing so may not resonate with
other clients. Be sure all your
customers feel well taken care of.
keters — especially key constituents
outside the marketing team — lack a
full understanding of the approach. So
basic education about ABM is critical
to its success, says Colby Fazio, senior
marketing strategist at the Pedowitz
Group, a revenue marketing agency.
“From program managers and
content developers to digital marketers and salespeople, educate the
team on what ABM really is,” Fazio
says. “You simply can’t start blasting
a [prospect] company without really understanding how to design account-based programs. If it’s done
incorrectly, ABM will build trust with
the target account. This is a new way
of thinking for most marketers, so failure to educate will undoubtedly result
in failure of the business strategy.”
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THE POWER BEHIND ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING
The challenges of ABM
A limited understanding of ABM isn’t
the only challenge marketers face in
trying to adopt or use it. There are several — along with the obvious issues
involved with fostering collaboration,
aligning goals, and sharing data. And,
as Terminus’ Vajre points out, identifying obstacles is as vital to a winning
ABM strategy as is identifying the
steps for success.
Vajre lists three of the biggest challenges with ABM: finding new, moreeffective metrics; having a too-narrow
focus; and thinking short term. “Marketers are used to looking at quantity
of leads instead of quality,” he says,
referring to identifying the right success measures.
“The same metrics that made
marketers heroes are no longer good
enough. Metrics such as leads, attendees, website traffic, open rates,
and click-through rates will need to be
retired. And metrics such as pipeline,
revenue, account-level engagement,
and personalized campaigns will become the norm.”
ABM “FLIPS THE FUNNEL”
Instead of the traditional lead-based funnel,
ABM begins with identifying a brand’s best-fit customers
IDENTIFY
EXPAND
ENGAGE
ADVOCATE
Source: Terminus
Opening the funnel
An ABM program with too narrow
a focus on too few accounts also can
negatively affect the program’s effectiveness and, worse, company growth.
“If the number of accounts is too few,
it might be hard to scale the program
and see results,” he says.
Vajre warns that marketers need to
realign their efforts to be in it for the
long haul. “ABM is a marathon — not
a sprint. In this type of strategy there
isn’t the instant gratification of number
of downloads, clicks, or open rates,”
he points out. “Marketers need to be
patient and need to focus on the longterm view of account engagement and
generate velocity. Then turn opportunities into customers.”
MedAssets CMO Michael Donohue and his team recently implement-
ed an ABM strategy to improve lead
quality and conversion. He says that
since implementing ABM, the sales
team at that healthcare consulting and
tech provider has seen a 389% increase
in accepted leads.
For those who haven’t taken the
plunge, Donohue offers this advice:
“Without the right people, process,
technology, and content in place, it
becomes very difficult to pull off.
­
­Without the right customer data and
insight, it’s difficult to deploy. Without
sales being all in, it’s difficult to implement. Without the right enabling
­technology, it’s difficult to support. Before anything else, build a solid foundation first.” n
The Numbers
B2B organizations with
tightly aligned sales
and marketing operations achieved
faster three-year revenue
growth and
faster three-year profit
growth or greater
24%
27%
Source: SiriusDecisions
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