The Misnomer of "Account" Based Marketing

As I speak with more and more companies about the technology evolving to support Account-Based Marketing (ABM), I get more excited about the possibilities as a marketer working in the B2B space. While it's not hard to understand why targeted messaging relevant to a specific business would be more effective than a generic blast to a huge database, there's a big problem I have with Account-Based Marketing. And that is its name.

What is an "Account?"

In the world of CRM, an account is created only when a lead converts to an contact on the identification of an opportunity. In simpler terms, an account is not synonymous with a "company." I believe when we're talking about ABM what we really want to be talking about is company-based marketing or org-based marketing. I know it doesn't sound as fancy as ABM (CBM or OBM just doesn't have the same ring to it), but as a marketer, it's much easier to explain to sales and the rest of the non-marketing world when  you call it company-based marketing vs account-based.

Company-Based Marketing means that whether or not you have an account record created in SFDC,  you can leverage technologies and services to identify the company that each lead belongs to. Surprisingly, that's one of the hardest things to do in a CRM system (at least in Salesforce, the CRM I am familiar with, and one of the most popular for B2B businesses.) There is no way to say - hey Salesforce, please pull me a list of all the companies in my database today and tell me how many leads I have in each company. That seems like a simple ask - but Salesforce was not built for marketers, it was built for sales whose only goal is identifying opportunities and creating accounts to work.

In a modern B2B organization, selling to companies/organizations, you have a limited number of companies in the world that meet your target market. Whether you're a marketer or sales rep, your objective is to identify where each of those companies stand in regards to interest in your business at any given time. With the current CRM architecture and supporting systems, without major expensive hacks by highly-skilled agency, you aren't going to be able to answer that very simple question.

Luckily, companies like Engagio, Marketo and others realize this is a big problem. While the work is early, I'm excited that finally there is significant focus on helping marketers identify target companies, analyze their progress within those companies, and, ultimately, create targeted campaigns via marketing automation and multi-channel programs.

This isn't "Account" Based Marketing

If we keep calling Company-Based Marketing "Account"-Based Marketing, we're going to get lost in the nomenclature before we make progress. The simple conversation with sales is - my goal is to have a list of all companies we could sell to, and then be able to slice and dice that list by demographic data (org size, industry, revenue size, location, et al) to generate very targeted campaigns to nurture leads AND contacts in our database who should be attached to those companies but who, given the limitations of Salesforce architecture, aren't.

The problem is, once you throw the term account in, and you'll get one too many raised eyebrows from sales and anyone else living in a world of CRM. We're not talking about marketing to accounts, we're actually talking about marketing to companies, and have a company-centric view of a portion of our marketing programs and activities.

It may sound strange to care so much about the name of this industry, but accounts are not the same thing as companies, and we're really talking about marketing to companies, not official "accounts." It's simple, it's understandable, and it's exactly what is needed in the modern marketing organization to achieve long-term success.