Tell us about your background – when did you become a marketer? Was it something that you always wanted to do? Or was it something that you stumbled into?
Growing up I wanted to be many things from a pilot, to doctor to lawyer, but I don’t remember it ever being B2B marketer though. From a very early age, I was more fascinated with TV adverts than with TV programmes – which maybe says more about 1980s children’s TV than anything else, but I like to think that laid the seed for marketing in my head.
Then I went to university, studied business and languages and realised I liked marketing more than economics, liked behavioural science and psychology more than statistics… And so I went out to find a job in marketing. I joined a small tech firm and kind of fell into B2B. But now I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else!
What is it that ignites your passion about marketing? Why have you stayed in the profession and grown with it?
I like the challenge of understanding people. What makes them tick, what will encourage them to talk to us, work with us, buy from us. What insights can we draw from all the myriad sources of data. And how can we use that to construct conversations. I guess that’s why I really like B2B particularly at the major accounts level. I know the names of the people I want to reach. You can’t do that in b2c marketing.
When start doing ABM? Was this with your current employer, or did it start elsewhere? Was the company do it before you were doing it?
It’s fair to say the first time I had a formal role that mentioned ABM was when I joined O2 a couple of years back, but frankly I’ve been exercising ABM practices for a long time. I think when you work in a commercially-focused business, with a small number of very large accounts as I have for best part of twenty years, you can only be successful by engaging in ABM. By looking for insights at the account level, looking for gaps and where your capabilities match.
When I joined O2, there was already a strong programme in place and I joined to help take that to the next level and align the programme with other aspects of our b2b marketing, such as our advocacy and industrial marketing programmes. By bringing those together, the value was greater than the sum of parts. And that’s been demonstrated over the last couple of years.
ABM has been a hot trend for the past five years or so – was that part of the appeal for you?
It has received a lot of hype hasn’t it. I wouldn’t say it was necessarily part of the appeal for me, as what I saw happening was really a name being given to what we were broadly doing already. I think what the ABM trend has brought though is a recognised methodology and techniques that are very helpful in designing and forming ABM programmes. Certainly, the ABM movement has helped me refine and build on some of the techniques that I think were quite natural activities in the businesses I’ve been involved with before.
Tell us about your ABM activities and challenges now – how long has the programme existed for? Who are you targeting?
We have a couple of major programmes – our ABM lighthouse programme which is our 1-2-1 approach which targets audiences of one; and a series of 1-2-few clusters of accounts where we are looking for commonalities to latch onto. For the former, we have only a small handful of our most important accounts. Where my team works hand-in-hand with the account teams to build bespoke marketing programmes. For the clusters we have 3 or 4 small clusters that we are focusing on at any one time. And the focus there is on building initiativs that will feel personal but go across multiple similar organisations.
Key part of what we are doing in both of those programmes is to derive insight around our customers and prospects, insight that helps us identify opportunities and reasons to engage.
One of the major challenges is around reporting. How do we prove the value of our activities. We subscribe to the ITSMA’s 3 Rs of revenue, relationships and reputation. But I flip the order here. I strongly believe that our role as marketing is to influence relationships and reputation, those are the levers that we can easily control. Ultimately these then support revenue, but there is less of a straight line. And I believe that if we fixate too much on delivering revenue, we risk taking a really short term viewpoint to our marketing and become sales support. Really it’s tough to set objectives around ABM that survive because the customer relationships are so fluid, and the number of targets and organisations so small. We need to be agile in our approach to these really and trust and mange objectives and outcomes across the longer term.
How does your ABM programme fit into your brand’s broader marketing activities? For example, is it a sideshow, or is it the main focus of activities?
It’s seen as a critically-important aspect of our marketing at the top of our business. I’d say there are a number of programmes that sit alongside ABM, some in my direct sphere of influence, some outside, but I really see the value of ABM increasing. My role since joining O2 has been to bring programmes closer together, get teams working together and weave together strands of already successful activities. I always think that marketing is really just glue. If we can bring the best our organisations have to offer, together and strengthen them, we will be successful.
What are your expectations for the future? Is it going to become more prominent as part of the mix?
100% Account-based marketing will be more important than ever, at least in its truest form of one-to-one and one-to-few. I’s all about getting to know customers in more depth, understanding their needs more closely at the individual level.
I think that customer retention, demonstrating ever greater value to existing customers becomes even more important in the environment we are in. I think business investment priorities are likely to change, which may mean there is less desire to switch supplier partners – winning new business becomes harder. Keeping what we have becomes even more important than before. And building the supplier-customer relationship into true partnership and making it harder for customers to move away is best affected with a large helping of top-drawer ABM.
