Feature: Two CMOs talk ABM

Two CMOs talk ABM

Alice De Courcy, CMO of Cognism, one of the leading Sales Intelligence platforms, sat down recently with our very own CMO, Declan Mulkeen to talk all things ABM - its past, its present and its future.

There is no denying that working for an ABM Agency gives us a unique window into the world of Account-based Marketing.

Working with clients across a multitude of industries - from MarTech to FinTech, from CyberTech, to HRTech, and with different levels of ABM maturity means we get to see ABM in action - in real life and not in a laboratory.

We get to see what works. We get to see what really moves the dial.

We’re all about sharing so here’s a download of two CMOs talking all things ABM.

Alice started at the top - What is ABM?

This question is a simple but important one as the answer varies greatly depending on who you ask.

There are plenty of voices in the world of B2B marketing and ABM who have their own opinion and definition for ABM - but here’s our stance on all things ABM:

A back to 2003 - ABM in its purest sense is strategy that treats an account, or a cluster of accounts, as a market of one.

Another way to think about ABM is that it is a means of looking at one account or a group of accounts that have similarities, for example, business challenges, they belong to the same vertical, etc.

ABM as a strategy is a highly personalized strategy where you harness data, insights, and technology to build a unique account experience to develop relationships, build a reputation, and ultimately to drive revenue.

Road test your ABM strategy with our ABM Lunch & Learn

A There are certain criteria you can use to determine whether ABM is a good fit for your business, for example:

So typically, if you are selling a high-value item into an organization, a complex software solution or cloud infrastructure or cybersecurity, etc., undoubtedly you're going to be talking to many people in the organization within the I.T team, within the Procurement team, very often in the C-suite - right up to the CEO.

So you need to be able to influence multiple groups of people, what we tend to call a buying committee.

Conversely, you're not ready for ABM if:

A Firstly, the advice we say to everyone is to start small. Very often we say to clients that the best way to move forward with their ABM program and ABM strategy is to select a very limited number of accounts.

Secondly, it’s important to select the right ABM program based on your objectives and resources.

One-to-many

One-to-many - typically this program is used to target a relatively large number of accounts, which can be in the dozens or hundreds, or even thousands.

Personalization at this level is very light touch. It's basically trying to put a message into a set of accounts that meet your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), with the goal of raising brand and proposition awareness.

One-to-few

At this level, you take a select number of accounts. We suggest taking 15-20 accounts that warrant that extra level of investment, per quarter, and enrolling them into a One-to-few program.

For this program, the level of personalization increases. We would typically suggest upping the level of personalization to around 15 to 20% for a cluster of accounts.

So whereas the One-to-many is much more around the value proposition and what that value proposition means to that vertical or challenge, the One-to-few is where you're personalizing much more to the individual account and to the level of 15-20%, so the account is seeing something which is relevant to them.

One-to-one

This is where you're going for full-scale personalization to one or a handful of accounts. It’s a far more advanced play and it's something that we would not recommend to clients to engage in as a first step into ABM.

We would recommend that clients start with what we typically call a Blended ABM program; combining a One-to-many, ‘always on’ campaign, and then choose a number of accounts from that Total Addressable Market (TAM) for a more personalized One-to-few program.

This way you're starting to drive a lot more engagement, whilst looking for those sales triggers.

Looking for when they are exhibiting some level of intent, some level of engagement with your brand, some level of engagement with the content that you're pushing out there.

And then you can bring together your Marketing team, your Sales team, your outreach, and build a cadence of engagement with the accounts.

A Discussion: Is ABM just good B2B marketing?

ALICE

There's a lot of chatter about it - I think a lot of people are like, “Oh, we're doing ABM”, But actually they're not really doing ABM.

DECLAN

Over the course of the last five, six, seven years there have been many companies that have launched themselves into the ABM world.

And very often when we ask prospects and the wider community about their ABM programs they may say “I'm running some LinkedIn ads.” And that's their definition of ABM.

Or they may say, “Yeah, we do ABM”. And we dig a little bit deeper and ask more questions, and they say, “well, we're running direct mail”.

Those are tactics that can form part of an ABM strategy, but they're just tactics. I think what's happening is people are grappling with the concept of ABM and trying to understand it.

They're picking certain elements that can often form part of a wider ABM strategy. But I think they're missing the much deeper and bigger picture that ABM is for us and our clients. It is very much a strategic pivot for the whole organization.

