ABM is Still Just Good Marketing Part One ABM is Still Just Good Marketing Part One

ABM is Just Good Marketing

Still

If you’re a marketer on planet earth today, you’re no stranger to the idea of ABM (whether you’re actually doing it or not). Google searches for "account-based marketing" and its acronym "ABM" peaked in the year 2020. Now, terms like “account-based experience,” “account-based everything,” and the catchall acronym “ABX,” which shifts the focus from marketing to the entire customer journey, are also on the rise.

The thing is, while account-based was once considered a new trend or just the latest marketing buzzword, it’s now become the norm. ABM isn’t a fad or something that only an elite few teams of marketing wizards are able to pull off. It’s the way every B2B company that aspires to achieve predictable revenue growth should be going to market. It’s just... good marketing.

The shift from leads to accounts

The big brains at Forrester have already predicted that by 2025, B2B demand generation efforts will focus predominantly on accounts, not leads. And since the events of 2020, that shift has only accelerated. In a nutshell, teams running an account-based strategy concentrate sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined set of target accounts (aka companies) and execute personalized campaigns, designed to resonate with the 10+ individuals on that account’s buying team (i.e., the employees at that company who would be involved in or influence the purchase decision).

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With a traditional lead-based approach, marketing teams assign value to one-off activities like form fills, downloads, and click-throughs. If a lead checks enough boxes and accrues enough points, it will be crowned a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and tossed over the wall to sales. Unfortunately, we know these kinds of actions don’t tell us a whole heck of a lot about whether someone is an ideal fit for what we’re selling, let alone whether they’re anywhere near ready to buy. (And remember, one lead

Have you transitioned your marketing approach and dashboards from lead-based to account-based?

In a recent study, we found that nearly 60% of organizations that claim to be “account-based” are still most focused on generating MQLs, despite the role an ABM strategy plays in their marketing mix. And a survey conducted by Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing revealed that 27% of marketers have already transitioned to account-based, 36% have not, and 37% are “currently working through it.” So why is it so hard to make the shift? And what are the biggest hurdles during the “working through it” period?

Moving away from forms, spam, and cold calls

Even if you see the value of account-based in theory, it can be oh-so-hard to let go of the lead-based tactics marketers have relied on for years — even if data shows these tactics just aren’t very effective. For example, the average form abandonment rate is nearly 68%. That means, the majority of people who get to your form immediately bolt. And many of the ones who don’t just plug in some bogus information. So now your BDR is busy trying to engage with Dr. Seuss, CEO of Whoville Inc. Chasing after the wrong leads is costly and just a waste of everyone’s time.

Ever since marketing declared “content is king,” we’ve been trying to lure prospects out of the dark by gating the content we think they need in order to make an informed decision. We want to believe that a prospect will step out of the shadows and give up their anonymity in exchange for some exclusive content. But B2B buyers are increasingly less willing to sacrifice their anonymity to access information that is ubiquitously available online, so if you put a barrier in front of your content, they’ll go find something similar (and ungated) from your competitor.

represents just one person, and we know B2B decisions are made by several people within the company.) So we know why it makes sense to move away from an individual lead-based approach to an account-based approach, but the bigger question is, how can companies make that shift? Many are still trying to figure that part out. Legacy B2B technologies are built around processing leads, which can make the logistics of shifting to ABM difficult.

Even with this realization, we’re still holding out hope that if we gate some of our “high value” content, this approach will continue to deliver enough quality leads to meet our pipeline goals because, well, anyone who fills out a form must be a good prospect, right? Nevermind the fact that this lead may be from an account that’s not a good fit for your business to sell to (e.g., it’s too small, the wrong industry, etc.). It also doesn’t matter that they’ve exhibited virtually no buying behavior other than doing some research or scanning their badge at a tradeshow to get a free charging dongle. You see where we’re going with this? ABM isn’t just about focusing on accounts instead of leads. It’s about targeting the right accounts that are actually in the market to buy (i.e., “in-market”), and orchestrating relevant outreach across their buying team.

When you can do that - firing on all account-based cylinders - you'll experience a smorgasbord of benefits:

But it’s not as easy as flipping a switch. There are a few bumps (and maybe even potholes) your team may encounter on the road to a successful account-based strategy.

4 ABM roadblocks

Yes

Working through it currently

37%

Based on industry research we’ve conducted, our own experiences, along with those of our customers, we’ve identified the four main challenges teams face when making the move from lead-based to a fully account-based strategy, and how to overcome them.

