Account-Based Marketing: Guide For Modern Marketers
Account-Based Marketing: Guide For Modern Marketers
Account-Based Marketing: Guide For Modern Marketers
Account-Based
Marketing
GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
INTRODUCTION
If you’re reading this guide, you’re probably a B2B marketer. If so, you probably
spend a lot of your time coming up with new ways to reach the right prospect, at The reason ABM
the right time, with the right message. Which means you’re one of a million B2B has reached peak
marketers trying to do exactly the same thing. Welcome to the club!
popularity is that
To make it worse, nearly everyone who sells solutions to B2B marketers like us technology and
will promise they can help you reach the right prospect at the right time with
the right message. Not too long ago, you could buy lists from ads in the back of resources have
inflight magazines that made the same promise. Now those promises come from allowed us to scale
marketing technology vendors, as well as bloggers and authors and consultants
putting their own spin on marketing strategies, both proven and unproven.
in new ways.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is the latest strategy those folks are trying to sell
—Craig Rosenberg, TOPO
you. But with ABM, there’s one key difference: ABM isn’t a new, unproven idea;
it’s a new way of combining proven fundamentals to help B2B marketers (you
guessed it) reach the right prospect, at the right time, with the right message.
Only this time, it really works.
What Is ABM?
ITSMA has a reasonable claim to having coined the phrase, and they have a solid
definition:
Craig Rosenberg of analyst firm TOPO agrees that ABM is actually old school.
“As long as there have been companies and people trying to sell them,”
Rosenberg said, “there have been account-based marketing campaigns. The
reason it has reached peak popularity over the last year or so, however, is that
technology and fresh resources have allowed us to scale in entirely new ways.”
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
We’re simply smarter and faster than we were years ago. And we have better
marketing tools at our disposal. The ABM planets are aligning.
Why ABM?
You can answer this question with one statistic from Forrester Research: Less
than 1 percent of leads turn into revenue-generating customers. We’ll let that sink
in for a minute.
More marketers are going after the same people with the same tactics. Traditional
email marketing worked until spam filters and legally-required unsubscribe options. 84% of B2B marketers say that
When was the last time you read every single email in your inbox? With more ABM delivers a higher ROI than
organizations bypassing email by using internal messaging tools, it’s even harder. any other approach. —ITSMA
Content marketing worked well until everybody started to do it. Gone are the days
when you could own a particular word or phrase on the web just by publishing
good content about that term. Inbound marketing still works, but for a lot of
companies, it’s not bringing the results it once did.
1. ABM FUNDAMENTALS
ABM treats all accounts as a market of one.
Successful account-based marketers embrace an end-to-end view across the
entire buyer’s journey and across all channels. Some call that addressing each
prospect company, or account, as a “market of one.”
This approach makes it vital to truly understand each individual within an account.
ABM focuses on customer value. If you’re targeting your highest-potential
prospect companies, it’s worth taking the time to make your pitch relevant
to a relatively small, high-value group of key people.
ABM forces marketers to do the hard work of making sure they engage in a hyper-
personalized way. If your subject line doesn’t immediately address a decision
maker’s specific needs, it will not work. Smart ABM marketers don’t just target to
titles. They personalize the message to a specific persona at a specific company.
Don’t think: “How the XYZ Widget Can Drive More Business.” Think: “How We
Can Solve Problem A at ABC Corp.”
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
Making ABM work requires marketing and sales to align on success metrics,
agree on account engagement strategy, and meet daily to check on progress.
Traditional lead-based metrics, like lead volume, impressions, and traffic present
challenges in ABM, as these figures don’t correlate to revenue, and many leads
generated aren’t targeted. ABM is all about focusing on the right leads, not just
more leads.
The best ways for a marketer to measure success in ABM include number of
accounts identified, number of key contact relationships, acceleration of pipeline,
reduction in sales cycle, and, ultimately, revenue.
And all of that requires sales and marketing to work together and ultimately align.
2. NAMED ACCOUNTS
With ABM, an organization defines a target set of accounts and then employs
campaigns that will resonate with each prospect or account individually. You’re
probably familiar with the term “named account.” Like all terms specific to
marketing, it means a lot of things to a lot of people. ABM requires companies
not only to have a shared understanding of the definition of named account,
but a unified method of engaging with them.
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
Apart from streamlining your operations, named accounts will also tend to be
more engaged and more ready to buy. (Hotter, if you prefer.) If you can identify a
company’s needs, you can be confident the leads that result will be interested in
what you have to offer.
A named account list for ABM needs to include more than just contact
information. You need to have insight into those accounts to build a targeted value
proposition. You need to understand the business issues each account is facing on
a specific level in order to show the decision makers how you will help solve them.
Plus, a target list that lives only in a marketer’s database ignores the key element
of sales-marketing alignment. “The marketer becomes part of the account team,”
Burgess says.
The second difference is when you are doing ABM, you’re creating an account-
specific marketing plan and integrating it with the sales plan. They’re aligned and
integrated: the marketer becomes a part of the account team.
