Account-based marketing is being touted as the latest technique marketers should be adopting. Emma Louise Parkes investigates its benefits and challenges
Unless you’ve been too busy bombarding your prospects and customers with generic messages, you’ll have noticed account-based marketing is currently getting a lot of attention.
Often referred to as ABM, account-based marketing is becoming a key technique for B2B marketers looking to adopt a more sustainable approach to nurturing prospects and clients. It is a marketing technique that encourages businesses to strengthen their relationships with the customers they value the most by having a very comprehensive understanding of what the client is about and how they work. This improves the package a marketer is offering a client, and will help deliver a clearer path for profitable return.
“Quality data and intelligent analysis are central to effective account-based marketing. At the outset it involves pinpointing ‘key accounts’,” Donna Belanger, managing director of Harte Hanks Database Solutions UK, says. “These clients contribute the highest relationship value, including revenue, and should therefore be nurtured. Insight can also predict key account churn and degradation rates.”
Although ABM is now on the radar for many marketers thanks to the increase in personalisation, Paul Hewerdine, partner and planning director for Earnest Agency, says: “ABM has actually been used by a savvy bunch of practitioners for some time. However, more B2B marketers are getting in on the act – recognising that to acquire and retain high value clients demands a more personalised approach.”
Executing an ABM strategy
Increasing competition in the marketing landscape means, without offering something ‘extra’, marketers will begin to find that competitors will be offering similar services, and clients won’t stay around. This is where ABM offers a distinct advantage; if you can develop a very personal and close relationship with that account and reflect that in your marketing to them, you will stand out among the crowd.
Alisha Lyndon, associate director of Momentum Account Based Marketing, explains: “ABM starts from understanding, at a deep level, the requirements of the individual decision-makers within a business – what are they trying to achieve as a business and what is their chosen strategy?”
It seems that the techniques and behaviours needed to make ABM work – clean data, analytical skills, the ability to humanise marketing activity and empathise with customers – should already be very familiar for marketers. Is ABM therefore, marketing best practice that should have been observed to begin with, or is it a dramatic change in thinking and behaviour?
“The short answer is it should be best practice if your behaviour is fit for purpose,” says Andy Jordan, managing director of Marketing Team Direct. “Where a brand’s behaviour isn’t [fit for purpose], then a dramatic change in that behaviour (brand conduct) is required before you adopt the best practice of buyer understanding, alignment and enablement. Obtaining a clear understanding of your customer, their landscape and their ambition is vital. As is creating and sustaining positive experiences in key accounts where relationships, shared vision and growth really matter.”
Personalisation
The opportunity to understand your customer at such a deep level, ties in with personalised marketing and an opportunity to make your clients and prospects feel that extra bit special. Personalisation in B2B, however, has often been something marketers have struggled with, mostly because the data hasn’t been there to support it. Does this new level of client relationships, therefore, offer the opportunity to make personalisation a reality for B2B marketing?
Lyndon says ABM actually goes one step further: “It’s not really accurate to speak about personalisation – ABM aims for hyper-personalisation. Sure, personalised marketing is part of the story – taking advantage of techniques such as digital printing and online activity that support and enable personalisation, but hyper-personalisation means taking everything a stage further – putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and staying in those shoes throughout the process.”
The growth of ABM and personalisation has also been heightened by the advancement of technology. “The role of technology in ABM has changed massively,” Paul Everett, director of marketing strategy for The Marketing Practice says. “It used to be a very manual effort, and still is for mega-deals. But now there’s a lot of tech-enabled options for extreme personalisation and highly targeted advertising – the digital equivalent of booking a billboard opposite your client’s HQ.”
At the heart of any successful marketing campaign, is a business buyer who is engaged with your product or service. Though business buyers ‘are people too,’ they are – in reality – groups of people with very specific requirements. Perhaps the nirvana of personalised ‘one-to-one’ marketing was never possible, but ABM is the closest alternative as it encourages marketers to develop a relationship with one account (the group of people responsible for the buying decision) at a time.
