Account Based Marketing/Selling—“Account Based Everything” is all the rage right now. Some very smart colleagues, including Craig Rosenberg and Matt Heinz are real leaders in helping organizations develop and implement their Account Based Marketing Strategies.
But despite all that I read, I’m really confused. Perhaps you can set me straight.
- Target the right accounts. I understand that we want to identify and target the right accounts. These seem to be the accounts that have the problems that we are expert at solving with our products and solutions.
- Target the right people within the accounts (personas). I’ve learned that we have to identify the people in our accounts that have these problems or are most concerned about these problems. For example, if I sell financial systems, I’d obviously target CFO’s, controllers, treasurers. I’d probably not have the CMO or VP of Manufacturing as a target persona.
- Understand their strategies and priorities as a company, within their organization, and their personal drivers. We need to tailor or personalize our communications–marketing/selling–to be specific and relevant to what their companies are trying to achieve, what their function is trying to achieve, and what they (or similar personas) are trying to achieve. For example, I probably wouldn’t try going to a food processing company and talk about how my semiconductor wafer processing system would be helpful to them (even though food processing companies may be making wafers of a different type—sorry, it’s that perverse humor that I can’t restrain).
- Tune everything we do in our marketing programs and sales approaches to 1,2, and 3, being as specific and focused as we can to the account. As an example, I’d have slightly different messaging, communications, and engagement strategies to two different food processing companies.
I know there is a lot more to it, but at a high level that’s my understanding of Account Based Marketing/Selling.
Now here’s where I’m confused, Isn’t this what we should be seeking to do with 100% of our communications and engagement strategies and everyone we are reaching out to?
Aren’t we supposed to be tailoring everything we do, as much as we possibly can to the needs, priorities, business drivers, concerns of the people we are trying to reach?
See, I think I get account marketing/selling–it’s really about personalization and relevance, all the time.
Perhaps, I’m really confused about all our other marketing efforts. I thought that personalization and relevance is what modern marketing is all about. We certainly have the tools and capabilities to slice and dice our lists in innumerable ways, by industry, company size, location, business drivers, persona, past engagement, business maturity, recent changes, and on and on and on. While we may not know specific strategies and priorities, through these tools, complemented by analytics, we can make some very informed guesses to more closely tailor what we communicate and how we engage these people.
It may not be quite as personalized and tailored as an account based approach (e.g. “We saw your market cap plunge by 17.25% on November 10, we can help you…..”), but the tools and technologies enable us to get reasonably close, (e.g. CFO’s in food service are saying these are the most critical issues…. obviously sending these to CFO’s in food service companies and not semiconductor companies).
But the implication in the excitement around Account Based Marketing/Selling, is that our other marketing programs aren’t doing this. Our other marketing programs aren’t segmenting and tailoring their messages, they aren’t focused on relevance.
Now the light bulb is going off in my head. Perhaps this explains the dozens of meaningless, irrelevant, unfocused messages that fill my Inbox everyday. Perhaps, that explains 95% of the phone calls that I now ignore.
It turns out Account Based Marketing/Selling is a movement to do what Marketing has the capability of doing already, but simply isn’t.
Maybe all our sales and marketing would be much more effective if we simply apply Account Based Marketing/Selling principles to everything we do.
Yeah, I know I’m overstating it a little, but not by much.
Am I missing something?
This is code for micro-segmentation, focused effort and resources enabled by systems like Salesforce, ‘personalized communication’, and very little more. Nothing particularly new here.
Michael: I don’t disagree, the principles go back decades. But the issue is, why isn’t it done? There are hundreds of technologies enabling this, there are hundreds/thousands of best practices articles outlining this, it is what our customer feed back to us.
Yet, while we have the knowledge and capability, It simply isn’t done.
Well there is a bit more to it: like multi-contact, multi-channel account targeting. I was recently a victim of it.
A few weeks ago I got an email from our receptionist informing me there was a package waiting for me.. As I picked the package I saw there was one for every VP and every director in marketing.
An ‘ABM’ vendor, interested in doing business with our company. It was an ABM playbook with a nice aluminum coffee mug. The booklet promised incredible open rates and great success.
The next day I got an email, to be followed by a voice mail, a LinkedIn message, a tweet, and then another email.
Today, many marketers seek success through brute force. ABM is like the blitzkrieg.
I have no desire to do business with this company. They proved how bad their flavor of ABM is.
Hi David, I would suspect that your answer lies in the way things get measured/managed. As long as quantity of opportunities trumps quality doing what is known for ages takes too long. So there will not be enough opportunities in the pipeline although the ones in there should have a far higher likelihood of conversion …
@Gerardo – the approach the vendor used on your business is likely the exact opposite of ABM. Sounds like an ordinary mass approach to me – all guns blazing. Not even anything social about it …
2 ct from Down Under
Thomas
@twieberneit
Thomas, I tend to agree, too often we measure and reward the wrong things. Ironically, all the research indicates increased personalization, more effective targeting, more relevant messaging produces far better engagement and results. One would think people would pay attention to this, doing more thing right, than driving for quantity, etc.