WTF is ABM?

Disclaimer: I’m mostly writing this post because I thought the title was hilarious. Please feel free to click away if you disagree.
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Certain buzzwords in marketing are so overused that they eventually transcend to a level of jargon that makes even the most jargon-y of marketers question its meaning. And to be honest, “account-based marketing” (ABM) is slowly rising to that same rank of vagueness also occupied by terms like “thought leadership” or “dynamic content.” As Blades of Glory so eloquently puts it … ​

In other words, ABM gets the marketers going.

Will Ferrell/Kanye West jokes aside, Emplify is in the process of transitioning to an account-based marketing model. Through this process, I’ve learned that ABM truly means something different to every marketer I’ve talked to. And I think that’s okay.

Like Agile, ABM brings certain principles that need to be modified and adapted for every team and their demand generation needs. In the process of building an account-based marketing strategy for Emplify, I thought I would share some of my interpretations of what this phrase means for marketers, as well as some common misconceptions I’ve encountered as well.

But first, what actually is account-based marketing?

​According to Marketo, ABM is defined as:

“an alternative B2B strategy that concentrates sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined set of target accounts within a market and employs personalized campaigns designed to resonate with each account.”

Essentially, account-based marketing is a cohesive marketing and sales effort to convert a select group of accounts (usually called ICP or “ideal client profile” accounts) using customized, multi-channel methods like remarketing, direct mail, and call/email cadences.

And when executed well, account-based marketing can demolish your demand gen goals. According to the Altera Group, 97% of marketers said that ABM had higher or much higher ROI than previous marketing initiatives.

But beyond value and definition, account-based marketing can still be a vastly overwhelming concept to apply to daily planning and operations. In conversations with fellow (genius) marketers in the Indy area and through our own trial and error at Emplify, here are a few early definitions I’ve realized during our transition to ABM.  

What ABM is:

• Highly curated. Every step of the account-based marketing process, from selecting accounts to planning plays (a series of multi-channel touches to your target accounts) should be extremely intentional and involve all stakeholders. This will help create more cohesive messaging and activities throughout the entire sales funnel. For example, if your director of product marketing selects your list of target accounts based on your top industries and buyer personas, those decisions will then inform the types of landing pages created, titles to target within those companies, or ad copy for Terminus campaigns. (Side note: check out Terminus. They’re a genius account-based advertising platform.)  
  
  
• A team-wide effort. When your team is hyper-focused on converting a select list of target accounts, everyone on the team--and I mean everyone-- should be committed to getting those companies to sign on the dotted line. Seriously, I’ve heard stories of CEOs showing up at a company’s doorstep with free pizza in an attempt to close a deal. Your entire team should know these accounts by name and be obsessively dialed in to winning them together. Not only does this help you focus on high-value accounts, but it helps everyone feel like they played a role in the success of a new customer.
  
  
• Expensive. When you’ve got a high level of commitment to closing a deal, the stakes can get pricey. Not only are you spending sales and marketing overhead on calling multiple contacts at the company, writing customized marketing messaging, and sending your CEO to Papa John's for surprise deliveries, but you’re layering that onto the existing costs of remarketing, sending direct mailers to multiple stakeholders at the company, and sometimes even targeting accounts at field events or other in-person meetings. It’s imperative that you adapt your demand gen model to forecast higher contract rates with ABM and that you intentionally select larger accounts to offset these costs.

What ABM isn’t:

• Direct mail. Or ads. Or a really good landing page. ABM can certainly incorporate these things into an orchestrated experience for an account, but account-based marketing goes beyond running ads or sending a really cool direct mail piece. Creating a truly account-based marketing strategy requires a complete understanding of your target company and their pain points, and deciding the best mediums to prove that you will help solve their pain. There’s no checklist for becoming an account-based marketer. There are excellent SaaS tools and resources to help you build an ABM strategy for your company, but it ultimately needs to be tailored to your company’s unique target market and pipeline trends.
  
  
• An overnight transition. Emplify kicked off ABM for our entire sales team at the beginning of October. It’s taken us four weeks of trial-and-error just to build the right Salesforce reports to monitor our successes and failures. Changing your entire sales and marketing team’s strategic focus is something that takes time, and variables like team size and years of practicing old tactics can increase that time even more. The first few weeks were extremely challenging for our team, but we’re quickly seeing wins like fewer no-shows to meetings or higher connect-SQL rates that are proving ABM’s value and increasing our persistence.
  
  
• A replacement for failing channels. If your marketing team operates like ours has at Emplify, you often track marketing performance through a series of channels, like paid search or events. If one channel is underperforming, you cut funding from it and funnel the spend to a higher-return channel. With ABM, underperforming channels can be a creative challenge to rework your strategy or messaging to create better brand awareness among your target accounts using that medium. You need all of of your brand touchpoints to be at peak performance so that you maximize your chances of ICPs interacting with your brand.

I’ve read approximately 37 blog posts, perused 13 e-books, and attended at least 3 webinars about ABM, and I can still understand why some marketers may be scratching their heads about what it actually means. Hopefully my post provides a bit of clarity around the subject from my experience so far.

Account-based marketing experts, I’d love to hear about what I got right (and what I got wrong!) and I’d love to hear additional questions that fellow marketers are having about ABM applications. Please leave a comment below!