Pawan Deshpande, CEO of Curata, and Ricky Abbott, marketing and strategy director at Pulse, provide answers
What is ABM?
At its core, ABM is the process of identifying specific accounts a marketer desires to close, then building campaigns to generate or engage leads associated with each of them and finally measuring the results. The process focuses strategy, technology and insight.
Why now?
ABM is nothing new. Marketers have been practicing the fundamentals since the mid-90s, but it’s a combination of technological advancements and the gusto with which modern B2B marketers approach strategy that has opened the floodgates.
So while the marketers of yesteryear might have used a tiered system based on the size their accounts and marketed to them accordingly, today marketers are able to use data-driven insights and intelligent software to deliver highly personalised, targeted and cost effective campaigns.
What are the benefits?
The main attraction of ABM is how it uses strategy, technology and insight to solve challenges across departments and throughout the whole customer journey. Specifically, here are the four main ways it does that:
Focusing strategy: By tailoring efforts to only the most valuable accounts, overall campaign costs are decreased while the resources available for targeting each account are dramatically increased.
Sales and marketing alignment: Identifying these accounts should be a collaborative effort between marketing and sales; a process that challenges the false dichotomy of marketers striving for leads while sales work on accounts.
Optimising CX: In scenarios where the addressable market is finite, known and quantifiable, ABM is far more effective than inbound marketing en masse. It enables a marketer to provide customer experience that would be unscalable in regular campaigns. For example, with a set of highly qualified leads, a marketer is able to invest a greater budget on delivering a personalised, relevantly messaged DM to a handful of key decision-makers from target accounts. Ultimately, more customised and enticing forms of marketing increase conversion rates.
Precise measurement: Using account data over traditional metrics makes for more precise and meaningful measurement. A direct approach would be to analyse the number of contacts touched and converted to sales: it’s the difference of measuring click rates to measuring close rates.
Why should companies practice ABM?
The role of a marketer within any organisation is to drive revenue and grow the business. In B2B, this means dealing with the challenges of long and complex sales cycles. But ABM shifts the weight of these challenges and makes them work in a marketer’s favour. The aforementioned benefits can be categorised into three groups which make a strong argument for practicing ABM.
To attract the right audience: Less a problem in the consumer market, B2B companies always have a finite set of target accounts. This usually means the accounts have met qualification criteria such as being in a specific target vertical, having the prerequisite technology stack, being located in a desired location or being a desired size. ABM takes advantage of this by ensuring each worthy account is prioritised.
To make your customers pay attention: Pushing messages out to a wide, partially defined audience means they’re often lost or ignored. Knowing exactly who to target enables marketers to prepare the right content and messaging to have maximum effect.
To align departments and goals: Working cross-departmentally doesn’t just encourage collaboration between sales and marketing, but also helps focus efforts on the overarching business goals. In ABM, this is manifested in the collaborative approach in swapping leads for accounts, creating personas and sharing revenue-related metrics.
Why isn’t everyone doing it?
ABM is complex. When fully committed to, it requires a change in approach throughout both sales and marketing, if not the whole company. Fragmentation between departments will be a major barrier to ABM, which relies on sharing a common goal.
The other reason most commonly cited by marketers is not having a roadmap; or only a rough understanding of the technologies and processes required. But the truth is, many brands already doing it; albeit simply.
*Part two of this feature will explore the practicalities of ABM, providing specialist guidance on strategies, programme scaling and tech stack components, as well as looking at who’s doing it well. Commentary to be provided by likes of Demandbase, Momentum ABM and more.
