Account-Based Marketing

How to Target and Engage the Companies That Will Grow Your Revenue

Chris Golec, Peter Isaacson, Jessica Fewless

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119572008
• eBook ISBN: 9781119572022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Account-Based Marketing is changing the discipline of marketing—Why?

Business-to-business (B2B) companies spend $40 Billion on marketing each year, and they embrace tech-driven innovations, yet the traditional model for lead generation has not changed for decades. Why? In addition to the techniques being outdated, they create friction and distrust between marketing and sales teams. ABM has quickly gained traction with leading B2B companies because it aligns sales and marketing teams around the accounts that will have the most business impact. Instead of chasing a large volume of lower-quality, generic leads, ABM helps sales and marketing professionals coordinate their efforts against a specific set of target accounts.

Despite the clear advantages of ABM, there continues to be much confusion around just how to implement it. Written by the leaders behind the successful marketing firm Demandbase, Account-Based Marketing explains how to execute a world-class ABM strategy from start to finish.

• Find out exactly how highly successful B2B companies are using Account-Based Marketing to grow their customer base
• Develop an effective strategy to adapt ABM principles for your own organization with its own unique needs
• Integrate your sales and marketing processes into an efficient, cohesive workflow
• Locate and attract the ideal clients for your business to increase revenue and open up new opportunities

From building the right target account list and understanding the impact of ABM on marketing programs, to selling ABM within an organization and finding budget for the strategy, you'll find it all in this authoritative guide.

1
The Sweet Spot:

Why Now Is a Better Time to Try ABM Instead of Five Years Ago or Five Years from Now

Crystal balls are silly, right? We all know that it’s impossible to predict the future. Take the stock market for example: if someone could predict its movements, that person could retire in a day and be a billionaire in a month. It’s also impossible to predict other short-term events like who will win the Super Bowl, or be next year’s pop music sensation.

Even so, accurate crystal balls do exist—if you know how to look at the right things. For example, demographics are highly predictable: we can confidently forecast the median age of a country’s population even 10 or 20 years from now.

Another clear trend: one by one, industries are being transformed by technology. Some industries benefit sooner than others. Technology has allowed the 140-year-old telephone to become infinitely more useful as a smartphone. Farming has gone from the iron plow to GPS-mapped fields that get precise amounts of fertilizers every few feet in order to maximize crop yields.

This book is about another trend we can confidently predict: it’s the turn of business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales to benefit from the technology revolution. We are at the early stages of an astonishing transformation in B2B marketing, made possible by data science, and aided by cheaper computing power and storage, as we’ll discuss later. Companies that recognize these elements coming together will be positioned to lead their industries in reputation, relationships, and revenue. Their competitors who are late to the party will wonder what happened.

Just as recognizing trends too late can mean that all you get are the crumbs, it’s also possible to adopt technology too early: the first attempts at applying technology can be buggy, time consuming, and frustrating. It can be enough to put you off the whole idea unless you’re willing at first to take one step back for every two steps forward.

This book is also about how right now, we’re at the sweet spot where mature technology meets B2B marketing: we’re far enough along that the technology has been tested, refined, and proven. Yet we’re early enough in the revolution that most industries have not yet been dominated by companies that recognize the sweet spot, act on it, and have become the leaders. That’s the opportunity before you right now.

To be more specific, the opportunity relates to Account-Based Marketing, or ABM. In the pages to come we’ll become intimately familiar with the workings of ABM, but for now let’s use this definition:

• Account-Based Marketing enables marketers to identify and target the accounts they value most. Accounts can be segmented in many ways, like prospect or customer. That’s not new. What’s new is this: among other capabilities, ABM allows you to personalize the marketing experience to your target accounts before they ever identify themselves to you. And you can scale it to 30, 300, or 3,000 accounts to support your business objectives.

“In your dreams,” you say? “Pie in the sky,” you say? No. ABM is a tested and proven approach that gives you insights into what your prospects are thinking and doing. In a sales environment in which business is won or lost on slim margins, ABM enables you to enjoy a substantial advantage over your competitors who are likely doing business the way their parents and grandparents did it.

Is This Book for You?

At this point, you may be asking yourself a reasonable question: “Chris, Peter, and Jessica wrote this book, they work at Demandbase, and they offer ABM-related solutions. Is this book going to be one long sales pitch for their stuff?”

Relax. There are a lot of great ABM technologies out there today, with more on the way. That’s what makes ABM such a vibrant category. But this book does not focus on any single vendor or any single technology. We intend to answer the following questions:

• What exactly is ABM, and how is it different from the way marketing was done in the past?
• What companies are right for ABM and what ones are not? (Because nothing is right for everyone.)
• How can I determine if ABM will work in my company? (It needs to be done in such a way that you don’t spend a ton of time and money before you know the answer.)
• What are best practices and also pitfalls to avoid so as to maximize the contribution of ABM to our bottom line?