And when it comes to winning that new business, ABM has a role to play too. Taking insight-led, focused propositions built for an individual prospect or small group of them is always going to be more successful that a broad-brush approach. And the customer advocates created through customer ABM have a role to play in winning new business too of course.
Bev Burgess says that ABM is ‘just good marketing’ and Prof Malcolm McDonald says pretty much the same thing too. Do you think there will be a time when ABM takes over the rest of B2B, or when we won’t see it as something different/unique?
I’m glad you mentioned that. I wholeheartedly agree that ABM is ‘just good marketing’. It doesn’t suit every business – customer value has to be significant enough to justify the cost and resource but where it’s appropriate, it is just good marketing, or maybe just really good marketing.
But I don’t agree that ABM will take over everything at anytime. I don’t buy into 1-2-many ABM as being ABM at all, so I think there will always be a place for broader communications that provide the ABMers with brand and awareness ‘aircover’ and provide the demand gen marketers with their leads. And similarly while the ABM insights to help shape brand comms and thought leadership, I wouldn’t see either of those things being directed and driven exclusively by ABM teams. In essence, I see ABM growing in importance for sure but will continue to co-exist alongside other disciplines rather than taking them over.
In B2B Marketing’s ABM Framework, we have five criteria which ABMers need to focus on to determine the success of their programme:
Account selection, data and insight, content and campaign execution, sales enablement/alignment, and technology. Which of these have you found most challenging? The sales alignment is often the hardest nut to crack. I think the way to do that is to pick your team well, start small with a pilot with a group of willing and receptive account teams and make a success of that. From there, success breeds interest breeds success.
Has Covid changed the way that you think about, or practice ABM?
Of course. Covid has been incredibly disruptive to marketers everywhere. There was the initial knee—jerk reactions to re-shape and cancel and events, change messaging to be more empathetic with customers and the challenge of some customers who had never been more demanding and others who had virtually closed their doors to us. Once the first couple of weeks had passed we were into the more considered, re-shaping for the longer term. At the start I turned around a webinar series in 4 days. That would have taken weeks previously, but there was a desire in the business to act, and an acceptance of taking a few risks to act quickly that was amazing to work through. On the strategic ABM side of things, we have a customer advisory board that had historically had been meeting twice a year, we were due to meet 3 days before what would become lockdown. We took the decision to change it to a virtual meeting with 24 hours notice. It was incredibly nerveracking decision but actually it worked really well. And we’ve gone from a group that meets every six months to a group that has met 6 or 7 times in the last 6 months. Why? All of a sudden there was this disruptive and unpredictable factor at play in Covid that there wasn’t a playbook for. Everyone was willing to share thoughts and ideas. IT was kind of uplifting.
So Covid has definitely shifted things in the short term, and in the longer term I think there are some aspects which are here to stay. I think virtual events will continue to play more of a role moving forward and our approach is likely to be more hybrid. Nothing beats getting face to face with customers, but we’ve shown that remote meetings can really work.
I also think a number of executives at our customers have generally been more accessible. Less train, plane and automobile time means they are more receptive to talking to us more frequently. It helps that our network and technologies are critical to them of course, but I’ve heard from others too that generally people have more time.
Our data shows that most marketers are at the early stages of ABM. What advice would you offer to people in that situation who are looking to accelerate their journey, and become more successful? What one area would you focus on?
Tough one. I would say be clear on why you think ABM is an answer to your challenges, whatever those may be and whatever you decide to do, do it on a ‘no regrets’ basis. For me it starts with wanting to use insights to drive better, higher value engagements with customers. As I alluded to, I’m more purist in what I think of as ABM and see it as most appropriate for marketers targeting small and identifiable groups of high value customers. If it’s tech-stack-driven, broad targeted campaign activity with a volume outcome, I struggle to see how you can build the insights to really market to organisations on an account-by-account basis.
In one word what’s the key to being a great ABMer?
Tenacity. Tenacious in working with sales. Tenacious in understanding customers. Tenacious in getting marketing initiatives off the ground and making things work. And in it for the long haul. ABM isn’t a quick fix for delivering results.
Thanks for agreeing to be part of B2B Marketing’s annual ABM Conference – can you tell us a little bit more about what you’ll be talking about there?
In short, I’ll be taking attendees behind the scenes of our ABM programme at O2 Business. Talking about the approach, the pitfalls and the successes we’ve had. Also be talking about our exec engagement programme and how that fits in with ABM.
I hope people will go away with a few hints as to what to do and more importantly what to avoid when building or scaling a programme.
