The C-Suite Is Finally Embracing Account-Based Marketing. Now What?
After years of crisis and startups, account-based marketing (ABM) is poised for a breakthrough in 2023. ABM’s simple yet powerful premise is tailored specifically for tough economic times. :
You focus your marketing spend only on the biggest accounts and the most compelling sales opportunities. Either you win the case or you don’t. If your “success rate” for ABM-targeted offers and accounts is higher than for other offers and accounts, you have a strong business case to keep going. more ABMs.
That’s why b-to-b CMOs have succeeded in impressing their CEOs and CFOs with the vast, largely untapped power that lies within ABM. ROI is binary and easy to measure. It’s a rare comfort in a down economy.
Undoubtedly, C-suite adoption of ABM is a welcome development for CMOs who have hired marketers with ABM skills, implemented the right ABM technology platforms, and set up Disciplined seamless processes between marketing and sales. However, I have spoken to many of my b-to-b CMO colleagues who admit that they have not made the necessary investments to confidently deploy ABM at scale. And, since you can’t build an ABM overnight, I think we’ll see a lot of anxious CMOs scrambling to roll out their ABM programs this year without knowing what constitutes a program. effective. Based on my experience as a leading ABM proponent and practice for over 10 years, I have identified three strategic direction areas that can help marketers create a Center of Excellence Successful ABM: talent, background and discipline.
Capacity
The first mistake CMOs make when setting up an ABM practice is thinking they can recruit any marketer on their team that shows interest. ABM is focused on mobilizing your best resources to help sales close the most important deals for the quarter or even the year. You can rest assured that the sales department will put its best talent into these deals, so why not just hire your best marketers?
Think of ABM as your SEAL team:
Only the best needs apply. Your ABMers should be top performers with a solid interdisciplinary marketing background, proven track record, and personality to work with the most motivated and successful salespeople on a daily basis. Your IBMers need to think and behave like small CMOs who have a deep understanding of sales strategy, know how to create a separate marketing plan, and have a plan in place for all other marketing functions (content, video, creative, social, etc.) deliver exactly what’s needed at the right time. This is not a place for inexperienced traders.
communication
A common misconception is that setting up an ABM program means buying an ABM technology platform, like the one from market leaders Demandbase or 6Sense. Obtaining an ABM background is essential, but not sufficient. Anyone on a budget can buy the technology. The key is to make sure it’s guided by smart marketers to deliver specific results. It also has to be tightly integrated with a number of different platforms and processes. Here are a few things to consider.
Integration:
Engage sales as an active partner to ensure you have clear data on your current customers in customer relationship management (CRM) and, more importantly, access to operations history with related profit and loss information. You’ll need it to refine the “ICP” ideal customer profile, which is essential to developing a similar model for deeper targeting as part of your broader ABM approach. You will also need to ensure that your marketing automation (MAP) platform as well as your social publishing and advertising platforms can seamlessly integrate with your ABM platform to ensure that you can launch multi-tactic campaigns including organic social outreach, paid social media, email, webinars, and intent-based digital advertising with a holistic approach and Attachment.
Commercial Visibility:
A common mistake is to assume that sales will welcome a different technology background into their professional lives. Most sales leadership teams struggle enough trying to get field salespeople to regularly update their funnel in the CRM system. The chances of your salespeople wanting to self-serve in your ABM platform are almost zero. Leave that job to your ABMers. Instead, work with sales operations to seamlessly import only the most important information from your ABM platform into your established CRM records system. For example, give them the option to turn on notifications so they know when their customers come to your site, and let them know when your target customers seem to be on “buying impulse” based on projections. guess about the signals they give out on the Web. That’s really all they need to know. Let them spend their time selling without trying to figure out the intricacies of another platform.
Fuel for your engine:
Even the most sophisticated machine is useless without fuel. The real power of the ABM platform isn’t just its ability to track potential customers’ digital behavior and identify their predictive buying signals. The real power lies in using this information to act on these signals with highly targeted digital ads that deliver the right message at the right time to the right people in the right business.
This requires an advertising budget that can be set aside for use in highly targeted ABM marketing and pursuit campaigns (through your ABM platform’s ad-serving capabilities). So don’t assume the ABM engine will get much use unless you’re willing to spend a lot of money on promotional “fuel” and are willing to protect it from poachers so you have it available on demand when new strategic activities arise. To support.
Discipline
Your ABM program is an exclusive invite-only club. Make sure you have rigorous and disciplined processes in place to make it happen. You don’t want it to just become another shiny object that initially excites the seller, only to have them seriously lose interest a month later.