1. The Dark Funnel

27%

36%

2. Marketing and Sales Misalignment

3. Distrust in Data

4. Insufficient or Disconnected Tech Stack

1. The Dark Funnel

The Dark Funnel may sound like something out of a horror flick, and for marketers, it can feel just as ominous. Today’s B2B buyers hold more power in the buying process than ever before. They control the flow of information, pace, and preferred channels they use, and they’re resistant to engage, especially with sales, until they’ve completed their own research and product comparisons.

To truly understand the level of demand in the market for your product or service and where these accounts are in their buying journey, you’ll need access to the right technology to uncover your Dark Funnel and connect this anonymous activity to your “known funnel” (i.e., data in your CRM and MAP) in order to get a complete picture of where each identified account sits in their buyer journey.

Getting into deals earlier

Larger deal sizes

Higher win rates

Marketing and sales alignment

The people on your marketing and sales teams may have spent years getting used to a certain modus operandi, and may be hesitant to leave all that lead-chasing behind to embrace an account-based approach. Especially if, over the years of siloed and disparate data and metrics, some level of animosity or mistrust has formed among the team. In a truly account-based model, these teams should be working together, as one “revenue team.”

Imagine, emerging on the other side of this transition with a more functional relationship between sales, marketing, and operations — with everyone aligned on goals, data, and metrics. It will be revenue nirvana!

2. Marketing and Sales Misalignment

Getting the entire team focused on common goals and a mutual understanding of what it takes to achieve them eliminates a lot of the traditional sources of friction. With a robust account-based strategy, everyone from marketing to sales to operations to customer success is working from the same playbook and toward the exact same goals — namely, to win more deals and provide a great prospect and customer experience.

According to Steven Casey, Principal Analyst with Forrester Research, only 12% of B2B marketers have confidence in their data. (Yikes!) If you’re not confident in your data, why should anyone else be? Number two and number three on this list are very much interrelated — data gaps are the main cause of team misalignment, and as long as those gaps exist, the friction between marketing and sales is sure to continue.

3. Distrust in data

The martech landscape is teeming with micro-solutions for every nagging problem the marketing automation platform vendors aren’t able to solve (or they themselves created). Sales tech is no different. Your CRM was built to store records, not facilitate decision-making. And the more we try to solve the problems, the more new solutions pop up, and pretty soon, your teams are “optimizing” their way further into both data and functional silos.

4. Insufficient or disconnected tech stack

Common Concerns when moving to account-based

Some common concerns when considering a move to an ABX strategy are:

Marketing worrying about how they'll "get credit" for their efforts without MQLS.

Sales not knowing how to prioritize their outreach.

Neither team agreeing on which accounts to target in the first place.

These are of course very legitimate concerns, and all routed in the same problem - lack of access to the right data.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have more visibility into these accounts?

So what is The Dark Funnel, you ask? Well, it’s made up of all that research activity and the buying signals within an account, like anonymous web visits, 3rd-party research, and false form fills that go unseen by sales and marketing teams and their legacy systems. In fact, we found that roughly 90% of B2B buying activity takes place in these unknown spaces. As if connecting disparate technologies wasn’t hard enough, tons of anonymous demand is hidden from those systems we often rely on.

If decisions are based more on guesswork than real data, you’ll have to work twice as hard for half the results. Luckily, remedying that issue is possible, and it starts with your tech stack.

■ Which markets and industries are best to pursue. ■ What your company’s ideal customer profile looks like. ■ What kinds of campaigns to run (and to which personas). ■ What content to create (and with what messaging).

decisions (and revenue). Accurate, reliable data — powered by artificial intelligence and predictive capabilities — makes it possible to know:

Simply deciding to shift focus from individual leads to accounts isn’t enough to ensure sales and marketing are working the right leads — those coming from accounts that are in-market and ready to engage. In an account-based context, data is key to driving

Account-based is nearly impossible to do at scale without alignment around process and technology. A single source of truth is essential — a platform that integrates seamlessly with your CRM, marketing automation platform, and web personalization tools, that gives the entire revenue team the same view into which accounts are showing meaningful activity, where they are in their buying journey, and what efforts are working to get them moving through the funnel.

The reason there is now such a thing as “ABX” is that it’s about more than just marketing now. The entire revenue team (marketing, sales, ops, and even customer success) needs to be on the same page. But when these teams are working inside disparate systems,

alignment challenges grow exponentially, as more data becomes siloed and disconnected from execution. (Not to mention the negative impact it has on the customer and prospect experience.)

2. Marketing and Sales Misalignment

1. The Dark Funnel

3. Distrust in Data

4. Insufficient or Disconnected Tech Stack

(Hover over cards to view benefits)