Why ABM is where it’s at

Marketing departments love a good TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) and their current favourite is ‘ABM’. If you’re not familiar with Account-Based Marketing, you need to be. I’ll tell you why.

ABM isn’t “this year’s trend” and it’s not the same old marketing dressed up in the emperor’s new clothes. But neither is it the magic bullet or the apex of modern marketing best-practice. What it is is a very powerful weapon to be deployed at the right time, for the right accounts. Strategically it extends and supports what marketing and sales departments can do, and its value is underlined by an increasing number of high-profile successes.

The clearest and simplest way I can think of to describe ABM is to use the ITSMA definition: “treating individual accounts as markets in their own right.” This has led to something of a misconception about ABM: that it in fact equates to “whale hunting” and is only a tactic to be used for landing very big accounts. While this is an important part of what ABM can do, it’s not the full story. ABM can equally be used for attaining deeper account penetration, developing new accounts, and changing the perceptions of an account within your internal sales, marketing and service teams.

What does ABM look like?

Well, ABM takes as its starting point the need for real insight into named accounts rather than just relying on generic painpoints for the whole sector. Some of the research activities might for example include understanding the account’s strategic goals, mapping their current supplier landscape, and creating a SWOT for each account. Then you would proceed to profiling and mapping the various stakeholders with the target account/s. Then creating marketing tactics to engage these on an individual level (and only after that, if successful, on a group level). Only then to commence engagement.

Doing ABM right is about being prepared to nurture these contacts slowly and carefully, and to use insight and feedback gained at every stage to inform the bigger picture about what to do next. Without getting too New Age on you, an ABM programme is indeed something that needs to be holistic, organic, engaged. ABM isn’t a quick-fix.

If you need to hit a number quickly to close a tricky quarter, ABM’s probably not for you. But with the big picture in mind, the rewards are great.

What are said rewards, for example? 

• 97% of marketers say ABM tactics yielded a higher ROI than any other marketing activity (Alterra Group)
• 80% say that ABM outperforms other marketing initiatives (ITSMA)
• 92% of B2B marketers worldwide consider ABM “extremely” or “very” important to their overall marketing efforts (SiriusDecisions)
• 84% believe that ABM provides significant benefits for retaining and expanding current client relationships (SiriusDecisions)

So increased marketing ROI, accelerated pipeline, heightened opportunity for upsell and increased customer satisfaction are all among the results that you should expect to see, alongside the opportunity to position your company as a thought-leader within your customer base. 

There’s one other very important benefit which is inevitably top of mind when people discuss ABM: much greater alignment between sales and marketing. This is a core consideration, but it’s also something of a double-edged sword…

Who should drive ABM into the business?

As Bev Burgess (an acknowledged ABM guru who has written ‘ABM: A Practitioner’s Guide’ which is rapidly becoming the ABM ‘bible’) puts it in this insightful blog:

“Partnership between sales and marketing [is one of the main underlying principles of ABM]. ABM will only achieve its potential when sales and marketing work hand in hand. This requires more than agreeing upon definitions, rules of engagement, and a list of prioritized accounts. It means that sales and marketing are equal partners collaborating on the same team.”

With this in mind, the question of who should bring ABM into the organisation, and how, is an important one. ABM needs commitment and sustained focus to work and to thrive. The benefits of alignment between sales and marketing are well articulated in a blog by InsightSquared. But we all know sales and marketing teams famously have a mutual antipathy – this can mean that ABM is unlikely to succeed if driven by one or the other team. It definitely shouldn’t be something that is ‘bought in’ by marketing and then ‘imposed’ on sales. The best way to guarantee adoption and roll out is for the senior stakeholders in a business or the senior management team to adopt it as a strategic approach to key accounts, and then pass this down to the sales and marketing teams. 

You will of course need an outstanding CRM system to bring everything together and to provide the link between sales and marketing. While the spirit behind ABM is all about increased personalisation and real differentiated thought going in to each account strategy, there’s still going to be a place for automation and, increasingly in future, Artificial Intelligence. 

What do you see as the main barriers to getting ABM up and running? Alternatively – if you’re already running it successfully – who was responsible for bringing this into your company? Drop me a line, I’d love you to join the conversation.