Yes!.. Account-Based Marketing Win! And What to Expect :D

Let me tell you the story about a little red Ferrari and my introduction to account-based marketing. This die-cast Ferrari, about five or six inches long, about $30, changed my understanding of marketing and set me on the path that I'm on today.

Hi, My name is Karim Abdelaziz; CXL scholarship recipient '21 and as a skilled yet experienced in sustainable development, business strategy, and research concerns with 5+ years of experience of growth spending over thousands of hours studying scientific and design thinking, Business model innovation, Data science, conducting research practices with Intel ISEF-International Science and Engineering fair and working around topics like (Circular Economy, Financial Inclusion, Infrastructure, and value chain). I am happy to vent a little about what I am currently learning.

Today, I am going to reflect on the CXL course from Mr. Instructor: Steve Watt which is about a masterclass on the art of Account-Based Marketing in the world of marketing!

We'll discuss laying the groundwork. These foundations, this foundation post, are still relevant if you're already part-way down the street and if you forget anything, they will come back to you later. And taking the time to think very hard now, you might be able to correct a few problems before they become a challenge. You can't just stop doing the whole demand creation and marketing and immediately turn a switch into an ABM-centric business.

You must run a pilot, develop, refine it, prove it, and then you place more and more focus on ABM and maybe less on other sectors, as it goes beyond the current marketing. You will lay solid foundations, you will start well, but always, always, always better. Today, we are just talking about traditional B2B marketing and why these inefficiencies and inefficiencies exist, and why it has been the best moment for ABM to take on the lead in B2B over the past several years.

We're going to talk about the different types of ABM and some tools to help you determine which type or types are most appropriate for you and your organization.

Understanding ABM

It was once really easy to sell B2B. You've placed leads at the top, grown, trained, and money came down. The more you led up, the more you nurtured, the more talented you were, the more money the bottom falls out. But the first thing came to the SEO and the SEM guys was to bring even more in their funnel.

And they were right, it works, it's powerful. And then the marketing automation guys came along a little later and said, you know what, your conversion, you're nurturing through the funnel is really inefficient. We can do some things that will create more revenue out of the same number of leads at the top. You have a lot of inefficiencies and a lot of ineffectiveness in your marketing and a lot of time and a lot of money spent on activities that don't actually drive the organization forward.

My inspired definition that I like to say is that ABM is a sustained, coordinated, strategic approach to identifying, engaging, closing, and growing the accounts that we know we should win. It really is an ongoing process that you build and execute and optimize, and it just becomes more and more powerful as you go. It doesn't stop with tossing leads over the fence, like so much of B2B marketing does. And the output of this, the outcome of this, should be a highly efficient and highly effective sales pipeline and revenue driver.

I find it very valuable, as do many others, in terms of talking about the three very different and all very powerful types of ABM. So at the top of the pyramid, you've got your strategic, one-to-one ABM. That's where we're talking about very complex, very large deals, probably going after quite a small universe of accounts and going incredibly deep to move mountains on these giant deals. I've got some friends in some huge organizations who are all about strategic ABM.

Questions for Considering the Right ABM Strategy

It's very, very different to be going after fortune 100 organizations versus SMBs. Sometimes there are wins that you want to achieve that go far beyond the revenue that they bring because once you can secure one or two key organizations within an industry, that can create a tipping point for you within the rest of that industry. So sometimes, even if the deal sizes aren't massive and the deals aren't incredibly complex, you still may want to take a very strategic one-to-one approach because of the high strategic value of those organizations. All of these things are going to come into, you know, your consideration set, in terms of figuring out what kind of ABM you're going to start with, what kind you're going to evolve to, and really making sure that you can kind of moderate your approach so that you're ambitious enough, but you also bite off something that you truly can chew.

Key issues within ABM

We've all been part of marketing initiatives, business strategies, growth strategies that didn't work really well, and it's really important that we learn from them. One is a lack of executive or sales alignment. People say that alignment is important, but oftentimes they stop there, and they don't really provide advice and guidance as to how to achieve this alignment. Don't try to dictate that ABM is the way things are going to be.

It starts with really making them believe that this can be powerful and that they can co-own it. Getting this alignment, we're going to talk more about executive alignment and sales-marketing alignment in more detail. 

Big mistake number two is measuring the wrong things. We all know that marketing absolutely is metric-driven, it's data-driven, of course, it is. I'm just going to show you some different ways that some different organizations approach, and you'll be able to figure out what's best for your organization. You need some nearer afield metrics to tell you that you're doing the right things to build the right foundations, build the right capabilities and that you're on the road to success. Because what we wanted to do is, we ultimately wanted to get to a point where the senior people in all of these organizations not only knew who we were but saw us as part of the future of this industry. Saw us as important leaders in where this industry was going.

There's a number of different ways of measuring ABM. And I'm not going to tell you which one's right for you. I'm just going to show you some different ways that some different organizations approach it, and you'll be able to figure out what's best for your organization. So one approach is the idea of coverage, engagement, and impact. And especially if your deals are large and your sales cycles are long, you can't just say, well, we're going to wait and see the revenue in a year and that'll tell us whether we're doing the right things or not.

You know another approach, of course, is marketing qualified accounts. And the definitions of that are going to vary from company to company. But you would set your own thresholds for how many people within the account need to be engaging with us, and in what ways, before we can call that a marketing qualified account. Some organizations will say, you know, there's not one thing, it's a variety of metrics.

You know that they're the right accounts to do business with you, they just don't know it yet. Do things that don't scale. Maybe you're going to be sending gifts, maybe you're going to be doing other things that they, don't worry in the early days about how scalable it is. So do things that don't scale in your pilot.

No matter what the results of your pilot are, if you have not learned really important things about what audiences, what channels, what tactics, what tools, what assets are highly effective, then you've missed a huge opportunity.