First, it avoids the possibility of reps stepping on each other’s toes and duplicating
efforts. There’s no point having two people assigned to selling to the same
company. In fact, it’s bad.
Secondly, in a modern B2B environment, the vast majority of companies will have
multiple decision makers, so it’s essential to first identify all relevant decision
makers and build your sales and marketing strategy accordingly, instead of
shunting from one lead to another.
This can be a very manual process. For example, when a sales or marketing rep
identifies a lead within a company for whom your product or service is relevant,
that lead would be flagged in your CRM, and that rep would be instructed to focus
on bringing in more strategic leads specifically from within that account and build
a pitch around them.
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
Moving to a named account approach for ABM may sound daunting at first, since
some CRM and marketing automation systems are geared toward leads, and the
leads (people) may not be connected to the companies (accounts) they work for. In
our section on predictive analytics, we’ll cover how this process can be automated
for far greater effectiveness.
Creating and implementing a content marketing strategy for ABM does not, at its
essence, require any radical shifts in the way you approach content marketing in
general. ABM will simply inform the way you target and promote your content,
much in the same way as ABM would inform—but in no way displace—your
company’s wider marketing strategy.
The difference is with ABM content marketing begins with the “who.” Again,
you’ll be treating accounts as markets of one, and contacts as influencers within
those accounts. That means you need to be versatile in who you direct and
promote your content to, and be much more specific.
On the one hand, content will need to be aimed at specific companies. But at the
same time, you will need to identify key influencers within those accounts, and
target them specifically as well. These audiences will also typically be far more
engaged and in most cases further down the funnel, and therefore require making
your content more specialized and niche.
Even the former approach is simpler than you might think, by adapting and editing
existing material, particularly gated content. A quality webinar, ebook, or customer
interview can be sliced and diced into multiple blog posts, customer brochures,
social media posts, or even infographics, customized and targeted to particular
audiences based on their needs and interests.
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
It’s worth emphasizing again that none of this needs to impact your broader, top-
of-the-funnel content. Both are important, and are in no way mutually exclusive.
In fact, many B2B companies that adopt ABM continue implementing other
traditional marketing methods at the same time, sometimes tasking separate
marketing teams for each.
But when it comes to the “how,” all of the same basic rules of B2B content
marketing still apply.
You need to carefully study and get to know who you are talking to with each
piece of marketing collateral, and create content around those profiles. The most
important question you need to be asking is: “What keeps our prospects (or this
one prospect) awake at night?”
That’s not necessarily the same as their most-pressing business goal. Even
though you’re marketing to accounts you’re still ultimately talking to human beings.
“Increasing company ROI” or “improving lead to conversion rates” could, on a
human level, boil down to “Please make my life easier and help me keep my job.”
No. You watch TV. The first is the Wikipedia definition. The second is what
people actually say. So why are we all still writing about seamless best-in-class,
multichannel, cloud-based marketectures that are flexible, extensible,
and feature-rich?
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
Jargon is never an effective way to engage with readers. People like to engage
with other human beings, and to be talked to (not at). This is even truer when
you’re fine-tuning your targeted ABM content. Have fun, tell a story, offer handy
tips, and use visual content where possible to make your material more engaging
and easy on the eye.
When addressing a specific problem, case studies illustrating your solution can
be particularly useful. How has your product or service solved similar or identical
problems in the past? As mentioned already, the great thing about case studies is
that they can usually be refashioned and reused over and over, so one customer
story could form the basis of multiple pieces of content (ABM or otherwise).
Remember: creating customized content for ABM doesn’t require coming up with
brand new material every time—so you can be an ABM ninja without reinventing
the wheel.
Outbound engagement.
Typical B2B lead generation efforts for sales development reps (SDRs) or business
development reps (BDRs) involve searching LinkedIn and Google, navigating
impossible phone directories, and playing email roulette to connect with the
right prospects.
With ABM becoming popular, more SDRs are focusing their outbound efforts on
specific accounts, rather than canvassing industries or company types to find key
influencers and decision makers.
While focusing on key accounts may seemingly help reduce the legwork involved,
SDRs are still spending way too much valuable time trying to identify the right
people. Even if you know the companies you want to contact, you still need to
know the names of the decision makers.
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
It’s scary because it’s true. In our ABM case study section, you’ll see how one big,
smart company with a big, smart inbound marketing program found out they had
200,000 valid leads sitting in their CRM that no one had ever contacted.
An ABM approach to inbound lead routing matches the contact info of the people
who responded to your CTA with the key account data of the companies they
work for. If someone contacts you for information, or requests a call or a demo,
and that person already works for a customer of yours, you want that person to
get a response from that company’s account team.
If the person who contacts you works for one of your top prospects, you want to
make sure you contact that person first. Lead-to-account matching, a feature of
ABM solutions built on predictive analytics, can make sure that happens. (More
on predictive analytics later.)
