Most Marketers are doing Account Based Marketing wrong

This is a controversial one and ABM has been a bit of a trigger word for me… but please hear me out as it’s important for us to succeed.

It must have been 5+ years ago when I first starting hearing rumbling about Account Base Marketing and how to flips the funnel… and how it better aligns with Sales etc. And like most Marketers, I misunderstood what it was meant to encompass and mean and why it was unique. I thought it’s just personalization with company data. I was WRONG. Even one of the most brilliant marketers I’ve met got it wrong. So I didn’t feel as bad.

What is Account Based Marketing?

Remember “Flip the Funnel”? This was about focusing on a few really big deals and doing highly customized marketing to them. Things that are budget or resource-intensive that can’t be scaled up for general marketing. This could be something like getting a visionary to record a personalized message (script) on a VR device you send that talks to challenges they are having and sets up time with your CEO and CTO, and their executive sponsor to meet in person. You also check your executive team to see if there are connections to any of the leadership at the prospect company for inclusion in the script. A highly personalized experience created through deep research. Obviously, this can’t be done for every prospect but it can be done for those very special deals.

This was the kind of hard to scale budget and resource campaign I understood to be ABM.

What is Account personalization?

If there are tactics that make use of company data that we can be automated or otherwise scaled up for all accounts then we should do it. But those should not be considered ABM. This includes things like automatic creation of landing pages (that pull in prospect logos) or dynamic text that references something about a challenge they are tacking through page scraping, intent data etc. All of these can be scaled up and should be to improve the overall experience of users.

Does the difference matter?

Yes, it absolutely does. Remember why it was being called out as a unique tactic separate from general marketing… we needed new budget/resource for this if we want to land huge deals without taking away from the general marketing design to harvest regular deals. By separating these tactics as their own category, it will have it’s own budget/resources, processes, and reports and insight track how well it does and what course corrections are needed for managing operationally.

If it gets lump all together it makes it hard to know what is working and why needs attention. This loosely relates to attribution and why it’s so important but not easy to do properly. It’s about visibility… The more clearly you see the more accurately you can steer the ship.

Originally published at https://marketingoptimized.wixsite.com on December 20, 2020.