Terry Corby, an independent business and marketing strategy consultant offers his thoughts. “Every client is a person as well. Although B2B marketing is very different from B2C one-to-one marketing, there are some lessons we can learn from the B2C marketing space around personalisation. Clients in the B2B space will, at the end of the day, make their buying decision around a few key questions: ‘Do they understand my business issues?’, ‘Can they deliver?’, ‘Is the price right?’; ‘Do I trust the team?’ So ensuring we can address all of these questions is the way to strengthen client relationships and win more work.”
Alignment with sales
One of the key challenges of ABM is the requirement to align marketing and sales; a close working relationship between the two is key to the technique’s success. However, does one or the other ‘own’ the process?
“In the most mature marketing organisations, ABM is owned by both sales and marketing teams,” Robert Hollier, strategy director for Momentum Account Based Marketing says. “By uniting efforts, ABM helps sales and marketing make a more powerful impact – addressing customers with a joined-up approach through smarter planning, personalised communications and highly relevant content.” By relying on both departments sharing ownership, ABM seems to play into another key technique designed to make marketing more efficient: sales enablement.
Belanger agrees with Hollier: “Ideally a symbiotic relationship should be fostered where sales acts on marketing insight and marketing listens to sales’ feedback. Nurturing is the responsibility of marketing, but sales needs to take a personal approach too, particularly as brands strive to achieve the nirvana of one-to-one marketing at scale.” Belanger continues: “Crucially, account-based marketing tends to generate leads that convert to revenue more easily. This boosts sales teams’ confidence in marketing, which in turn strengthens unity and cohesion between sales and marketing, leading to a cycle of continual improvement.”
Challenges
As with any marketing technique, ABM comes with challenges as well as benefits. Hewerdine says: “We’ve used ABM effectively as part of targeted acquisition programmes and also, to drive better engagement (and ultimately cross-sell) with existing customers. There’s clearly time and effort involved in building ABM programmes, which means that today it’s more commercially viable for high value sales. That said, marketing technology is improving to such an extent that it’s now easier to scale ABM to a wider set of accounts. The big challenge as ever, is data. Like any campaign, you’re only as good as your data.”
Lyndon agrees that ABM is suitable for both prospects and existing customers, but warns: “With prospects you will need to do more intelligence gathering up front to understand the landscape.”
Despite acknowledging the point about the time commitment required to make ABM work, Lyndon still believes it’s worth it: “Consider this – if 80 per cent of revenue comes from 20 per cent of your high-value accounts, then isn’t this time well spent? Part of the challenge is figuring out which customers are appropriate for an ABM programme. It is definitely a process that becomes cumulatively more powerful over time. It’s not a one-hit wonder. You must have an account plan in place that maps ABM to the sales process.”
As with anything that’s relatively new, there can be hesitation from some before embarking on what could be a lengthy new process, but the end results can be substantial. Corby offers an insight into his experiences of ABM and the success he found. “At KPMG, I introduced ABM as a pilot programme for our top multi-national accounts. We started small – with five or six clients. Just 12 months later the programme was so successful it was rolled out to 17 countries and a further 15 accounts.”
Many high-profile companies are using ABM very well, including Cisco, TMF and BT Global Services (BTGS). Focusing on the latter, BT is a great example of results that can be seen from implementing ABM. In an interview on the BT website, Neil Blakesley, former vice-president of marketing at BTGS, revealed that ABM was used as a methodology for recognising its most valuable customers. The brand developed and deployed an award-winning ABM programme (the group won a Marketing Excellence Gold Award from the IT Service Marketing Association), which led to a dramatic increase in major account acquisitions and a huge increase in new deal revenue.
Regardless of how you feel about account-based marketing, it is hard to look past the results that marketers are seeing. The level of personalisation it offers not only makes you look better and more professional in the eyes of the client, it secures long-term higher value projects and results that will impress new prospective customers too. The challenge you have to accept is the time involved and effort required. If done well, the results will speak for themselves.
