Thursday, January 18, 2018

Account Based Marketing - New Phenomenon or Emerging Discipline?

Account Based Marketing - New Phenomenon or Emerging Discipline?

What exactly is Account Based Marketing? Marketo defines it as “an alternative B2B strategy that concentrates sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined set of target accounts within a market and employs personalized campaigns designed to resonate with each account.”

While I think this definition is an accurate description of ABM, I would argue that it’s not really an alternative strategy. It turns out that a highly personalized sales and marketing strategy, based on an account-by-account basis, is not a new phenomenon. Ask anyone who has spent time marketing and selling into big organizations (e.g. F500 corporations, large financial institutions, etc.) with large average contract values, and she will tell you that this has been in her go-to-market playbook for a long time.

But, all of a sudden, it sounds like ABM is all the rage. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions, 87% of B2B companies say “ABM has become extremely or very important to their overall marketing efforts.”

So, why all the buzz?

With a emergence of a so many effective and cost-efficient digital marketing tools, a personalized approach can be deployed much more easily than ever before. These data collection, automation and analytics tools are so cheap that companies with much smaller average contract values (e.g. $15K-$100K) can now deploy this strategy.

However, just because these tools are out there doesn’t mean that anyone can do it. Hiring an excellent demand generation marketer is not an easy exercise. Having gone through the exercise at a prior company, it’s a nascent career field with far greater demand vs. supply of talent.

Once you attract the right talent, you still have to set the right metrics to measure effectiveness and integrate the sales and marketing teams. More on these issues in future blog posts!

No comments: