Forget about one-to-one, one-to-few and one-to-many. Content consumption is the key to ABM.

Conduent’s David Cotterill explains why he kicked off ABM from a different starting point – and what you can learn from the success that’s followed. Molly Raycraft reports. 

It’s been a year since ABM veteren David Cotterill, marketing director at Conduent last took to B2B Marketing’s stage to discuss the advent of his ABM programme. At our last conference, he returned to outline his success using methods that are somewhat against the grain.

Conduent is a business processing firm which formed just over two years ago from an arm of Xerox. It was fairly quick to take up account-based marketing but not so in answering the first question most ABMers come to. “Do you start with one-to-one, one-to-few, or one-to-many?”, David wondered. “The answer is: it doesn’t matter.”

Instead, Conduent focused on content consumption and how this could indicate client pain points that ABM could resolve. 

Choosing accounts though content consumption

This unique approach first meant deciphering target accounts, which David asked the sales team to provide. Once sales had sent a list of 50-60 accounts, the marketing team identified the account’s content consumption (using Demandbase) as an indicator of their propensity to buy. “If they’ve been consuming content, we can see. I can tell you that at one of our tech target accounts, there are 171 people researching key terms across online publications and research sites, which are relevant to Conduent solutions,” David explains.

Although the ABM team couldn’t see who the individuals were, they could see the companies. Once this information was obtained Conduent invested £10,000-£20,000 in retargeting the prospects each time they returned to the page. “This takes us away from spraying and praying towards a more targeted, focused advertising approach,” says David.

This process identified which of the sales accounts were actually in market and willing to engage with Conduent, and which ones needed to be dropped. David mentions one particular account which demonstrated the importance of this kind of vetting. “The sales guy was really driving the relationship,” he says. “But it became clear the account wasn’t in market because they weren’t consuming any content around our topics. They were playing lots of golf together but not making sales.”

Of course, David instructed the salesperson to stop activity with the account. But rather than pull the plug entirely, he used the account as a template to find look-a-likes, such as Swiss Re, which was similar and ready to purchase. The sales team followed up with the insurance company and sold a $3 million deal within three months. “This is why you don’t need to worry about one-to-one, one-to-few or one-to-many, because the most important thing is working out which accounts are consuming content.”

His success led David to replicate the process, finding more look-a-like accounts. This now means the marketing team can take 10-30 accounts from the sales team and multiply it by ten. “I can go back to sales in 2020, and say you gave me these accounts in 2019, these are the accounts you should be looking at for 2020,” explains David.

Choosing an approach

A prospect’s content consumption habits have proven invaluable to Conduent. It’s allowed the company to decipher levels of engagement and propensity to buy, but also outlined the approach they should be taking with ABM.

For heavily engaged accounts, Conduent know to take a one-to-one strategic approach. “We’ll really drive down into them. We’ll understand their personas and buying characteristics. And at the same time we’ll slowly be bringing through the accounts that were originally not engaged.”

The ABM programme will take a lighter form when applied to accounts that have been viewing relevant content but aren’t engaged with Conduent – at least until they’ve started engaging and can be moved to the heavier approach.

So far, the metrics indicate strong success with this not-so-conventional approach. Page views, cost-per-click, and the revenue from look-a-like accounts have all improved significantly.

“A year ago we didn’t have a tech platform. A year on and we really understand ABM. We’re doing ABM in a targeted and segmented fashion, driving real outcome and results,” says David.

So what can other ABM teams learn from David success? “The most important thing to take away is that this approach is providing MQLs that are driving SQLs, that are driving leads and opportunities. Everytime you think about ABM, this is what you should be focused on,” David answers.