One thing sales and marketing can agree on? ABM works, and here’s how
Account-based marketing (ABM) is hardly new. Its earliest iterations were in the 1990s, as the transition from analog to digital technology put customer data into the hands of marketers. Since then, ABM has continued to evolve, fuelled by the ever-increasing availability of data.
But there’s another reason why interest in ABM strategy has surged over the past few years. We’re living in an era of content fatigue.
The internet is awash with a vast repository of digital content. In 2024, it’s estimated that 402.74 million terabytes of data will be created each day, with 90% of the world’s data generated in the last two years alone.
Your potential customers are overwhelmed and unimpressed by the sheer volume of digital content trying to sell them something in every app they open. It’s no surprise that we’re seeing a global trend of audience engagement decline, diminished content quality, higher unsubscribe/unfollow rates, and falling ROI.
Fortunately, ABM strategy is the antidote to this content fatigue. Marketing and sales teams have realised that by treating individual accounts as markets of one, or a few, and tailoring strategies to them, they can deliver both content cut-through and meaningful business results.
Elevating ABM: Building Blocks for Long-Term Growth | ABX2022F © 2022
Deep curiosity: The secret weapon in ABM
The proliferation of data may be ABM’s origin story, but an effective strategy isn’t just about the numbers—it’s about understanding what truly drives your target accounts.
While data-driven insights into customer behaviour, preferences and engagement history make it easier to reach the right person at the right time, the real secret weapon in ABM strategy is what we call ‘deep curiosity’.
Metrics matter, but they won’t tell you everything you need to know about your audience. So think beyond the data and immerse yourself in the worlds of your target accounts, uncovering everything you can about their goals, successes, failures and, sometimes, even what they eat for breakfast.
That’s how you build an ABM strategy that opens the doors for your sales team.
ABM is a team sport
Speaking of sales, an ABM strategy won’t get off the ground without them. In many ways, sales teams are the masters and commanders of account-based engagement. It’s what they do, day in and day out.
That’s why, when we kick off an ABM campaign (like this one), we start by bringing sales and marketing together to workshop four foundational elements:
1. Establish clear roles and responsibilities
2. Agree on key account selections
3. Share and interrogate account data and intel
4. Develop shared success metrics
Technology can give us more data and metrics than we sometimes know what to do with. It’s sales that so often holds the intel and the untold stories behind the numbers—and that’s what we need to craft messages that make a big impact.
Along with pooling knowledge, another critical step when bringing sales and marketing together is getting clear on roles and responsibilities. Who does what, when and how.
This includes factoring in sales goals every step of the way so that, wherever possible, marketing tactics are married to sales-related success metrics.
Beating content fatigue with the sweet spot
Your target accounts and the people in them are drowning in content, from the time they open social media in the morning to when they send their last email for the day.
But your investment in deep curiosity from the outset of your ABM strategy means that by the time you arrive at developing your messaging, there’s no question about who you’re talking to and what you need to say to capture their attention.
• You know the industry you’re speaking to and what unifies the businesses within it.
• You know your target accounts, and you group them by their pain points.
• Within your account groups, you know the target personas you need to speak to.
The result is messaging that’s tailored to speak directly to the unique needs and interests of your target audiences. Not one industry. Not the businesses. But the varied and complex people inside them. The decision-makers you need to move with the right message at the right time.
The messaging approach we come back to again and again is ‘The Sweet Spot’—the intersection between what you have the authority to say, what you want to get across, what your competitors aren’t doing and what your audience wants to hear.
Applied to each of your personas, it will help you strike a balance between your business objectives and what your audience cares about. It’s the antidote to content fatigue.
Going the distance together
Sales and marketing must be aligned from the start to ensure ABM success. And they need to stay aligned, too.
As you take your key messages and develop them into a phased channel plan that coordinates the path from awareness to engagement to conversion, it’s important to understand how sales and marketing will work together to walk decision-makers along that journey.
Once implementation begins, you’ll return to your shared success metrics and measure how you’re progressing against short- and longer-term goals. You’ll collaborate with the sales team to gather their frontline feedback on how marketing KPIs are feeding into commercial conversations. And you’ll refine your strategy and optimise outcomes along the way.
From start to finish, ABM is a team sport. While sales and marketing teams may often speak very different languages, there’s one thing they agree on: done right, ABM works.