ALICE

It goes back to that whole point of some people thinking ABM is just good B2B marketing. Well, it's not, but it depends if you're actually doing proper ABM.

But because of this, people are more aware of how we should be marketing regardless of whether your deal size is under $40,000.

So using more personalization, looking at accounts, and focusing your targeting better through multiple channels.

And so they think they're doing ABM, but they're actually just doing better B2B marketing, which is a good thing, right?

DECLAN

I think the difference between B2B Demand Gen and ABM is that as a Marketing team you can do a great Demand Gen porgram almost on your own.

But ABM requires many actors to be involved - there are so many roles involved in it, and it touches many parts of our organization.

The movement now from ABM through to what some people define as ‘Account-based Experience’ or ‘Account-based Engagement’, or what we often refer to as ‘Account-based Everything’ - is when you see it actually being much more pervasive and penetrating the entire organization.

A ABM is a resource-heavy strategy in terms of all the moving parts. There is a lot of orchestration to be done and companies don’t always have the people to deliver this strategy.

We often find that the Marketing teams we work with are able to pull on different parts of the Marketing organization, whether it's Design teams, whether it's Operations teams, whether it's their Content Marketing teams.

They're able to pull resources from within their wider organization to actually help to orchestrate those various elements.

We also find that although our clients may not have anybody who's an ABM specialist within the company, over the course of working with ourselves over 12 -18 months, very often somebody becomes identified as the ABM champion within the team, and ultimately then becomes that ABM Manager or ABM Director.

It’s like an evolution that happens very often within the Marketing department that the team or individuals go through the training with ourselves to build a level of expertize and domain authority.

A We often talk about ABM being a journey - it's a marathon and not a sprint. And often people might rush some of the foundational elements of that journey because they need to desperately get to campaign.

And obviously, as Marketers, we’re always under pressure to get to campaign.

We're always under pressure from the wider organization to get results as soon as possible, to show we’re moving the dial. The issue with ABM is there is a fair amount of foundational work to be done first.

And that's one of the places where we see companies perhaps not getting ABM right from the beginning.

Road test your ABM strategy

The three most common mistakes we see are:

1. ICP Development

Not working hard enough on building your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and truly understanding who your ideal customer is, is a common issue.

ICP development is a collaborative approach where Marketing needs to work very closely with Sales, but also ask some questions higher up and engaging with forward-thinking C-suite.

Asking questions like ‘where are we heading with our clients?’

‘What kind of clients are we looking to onboard?’.

2. Account Selection

We also see companies go wrong in how they're selecting accounts. Very often there isn't enough thought process in terms of how the accounts are being selected.

It could be the accounts have been handed down from above, or the Sales team have identified, or to be honest, a list has been cobbled together by a group of people and it's like a list of some really nice logos.

This type of account selection is likely based on a feeling that these are interesting companies, but there isn't enough (or any) science or data behind the account selection.

So we work really hard with clients on the whole account selection process. In terms of building your Total Addressable Market (TAM), working out which accounts within that TAM you should be going after.

And then once you've done the theory process, then you've got to prioritize those accounts.

3. Sales Alignment

And then the classic one, particularly from an ABM point of view, is the relationship between Sales and Marketing.

ABM is just good marketing without Sales alignment.

If you have that sales alignment, your ABM will succeed and without it, it won't succeed or it won't be as effective.

Our discovery calls and ABM Lunch and Learn workshops sessions - here we bring Marketing and Sales teams together to talk about what they're trying to achieve.

We try to make sure that Sales is in from the very beginning because if Sales is on board from the beginning, you're going to have success.

So I think those three things are definitely where I'd say companies should look very closely.

A Part of the problem is that the traditional relationship between Sales and Marketing departments can be quite siloed.

ABM is a strategic pivot for an organization. So the way we recommend our clients to talk about ABM internally is to refer to it as an Account-based strategy

Account-based Marketing is probably the greatest unifier that exists between Sales and Marketing because you are unifying around a group of named accounts.

So once you tell Sales, “hey, guys, we're going to help you work on these accounts and we're going to do

everything in our power to get these accounts to move through the different deal stages and in order to obviously convert, to win, to grow or to retain those accounts that you're working on”, that then makes Sales pick up their ears.

And they actually say “you know what, you guys are actually now finally speaking our language.”

You're no longer coming to us with MQLs and SQLs and all these other Marketing acronyms that we've created over the years, that haven't really done us any favors.

So I would urge Marketing leaders when they're talking to their Sales colleagues to actually use the same language that Sales use.