Account based marketing (ABM) is nothing new, and anyone that’s been around B2B marketing since the year 2000 knows the term “Account Based Marketing”. ABM reached a pinnacle of buzz around the mid 2000’s as ABM was brought to life by ITSMA in the mid-2000’s. ITSMA provided leadership, and insight to what an Account Based Marketing Program was by defining it as a shared process between sales and marketing. Then ABM somewhat whimpered away, especially as the recession hit, as marketers came under great pressure to focus on top of funnel demand generation. Today we are seeing a great resurgence and renewed interest in ABM.
So is ABM just the latest buzz word for B2B marketers to get all riled up about, and a new way to pitch for more budget? Or is ABM going to become part of the defacto B2B marketing landscape going forward? One thing for certain is that B2B Marketers are placing a greater focus on ABM today:
- 80% report ABM programs deliver greater ROI than other marketing initiatives (ITSMA)
- 300% increase in close rates and 200% increase in revenue (Act-On 2016)
- 70% now have dedicated staff supporting an ABM program (Sirius Decisions 2016)
- 41% have a full ABM program in place vs 20% in 2015 (Sirius Decisions 2016)
- 58% report a pilot program in place vs 20% (Sirius Decisions 2016)
Yet as ABM shines in the spotlight once again only 20% of enterprises say they have a clear understanding of what ABM actually is (Act On ABM Survey 2016). A lack of understanding of what ABM truly is will undoubtedly make your ABM initiative less successful. First and foremost, ABM is not a tactic, but a process. The goal of this blog post will to be to provide a pragmatic background on all things ABM in the hopes of providing you with enough of an understanding to move forward with your own ABM initiative, and ensure the best chance of success. So let’s start at the beginning.
What Is ABM?
Account Based Marketing (ABM) is generally defined as a coordinated effort between sales and marketing that targets a set of accounts with specific, customized engagements, and communications, with the goal of increasing velocity-to-value.
In the early days of ABM efforts mostly consisted of rebranding already existing marketing assets, developing some basic email templates, and if really gung-ho developing an account specific microsite. More advanced efforts would follow a specific process aligned with sales, along with the development of new account specific assets and engagement opportunities.
ABM Friction
There were four big friction points to greater adoption of Account Based Marketing in the early days:
- Lack of Strategy-Every Account is a Priority-ABM was usually initially driven by the marketing department, and generally received a warm welcome when presented to sales. What sales person wouldn’t want a custom marketing program for their accounts? However; when asked to identify their top strategic accounts the resulting answer would inevitably be “all accounts are strategic-let’s do this for everyone”. Lack of specific, and focused ABM target accounts usually set the course for failure right out of the gate.
- Lack of Process-What makes a great ABM program work is the underlying process jointly supported, and aligned to by sales and marketing. So often times, when marketing presented an ABM process (a joint sales and marketing process), it was often tossed aside or had lack luster implementation and support from the sales side. Why would any self-respecting enterprise sales team follow an account management process defined by the marketing guy anyway? Generally speaking, sales executives are not apt to just implement a new account management process willy-nilly, and often look askance when that process was pitched by the marketing department. Yet, in an effort where the first engagement is just the start of the process, and not the end, a lack of integrated and coordinated efforts only cemented lack luster results.
- Lack of Scalability-A good ABM program relies on some level of personalization to be effective. If you were to make it past the first two friction points you generally ran right into the “scalability wall”, as personalization efforts back then all relied on heavy lifting. As most organizations failed to really limit the focus to the few accounts that really mattered, the marketing team was faced with scaling custom 1-to-1 marketing assets and engagements to a larger set of accounts than they could realistically serve. For those of us old enough to remember, to even do a microsite back then generally required many departments involvement, time, and effort to implement. These custom assets then fully relied on email and/or personal contact by the sales team to inform and drive usage on behalf of the target.
- Lack of Account-to-Contact Context- One of the underlying reasons for the eternal conflict between sales and marketing is that marketers tend think in terms of contacts, while sales tends to think in terms of accounts. As one sales executive would always remind me “Ed, we need to consummate a marriage, not just go on dates”. ABM creates a natural gearing where accounts meet contacts, and in doing so creates a strong foundation for productive marketing-sales engagements. However; it was often difficult to link multiple contacts to the same account and provide sales with the visibility needed to define the context of further engagements. In the mid-2000s organizations were just getting their arms around CRM, and Marketing Automation was just knocking at the door. So even if you were successful in selling in an ABM initiative, you were generally not in a good position to actually identify the needed account-contact context in such a way as to manage and gain visibility into how well the ABM effort was working. So measuring success proved to be a difficult, if not an impossible task for most marketing departments. Without the ability to measure, one had a difficult time to see if value was actually being created as a result of the ABM effort.
And so, ABM for the most part, took a hiatus and faded from the marketing team’s agenda as the recession hit, and focus shifted to developing “always-on” demand capabilities and in keeping the top of the funnel full (lead quantity versus lead quality). Fast forward 8+ years or so and all of sudden ABM is back with a vengeance. 87% of B2B companies now say ABM is extremely or very important to their overall marketing (Sirius Decisions 2016). Why? In Part II we will explore the factors that are leading to a resurgence of ABM in greater detail.
Nuff Said
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