Bev Burgess reveals some of the worst real-life ABM failures, and how to avoid the same ghastly experience happening to you. Molly Raycraft reports from B2B Marketing’s ABM Conference in November, where Bev presented.
It’s been 16 years since Bev Burgess — one of the early pioneers of account-based marketing — began working in the field. Since then, she’s seen many successful programmes, but she’s also seen what she describes as “real howlers”.
At The B2B Marketing Conference, she divulged industry disasters plus advice on how to prevent others from falling into the same traps.
1. Sales want ABM but they won’t collaborate
Sales and marketing collaboration is absolutely vital for ABM, and you won’t get anywhere without it, says Bev. She’s seen ABMers get initial buy-in from sales, only to scrabble for their input.
“The marketers couldn’t get any time with sales, despite trying really hard to get onto the team meeting. Six months later the business asked what the ABMers had actually done,” says Bev. Unfortunately the programme was scrapped after six months without progress.
Instead, Bev suggests following in the footsteps of tech company, Red Hat, which has an award-winning programme. “Not only do they collaborate with sales, but they find the champion in the target account, and that champion helps build the communications plan. It’s a fantastic piece of alignment between business strategy, sales, and the client,” she says.
2. The business only wants to measure MQLs
An ABM programme will never be successful if you only measure MQLs, yet Bev has seen many ABM programmes succumb to the lead generation expectations of business leaders.
An ABM programme’s MQLs will be considerably less than traditional campaigns – so if this is the focus, your ABM programme will come unstuck. “If you want MQLs then traditional marketing with some personalisation is a better way to go,” recommends Bev.
An ideal approach to ABM measurement is that of Microsoft. The company measures its programme by relationships, the number of people who see the brand as a transformation partner (rather than a software provider), and the size of the deal it generates. This gives the company a much better view of its ABM success.
3. There are ABM accounts that marketing didn’t choose
Don’t accept just any account you’re given, advises Bev. When salespeople begin to hear of ABM’s success they’ll try to pass over accounts that they’ve struggled with, hoping the programme will do the trick. But it doesn’t work like this. “It’s the fastest way to fail,” says Bev.
She recalls a Japanese widget manufacturer, which decided to trial ABM on an account that sales put forward. “The account insight was prepared, Japanese staff were flown in from Tokyo, and 10 minutes into the planning workshop, the Japanese team said they’d decided to stop manufacturing the widget.” This meant the company wanted to break its five-year contract, which made ABM on the account unfeasible, and wasted significant resources.
“That’s because the marketers hadn’t chosen the account, they were just given it by the local sales person” explains Bev. She suggests pushing back on sales, and deciding accounts as a management team.
4. Doing ABM on top of the day job
If a business decides to do ABM, it should be the marketing team’s core focus — not an add-on. Many businesses invest a huge amount of resources into ABM training, but don’t allocate any time to the strategy, says Bev.
“I was working with a global professional services company. It trained marketers in three regions at great expense, but didn’t have the mandate to stop any of marketing’s existing tasks,” says Bev. The newly trained marketers went back to their desks expecting to start ABM, but didn’t, because there just wasn’t time.
Bev points to IT services company DXC as a prime example of how to move ABM into the marketing team’s core focus. “They started very small with a few people in a central team. They started on deal-based marketing — so ABM around specific deals. This showed how ABM could help get the deal over the line.”
After the team had completed its first set of deal-based ABM, the CMO and salespeople were so happy with the results, they requested for 12 people to be hired as an ABM-dedicated team. “Their project is a stomping success. So don’t just add it to the day job, and if someone asks you to do that – tell them ‘no’,” says Bev.
5. Jumping straight to tactics
Some salespeople will jump the gun and ask for just the ABM tactics, because they already have the insight. Bev warns against this dangerous approach, and that it’s best to stick to the formal ABM procedure by always starting with insights.
Bev worked with a professional services ABMer who had been asked to skip the insights stage by a sales colleague. Instead, they stood their ground and conducted the insight analysis anyway. “We did some digging into the account, and found the value proposition was exactly the same as two major competitors,” she explains.
Want to see how it’s done well? O2 is one to watch, Bev says. “They really research their accounts. They look at how they can save their accounts money, or generate new money for them. Then they demonstrate a quantified value proposition through a range of tactics.”
6. ABM as an online targeting tactic
There’s a misconception that ABM spans as far as personalised and targeted online ads — and some fall foul to this. Bev recalls sitting on a panel one which one panelist was discussing his programme – it targeted 3000 accounts with online ads and nothing else. “There’s so much more that you can be doing,” she explains. “Online advertising is just one tactic. It’s about an integrated surround campaign that makes sense of the situation you’re working on.”
Accenture illustrates a brilliant approach to balancing online and offline strategies. “It has a tool kit, which starts with insights. It has to be personalised and it’s got to be differentiated. Once that’s wrapped up the team can choose its tactics; it might be online but also offline.” Bev suggests a 50/50 split between the two.
7. An ABM programme that doesn’t need technology
Your ABM could be great, but without technology it might be missing out. Bev cites an IT services company that proves this point exactly. The business’ tech differed between regions and it didn’t have a marketing automation system – but it did have good ABM.
“They’ve done great things but they can’t compete now because the people that do have a comprehensive martech stack can do always-on marketing that’s so much better. They can surround the people they want to talk to, making their marketing really personalized. They can even predict the next best action for that person. You can’t do that without technology,” she explains.
HP Ink is a great example of this. When the brand separated from HPE, it took 400 of its 1000 top global accounts with it — all of these were cold, hostile, or dead. “Usually you’d run 100,000 miles in the other direction,” laughs Bev.
Instead, the company decided to do ABM, but faced the problem of contacting people that had in some cases asked not to be contacted. “They used a whole bunch of technology to populate contact details, names and job titles of the people who mattered in each of these 400 accounts. They then personalised content, by company, hosting it one their website and a select number of third party sites.” Technology was then used to track efforts and predict the next best step to reheat the account.