Our guess is that you’ve been around the block a few times when it comes to witnessing fads that come and go in business. You have a healthy skepticism about something you’re told has the potential to make a big difference in your revenues. It’s not that you’re cynical that nothing will work—you just need proof and details before taking the next step.

Our further guess is that you’re in the marketing department of a B2B business, given that the book title is about account-based marketing, and not selling directly to consumers. If you happen to be in sales, you will also get a great deal from this book: you’ll love how we advocate a different approach for marketing, getting away from delivering volumes of leads that you have no interest in pursuing, to working with you to generate interest from the accounts you actually care about.

If we’re even partly right about your situation, then you’re in for a treat: we will show you a smarter way to attract and persuade the customers you most want to close and win.

Now let’s look at why ABM is such a fundamental improvement on the inefficiencies that make up much of traditional marketing.

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Fujitsu on ABM:

“We’ve proven that ABM is a successful part of what we do in marketing. Without ABM we’d be struggling to achieve our KPIs. So ABM is kind of a hero.”

—Head of Account-Based and Deal-Based Marketing, EMEIA Fujitsu

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What Would a World-Class Marketing Strategy Include?

In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey calls one of those habits “Begin with the end in mind.”¹ Let’s consider that approach and try to answer the following question: “If we were designing a zero-waste, world-class marketing system, what would it look like?” Here’s our take on how we would define the characteristics of such a system—and the degree to which ABM meets those characteristics:

1. You don’t waste efforts on people who are not available or qualified to buy what you have to offer. Some leads may be qualified but currently locked into multiyear contracts. Then again, someone may be typing in the keywords you’re targeting and paying for in your pay-per-click campaign, and this person is merely writing a research paper in college. Either way, you would save time and money if you could filter out such leads.
   ABM allows you to do just that. Sure, anybody can come to your website or stroll up to your booth at an event. Some of those visitors may even end up buying from you. But in terms of your outbound efforts, ABM focuses your resources on your target accounts.
2. Down the road after you implement both ABM strategy and technology, you will be able to detect the earliest stages when qualified and available prospects are not just surfing, but are in the market for a solution. Imagine how great it would be to engage with prospects at just the right time in the buying journey: they’re not merely casually browsing, but seem to be on the hunt for solutions. At the same time, you want to be able to know when they’re not so far along that their minds are made up.
   As you’ll see later in this book, technology deployed to support an ABM strategy gives you the ability to gauge where your target accounts are in their buying journey, and what it is that they’re focused on buying. This allows you not to waste messages that are mismatched with the mindset of those target accounts.
3. You will be able to deliver a personalized message to target accounts, even before they ever fill out a form on your site and give you any personal details. For years the best you could hope for on your site was to get people to fill out your form in exchange for a white paper, webinar, or other piece of content. That can work okay except for the people who’ve been burned by filling out a form, because they were hounded afterward. They will not complete the form, or they’ll use bogus details and a throwaway email address.
   With ABM, you can not only serve up a page that’s customized to target accounts when they visit your site, but you have the luxury of deciding the extent of that personalization. Highly relevant messages served with pinpoint accuracy enable you to avoid a lot of generalized, semi-effective messaging.
4. Marketing and Sales are in sync so that Marketing delivers the kind of leads that Sales wants. Have you ever delivered leads to Sales, only to find out that they didn’t follow through on them? Yeah, we know the feeling. What if we told you that a world does exist in which the kind of leads you deliver are just the kind that Sales wants?
   When an ABM strategy is working properly, that’s precisely what happens. We said, “Working properly” because sometimes people think they’re following ABM when in fact they’re misapplying it or only partly applying it. We’ll get into this in much more detail later. We’ll also give you many real-world cases of ABM facilitating Marketing and Sales to work together and not at cross-purposes.
5. Marketing’s budget is calibrated so that as leads get closer to becoming revenue, more dollars are spent on them. It’s always been the case that a few choice prospects wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• 1 The Sweet Spot:
• 2 Building Blocks:
• 3 Getting Buy-In:
• 4 Your Target Account List:
• 5 Attracting Your Target Accounts:
• 6 Boosting Engagement:
• 7 Converting and Closing:
• 8 Measuring What Matters:
• 9 Scaling Your ABM Efforts:
• 10 Enhancing ABM with Technology:
• 11 Guiding ABM Ever Higher:
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• End User License Agreement