TLDR:
MarketingProfs invited Samantha Stone, business owner and author, to talk shop about ABM. As a marketing strategy, it’s more than the technology and targeting capabilities that make it work. But in order for ABM to function the way it should, marketers need to ask themselves a few questions about their organization because alignment is hard. To get that alignment, marketers need to seek third-party data vendors. This will make it easier to sell marketers’ companies on ABM.
ABM has been out awhile now, It’s hard to miss. Simply put, ABM is a focused approach in which marketing and sales work together to target strategic accounts in order to turn them from prospects to customers. But to further illustrate what ABM actually is, MarketingProfs invited business owner and author, Samatha Stone, to elaborate further on the subject.
According to Stone, many marketers don’t understand ABM the way it should be. Instead, those marketers try to apply the same tactics that worked for them in the past and force that methodology onto their ABM strategy. The result? Bad news.
ABM, though, is doing all of those same processes being forced on it, but it’s doing them in a different way.
Many organizations don’t have the resources to convert to a strict ABM diet, and that’s okay. ABM is an agile strategy that can also be used effectively in conjunction with other marketing and sales functions, such as inbound marketing and outbound sales.
To get started with an ABM strategy, marketers need to honestly ask themselves five questions about their organizations:
- How many people are involved in the buy?
- What is the length of the buy?
- How complex is the organization’s messaging?
- What changes will need to be made?
- How well-identified is the target market?
If marketers answer these questions, they’ll have done half the job. The other half—alignment—is much trickier. That’s why agreements on what the shared objectives are made to begin with.
Before diving into ABM, though, it is vital importance that marketing and sales know who the customer (or customers) is. That often means looking at first-party data. But internal data is good for giving marketing and sales a close-up picture of the customer. Third-party data allows marketing and sales to get a better overall view.
Sometimes, to make ABM work, marketing and sales need information from all avenues. It makes the case for marketers that need to sell companies on the idea of ABM.
Original article from MarketingProfs on 23 May 2019.
