Account-Based Marketing

psst. it's kinda just marketing.

Hello hello hello,

It’s good to be back. Been far too long. Today’s topic has been a hot one for B2B marketing and sales teams for the past 7 or so years: Account-based marketing.

But before I get too far, I just want to say thank you. I’m about a month into this and am genuinely enjoying writing this marketing word vomit. So it’s nice to have some people on the other side.

If you know anyone who may like this (students, startup founders, etc. etc.), please share here. I’m trying to come up with a referral system to give back to the readers. If you have ideas, let me know!

Alright, let’s do it. Account-Based Marketing.

According to Marketo, "Account-based marketing is a focused approach to B2B marketing in which marketing and sales teams work together to target best-fit accounts and turn them into customers."

Remember the marketing funnel? Well here's one way you could structure an ABM funnel (from Neil Patel):

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The Growth of ABM

interest over time for “account based marketing” (via Google Trends)

This is due to a couple things:

1. Buyer behavior - Literally everyone discovering and engaging with brands in different ways. You can attribute the rise of social media, ecommerce, new marketing strategies, and a lot more to this. Gone are the days where you can pitch a cold prospect and get a signed contract by end of the week. Well, maybe that can still happen but it's incredibly rare. Marketers should be actively engaging with their prospects - across a variety of channels - in a way that makes sense for your business and audience. And ABM lets you do that at scale.
   

2. Technology - In the past, it was pretty expensive to scale ABM because it was just a more manual process. It requires a fair amount of personalization and if you want to start targeting thousands of accounts, each with hundreds of employees, you're gonna need a LOT more people and that just doesn't make good business sense. Over the 5 or so years, marketing technology companies have developed innovative ways for companies to target specific companies at scale to improve their return on investment (ROI) and get better leads.

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"How is this different than regular marketing?"

That is an incredible question, my dear reader.

In short, it's not. ABM is just marketing with some added dynamics. I used to think ABM was the end-all-be-all of B2B marketing. But it’s really just another tool in the marketer’s toolbox.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. A company called GumGum (amazing name) wanted to get T-Mobile as a client. So they created this comic book about the company. This works especially well because of how online their former CEO was. He was in the twitter culture moreso than other telcom CEOs so this was a unique approach to get the attention of t-mobile while also building some solid brand awareness.

John Legere @JohnLegere

I love this!! Thank you @GumGum for making this epic comic book about @TMobile. Go #Tman!!! bit.ly/2gCfMOj

So you can get as specific as one single company and create some awesome content for them or target a set of companies with specific messaging and content relevant to those buyer roles.

What ABM Isn’t

(Apologies if this section doesn’t resonate with those who haven’t worked in B2B or haven’t experience this. But it must be said!)

In the last few years, ABM has been co-opted by sales leaders and uninformed CMOs. They’ve turned a legitimate program b2b marketers can implement into “let’s have marketing do outbound sales.”

Here’s what I mean:

“Let’s have marketing be responsible for researching, identifying, contacting, and nurturing cold prospects that fit specific criteria.”

That is literally the job description of a sales development rep.

And when those contacts don’t convert (because marketing has a million other things to focus on and chasing down opportunities is not one of them), more blame and pressure is placed on marketing. It’s a system destined for failure. Marketing should be responsible for equipping sales with the tools to succeed. And that is an iterative process which likely will never end.

If this sounds harsh, I’m sorry. But it’s true.

Gaetano said it beautifully:

ABM is a code for marketers doing sales + a lot of ads. The concept of narrowly targeting a focused set of accounts has been around forever, but vendors needed a clever way to brand their software. They influenced the industry to buy their expensive tools - and the official category of ABM was born to fuel this purpose. It worked.

(Another good post from him on what ABM can devolve into.)

Now, I 99.99% agree with him here. The other .01% is saved for the marketing and sales teams actually working together with common goals and mutual agreements to win specific accounts.

But this is not always the case and in my experience (and it sounds like Gaetano's too) it's getting worse.

How you could structure an ABM campaign

I’m going to run through a very rough example of what this could look like in the real world. I’ll oversimplify a few things but this is the gist.

You’re targeting marketing teams for a new SaaS product. You have a nice list of companies provided by sales. The companies on that list have specific criteria important to sales targets - revenue, employee count, and industry.

You’ve worked with sales to understand all the context around this specific customer segment as well as the buyer roles.

Let’s say there’s 3 key roles you need to consider - end user, decision maker, blocker. Each of these buyer roles could fall into the awareness, considering, or purchasing stage. The role and stage will determine what content they get (that’s where tech can really help).

You’ve identified the strategy and budget of this campaign. The campaign will be structured like this:

• Outbound LinkedIn message to key contacts (executed by sales)

• 5 email sequence positioned as free tool for each of the buyer roles. The email sequence will provide a story and useful information for your target buyers that is contextual to the type of company you are targeting.

Display ads promoting the email sequences. Audience is built off the company list.

Marketing then creates:

• Draft messaging for sales to use in their outreach message (if they’re nice)

• The 5 email sequences

• Ads

• A landing page marketing can promote to contacts in their CRM that fit the company and contact criteria

• Emails tied to promotion of landing page. 1 or 2. And/or inclusion in a newsletter.

I like the use of an email sequence as the offering here because it can really help out sales. Sure, you could just turn that copy into an ebook. And sales will reach out to everyone that downloads. But the leads in this email product could be sorted by level of engagement. So not only does sales have a lead list from those who opted into the sequence, but they can sort it by how engaged they are, unlocking another layer of buyer readiness. And this is just one strategy, wont work for every team.

Anyway, that’s ABM. Or at least the surface of it. It’s a confusing area of marketing for many people and can often put marketing teams in a tough spot. So it’s important for people to understand what it is, the value of it, and what it isn’t. At the end of the day, it comes down to marketing and sales being completely transparent with each other on what they want to accomplish.

Resources for Account-Based Marketing:

• Webinar: timeline for go-to-market success via ABM (Terminus)

• Account-Based Marketing Examples (Integrate)

• How to Implement Account-Based Marketing (PropelGrowth)

  • Their “message map” image really helps bring the concept of ABM to life

• Service-Level Agreements with sales are super important for ABM. Jason Bradwell just wrote a great newsletter about it here