87% of B2B companies (Sirius Decisions) now say ABM is extremely, or very important to their overall marketing. Why?
Changing Role of B2B Marketing
In times of improving business conditions sales focus will generally shift away from lead volume to lead quality, as a greater optimization of finite sales bandwidth is needed. However; coinciding with the recent economic upswing we have seen a nexus of several key trends converging to create a new B2B marketing environment, and one that I believe has fundamentally changed B2B marketing from here on out.
These trends will firmly cement ABM as a de-facto standard operating procedure for B2B marketing and sales going forward.
Marketing by IP
One of the single greatest advancements in the last several years has been the emergence of tools and capabilities that allow B2B marketers to market by company IP (internet protocol) address. While reverse IP lookup has been around almost since the beginning of the internet, it has only been in the last several years that tools designed specifically for marketers to leverage reverse IP look-up for more precise targeting and profiling have emerged. This has fueled the ability of marketers to gain unprecedented access, and visibility into the path that account contacts are taking within their buying cycles, and not just within the confines of the company website, but also across the internet, and other sources of information.
Most of us are now familiar with the main use-case of marketing by IP in utilizing account retargeting activities to place our message in front of a prospect-contact as they travel across the internet in support of their buying cycles.
Buyer Centricity-Marketing as a Revenue Center
While we can debate as to the exact point in time when the buying cycle shifted away from company-controlled to buyer-controlled, we can all agree that buyer-controlled purchasing processes are the dominant reality today. The path a prospect takes, in support of their buying cycle, is now omni-channel (many-routes to information) with the majority of activity taking place across online channels vs offline. In addition, the buying cycle for many B2B decisions is not linear, but consists of many roles (contacts) entering and leaving the buying process, at different times, and with different information needs.
This shift to buyer centricity, has many questioning and even calling for an end to the traditional funnel view of demand management. What’s underpinning the questioning of the 19th century funnel construct of demand management is the notion of discrete hand-offs between marketing and sales in a non-liner, and more complex 21st century buyer-centric model.
The more accurate view may not be one of discrete handoffs, but rather one of whom has the lead engagement and intrapersonal dialogue with the prospect/customer within a particular stage of the buying process. In a world where +60% of B2B buying cycles begin with the initiation of online activities, the marketing department is actually the number one sales person during the early stages of the buying cycle. As the prospect moves to later stages of their buying process the primary engagement and intrapersonal dialogue would naturally shift more towards sales.
However, if we look at the buying process in a more holistic way, and from a buyer lifecycle point of view, the “buying process” would actually continue through to after-sale engagements and dialogue. At these stages, service and customer support, are actually in the lead selling role, in terms of building customer advocacy. So the reality is that we really don’t operate in a linear demand funnel, with a start and stopping point, but rather more of a continuous customer engagement cycle designed to deliver a superior customer experience, and increasing number of customer brand advocates.
In this view of demand management, the old saying of “we are all sales people” has never been more relevant. Especially as we move toward a world where differentiation on customer experience becomes the #1 competitive factor, as differentiation based on technical capabilities becomes less and less of a factor. In this world, marketing is no longer a cost center, but a revenue center, and to ignore it as such would be missing an opportunity for optimizing revenue generation.
In the world of competing customer experiences marketing efforts become vital to revenue generation, and in ensuring that the right content, is at the right place and time to meet prospect informational needs and expectations.
Marketing Science
Technology has certainly made account based marketing more consumable and easier to implement. Most business have now matured their use of CRM and Marketing Automation systems (MA) to a point where new levels of account information and buyer behavior insight can be joined together. In the last few years we have seen the emergence of Predictive Analytics. Traditional friction points to using advanced analytics have usually been due to the lack of ample data sets, along with sufficient and consistent data accuracy and taxonomy. One of the beautiful things about B2B, is that our buyers tend to throw off a tremendous amount of online data, or what some may know as “Digital Body Language”.
By using new tools and services available to marketers, we can make greater use of “Marketing-by-IP” capabilities to quickly amass a tremendous amount of data beyond the confines of our web site to include data from many external sources (media portals, social, email) that shed new light on the digital footprints left behind by potential contacts as they move through their buying cycle. By marrying this new insight together with data from your website, and past sales successes, you can now identify, with a high degree of accuracy, those accounts being actively engaged within a buying cycle.
These new analytic capabilities, combined with your CRM and MAP, have what amounts to be a true game changer for B2B marketing, in that we can deliver the right message, to the right contact, at the right time, and tailored for a specific buying stage or persona scenario.
The nexus of these trends truly enables a new degree of personalization to take hold, and as a result, elevate the customer experience to new levels. It will force us to reevaluate traditional processes, and develop new engagements with our customers. For example, imagine sales territories now being predicted, not on geography, but rather on sales people personalities to better match those of buyer contacts, with the goal to elevate the chances of a successful engagement.
In Part III we will look at the “Keys to ABM Success”.
Nuff said
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