B2B marketers face the same problem with every campaign. There might not
be as much crying involved (or there might be). Multiple studies have placed the Inaccurate data had a direct
amount of bad data in the average company CRM database anywhere from 50 to impact on the bottom line of
70 percent. A survey by Experian Data Quality found inaccurate data had a direct 88% of companies.
impact on the bottom line for 88% of responding companies, with the average —Experian Data Quality
company losing 12% of its revenue because of it.
Marketers have tried to avoid the data problem with volume, sending more and
more emails with lower and lower conversions. Perhaps you’ve heard that the
definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting
different results.
ABM requires a personalized approach that addresses the individual needs of the
individual decision makers. How can you accomplish that if you can’t be sure who
they are, or even their accurate email address?
Some companies address this challenge in a manual way, building target account
lists manually and researching the right people to reach through their online
presence, then calling and hoping to get through. This approach may work for
companies with a specialized product and a relatively small list of target accounts.
But it’s obviously heavy on people power.
For the average B2B company, this approach doesn’t scale, which is what we say
these days to mean: “There is absolutely no way we can do that unless we hire a
whole bunch more people.”
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
ABM requires a list of elements working together, but if you’re building your
campaigns on inaccurate or incomplete data… Do we even need to finish
that sentence?
By going beyond the title to understand the roles and responsibilities of a person—
on an individual level, specific to that person—you can successfully personalize
your outreach to make sure it is topical, timely, practical, and personalized. Even on
the simplest level, a marketing operations person is more likely to open an email
or engage with an SDR on a phone call if the phrase “marketing operations” is
mentioned, compared to a generic pitch targeting the marketing domain.
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
It’s easy to create quick personas based on title or a few other factors, and never
look back. But if you do the work now of creating accurate personas based on
role, company size, industry, job function, technology used level and department,
keeping them up to date will be much easier. It’s a valuable investment of time
and effort that will pay off in better engagement.
4. PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
FOR ABM
What is predictive analytics?
All marketing and sales teams deal with the pain of bad person and company data.
Between incomplete form-fills, attendee lists from events, and anonymous web
visitors, trying to make sense of this information can be a complete mess, not to
mention a huge waste of time.
Considering how far marketing technology has evolved, it’s surprising that the
database problem still plagues most marketers. It’s getting worse as marketing
continues to expand into new channels and technologies.
Traditionally, marketing and sales teams have looked to data and lead vendors to
help cleanse and enrich their data. The problem with this method—as most will How many people do you
agree—is that the data from many vendors can be out of date by six months if know who have switched
not more, rendering it useless. How many people do you know in B2B who have companies, gotten new jobs
switched companies, gotten new jobs in the same company, been promoted, or at the same company, or
even changed their phone number or address in the last six months? How about in been promoted in the last
the last six weeks? Or six days? Now multiply that by everybody and you’ll see the six months?
magnitude of the data problem for B2B.
In a typical day for anyone in sales or marketing, you will likely visit at least
one social or web channel (LinkedIn, Twitter, Google) to get more context on a
particular person or company (or even just to find an accurate phone number). You
do this because you know that whatever is available on the open and social web is
most likely the most accurate and up-to-date information.
The open and social web is comprised of mostly unstructured data—such as data
that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-
defined manner so there’s a manual element to finding the information you need
and then synthesizing it with your existing records. This process makes it difficult
to support at scale.
Predictive analytics platforms for B2B lead generation have entered the market
to address this challenge. They provide an intelligence layer to aggregate and
reconcile multiple data sources while also bringing in contextually relevant and
valuable external information. (Who just got promoted? What company has just
hired five new developers? What technologies does the company use?) This type
of platform not only eliminates the need for the majority of data cleansing tools,
but also provides an on-demand, virtual database of the most accurate person and
company information.
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
Imagine the time saved and the improved efficacy of your campaigns if your
database was on-demand and always up-to-date. It’s no longer a fantasy with
predictive analytics.
Models are built by correlating behaviors such as web searches or page views and
social media comments with important outcomes such as requesting a proposal
or making a purchase. The goal is to help internal teams apply their time to the
most pressing needs. Lead intelligence can also be informed by the product, offer,
and channel recommendations provided by content models.
For example, the job level of decision makers usually depends on the size of the
company. A director might have ultimate say in the buying process and unlimited
signing and budget authority. Or he might have three levels of vice president
between him and the person who signs the checks. This can vary by industry
as well.
If you’re basing your persona segmentation on title alone, you may be aiming too
high or too low, or even both.
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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING GUIDE FOR MODERN MARKETERS
It’s hard to imagine how that could occur. (Wouldn’t it be great though?) Before
RingCentral launched their ABM strategy, they were unaware of 200,000 qualified
leads floating under their radar, on their own systems.
• 65 hour decrease per quarter, per rep dealing with lead routing
and administration.
And that’s what ABM is all about: taking a targeted, strategic approach to
sales and marketing that separates the wheat from the chaff and focuses your
company’s efforts on the leads most likely to convert.
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About Oracle Marketing Cloud
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Visit oracle.com/marketingcloud
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Leadspace predictive analytics, built on a Virtual Data Management Platform, offers customers best-in-class data and
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Visit www.leadspace.com