- March 21, 2022
- ABM, Objective Data
ABM’s observations and learnings from the 2022 B2B Marketing Exchange
I just came from B2BMX in Scottsdale, the first face-to-face event I attended in exactly two years. With so many topics covered, this huge festival of B2B practices provided a great opportunity to see how far account-based marketing (ABM) has come in the past 24 months. Whether 1: 1, 1: Few, or 1: Many, ABM is clearly here to stay – because it works! For mature marketing and sales teams, this has been a great way of focusing GTM team strength on achieving significant revenue growth from specifically targeted accounts.
In B2BMX, I had to take a deep dive with practitioner-leaders from ServiceNow, Google Cloud, Snowflake, Talkdesk and more as they outlined how they revitalized their ABM strategies. In all leaders, apart from the core systems, there is a huge variety of software solutions that are brought to the tactical support of their programs. But aside from the software, two essential elements for success that are common to all players really jumped at me.
ABM Foundational Requirement #1 – Insight: Performance depends on it everywhere
First and most critical of these is a very high quality data set that they use to guide the content and action priorities of the many players involved. Better data is clearly a critical capability for these teams as it creates the launch pad where they then create their unique value giving life to ABM’s go-to-market strategy. For all of this team, the insights drive optimization in planning, targeting, positioning, messaging, outreach and more.
Beyond cleanliness, better access to actual behavior
To populate the basics within their ABM list and keep it up to date, they rely on a range of reliable firmographic, technographic and demographic sources combined with essential hygiene techniques that work seamlessly in the background. What I found very different from where the practices were a few years ago is how focused these groups have been on understanding the habits of their audiences-signs of their purpose-both through of tracking their target market in general, and of course, in response to their own 1st-party marketing and sales activity. This is about the whole Intent Data revolution.
Understanding your markets, customers and prospects
The success these groups are seeing depends on these superb abilities to understand the needs of the target account both for prioritization at the moment and to guide account engagement efforts more. long time in their programs. From Carrie Feord of ServiceNow, I got a very good term that covers it: Their “Imperative-Based Messaging” is built by first deep understanding of what accounts need to be done [to improve their own performance] in the next 12-18 months. The ABM team then oversees how that knowledge becomes content that clearly explains how ServiceNow can help. To fulfill the promise of this approach, the ABM team must then collaborate with all implementation elements within the go-to-market organization to ensure timely, relevant delivery. It’s better personalization, and really, better CX, truly operationalized! And if there is no better data, it will not be achieved.
ABM Foundational Requirement #2-Integration: End-to-end thinking, from start-up to scale-up
The second critical factor of ABM’s success demonstrated by these four companies is about the evolving nature of the ABM team’s contribution to GTM’s target account organization as a whole. In the session I hosted at Talkdesk’s Mervyn Alamgir, she went into very prescriptive detail on developing their account engagement, demand identification and capture engine. The study embedded a deep awareness of his team’s role in serving the goals of other colleagues. The success of the program as a whole requires that his team carefully consider the relationships and dependencies between the various elements of GTM. From the outset, Mervyn was critical of the need to help boost sales revenue in the near term-if there is no revenue to fuel continued momentum, growth can easily be halted. Based on experience, he knew this was an area where Prospect-Level Intent ™ data could deliver immediate impact, so he incorporated that into his launch of the data infrastructure as a foundational building block.
Enable GTM -wide effectiveness
Forrester’s Barry Vasudevan has been extremely helpful in detailing the need for what he calls better ‘enablement’ at many points in the GTM organizational value chain – and it has been crystal clear for me what I hear about ABM practitioners who mentioned above. Primarily, ABM’s advanced teams are about enabling the various functional members of the GTM organization to do their parts more accurately. With these teams, their vision goes beyond ABM’s generic cries for better alignment in sales and marketing. These are well -oiled machines with a target account list and an ABM team in the middle, along with many other coherent elements working on the concert. Instead of trying to be the muscle executors of an ABM automation effort separate from their company’s other resources, these groups have become more like the brain and nervous system: They focus on interpreting they see and then communicate that in a highly compelling way to more members of the GTM implementation and capability team. Although some have added fairly specific tools to fill in functional gaps, that seems to be a relatively small feature within their overall success. Based on critical data and elements of insight, success here seems to come largely from how an ABM team supports and guides the entire GTM ecosystem to be compatible with the needs of the prospect and customer.
People and process first
Earlier in my career, and importantly, in my time at some very large, well -resourced organizations, I learned that until my teams and my processes became better, the last thing I needed was more technology. (we certainly have a lot of technology.!). Beyond the basics, this may be more true for smaller stores. If a sub-group within the team is having difficulty understanding the market or our target accounts, we have done nothing executionally that has delivered an impact on the results we all seek. Over the years in the business, I’ve learned the hard way that entering more tech at the wrong time can easily create disastrous drag, as it distracts and dilutes the team’s focus on higher efficiency issues. . With all the feature/function research out there from the technology analyst community, it’s very easy for team members to get caught up in some sort of tech stack arms race. Envy of the tool can be very real and can blind you to your most serious gaps. My own recent experience with B2BMX has once again served to underline how important having this perspective is to any leader seeking long-term growth. All the technology in the world is probably not what your team needs to move faster towards what these ABM leaders are currently doing.
How can we help
Here at TechTarget, these types of observations reinforce our relentless focus on delivering the best in enterprise tech buyer insight from our opt-in audience of approximately 30 million members. Based on our data core intent, we deliver a wide range of service capabilities that help solve the most important GTM challenges. Like those ABM teams I described, we work with thousands of tech companies end-to-end-strategically, from product concept to marketable content, and to implementation, from click until closing. To learn more about how we can support your ABM evolution, speak with a TechTarget representative today.
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