account based marketing: a look around the corner

2017 Report

February 2017

Account-Based MarketingA Look Around the Corner

In partnership with:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Speakers

Overview

Introduction

Points of View

Closing Remarks

EXPERT SPEAKERS

Mark Ogne – Founder of The ABM Consortium & CMO of ZenIQ@markogne / @AcctBasedMktg / www.AccountBased.Marketing

James Regan - Co-Founder & CMO of MRP@jamesregan1 / www.mrpfd.com

Stephanie Kidder - CMO of Azalead@stephaniekidder / www.azalead.com

Srihari Kumar - Founder & CEO of ZenIQ@SrihariSKumar / @GetZenIQ / www.zeniq.io

Christopher Engman - Founder and Head of Vendemore@chrisengman / www.vendemore.com

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OVERVIEW

So, what does 2017 have in store for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) practitioners?

In 2013 and 2014 marketers began adoption and testing of the practice. The hype surrounding the market was near deafening but a lot of fun. During 2015 and 2016 we saw ABM practitioners beginning to craft and adopt best practices. What’s around the corner for ABM?

During Q4 2016 Demand Metric connected The Account-Based Marketing Consortium and five C-Level executives in a live discussion. These experts from around the world applied their combined experience to explore what the next stage of ABM will look like. This report will identify and discuss the positions of these ABM experts and will share answers to the following key questions:

• What are the areas of focus in 2017?

• Where should practitioners place their investments?• What mistakes of the past can we learn from?

• And, what successes should we seek to scale?

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OVERVIEW - Key Takeaways

Our experts identified the following three key issues as areas where ABM practitioners should prioritize resources in their programs during 2017:

1. ABM practitioners need to target key people within accounts – there are a limited number of people at any target account who can actually influence or purchase. This is a signal vs noise issue where “all engagement’s not created equal.” ABM practitioners must be able to identify (within CRM and across marketing systems), target and measure their ABM programs against this critical group within each target account.

2. Multi Channel – because buyers engage with marketing programs across platforms and channels, marketers need to be able to sense this engagement and respond with precision. The highest performing marketing programs start with the indicated need of the target audience – topics that interest them and channels they respond to historically. This is NOT about creating campaigns to deliver through different means, this is about listening and responding to user needs as they occur.

3. Sales and Marketing alignment – it’s not a foregone conclusion that ABM will solve the communication and alignment issues with your peer organization. One key issue for marketers is that most are stuck in an inbound mentality where they still gauge success based upon quantity of leads. Your sales team needs you to find and engage the right people through the right means. In a sense, Sales and Marketing Alignment is a culmination of finding and targeting your Buying Centers, and then engaging them in a Multi Channel means.

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Mark Ogne introduced the topic by discussing the six elements of high-performance ABM.

Account-Based Marketing is a strategy. When done well it will produce tremendous revenue impact. To this point research shows that many programs are not realizing this upside, plagued by tactical execution of advertising point solutions, avoiding the planning required: in particular, alignment with sales counterparts, data aggregation, content strategy and orchestration based upon user needs.

A critical point to jumpstart results and alignment with sales organizations is to focus marketing attention on those who can actually influence or make a purchase decision. Not all engagement is equal. Within an account, you need to identify, target and measure results against this critical group.

Measurement will be crucial and impactful to solving many problem. If you don’t know the results of what you’re testing, you will be unable to find the right results. 6

INTRODUCTION - MARK OGNE, Founder ABM Consortium, CMO of ZenIQ

Most ABM vendors are clustered at the top of the funnel. The trouble now is there are too many leads making it difficult to follow up. You have to be ready to scale.

So what do you need to do for 2017?

§ ABM is proliferated so we must look deeper down the funnel.

§ There is an issue with marketing and the sales handoff.

§ How can we fix it? BANT.

BANT is a qualification process that stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. Many companies don’t use BANT and this causes the problem. If you don’t use BANT, you haven’t set a foundation to address the sales and marketing handoff problem and you don’t yet understand the role of person engaged… and their ability to make a purchase decision.

So, in 2017 practitioners need to focus on reintroducing BANT. This will lead to alignment which leads to measurement which leads to more money and other successes.

POINT OF VIEW - JAMES REGAN, CMO MRP

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POINT OF VIEW - STEPHANIE KIDDER, CMO Azalead

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ABM has been around since the 90s, but not many companies are using it because it is hard to implement and it can often involve manual processes. Some of the benefits new technology is already bringing or will bring include:

§ IP technology based company ID (tracking)§ Machine learning§ Predictive§ Personalization § Automation

In 2017, there are three areas to focus on:

§ First, identify who comes to your website. You need to find a product that will help you identify all visitors and track them.

§ Second, create a multi-channel system. Stephanie suggests having 10 channels that influence buyers at each stage of the journey.

§ Finally, get international. This is a lot easier to do now because of the internet. Work to find subsidiaries and partners, and use mobile forces to identify buyers on their phone.

Software is dominating the marketing landscape. Over the past few years, it has shaped how practitioners have to work:

§ 2015: There were 3,000 players in the marketplace§ 2016: How do we make technologies work together?§ 2017: It’s all about scaling!

How can we get these technologies to work well together and how can we scale it? To answer this question, Srihari’s team recently launched SmartPlays.

SmartPlays empower marketers to analyze target account interactions across their tech stack, identify opportunities to increase engagement, and can then orchestrate multi-player, multi-channel marketing and sales actions at the click of a button.

Their homepage has a link to find out which SmartPlays can provide the most value to ABM Practitioners – www.zeniq.io.

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POINT OF VIEW - SRIHARI KUMAR, CEO ZenIQ

Christopher notes there has been an inflation with the term ABM, but most of the work being done is actually target marketing instead of ABM.

For 2017, he suggests focusing on:

§ Marketing and Sales: Global accounts doing large deals.§ Product: Account Based Advertising today, Account Based Marketing tomorrow.§ Analytics: ROI today, cause and effect tomorrow.§ Delivery: Intimate delivery filled with insights.

Additionally, he suggests using the visualization process outlined below to scale:

1. Map complex enterprise accounts into regions, countries, and the business units2. Map opportunities and solutions into a matrix to identify potential gaps where the customers

can create additional value. 3. Map contacts into a matrix to identify potential gaps and analyze your contacts to determine

who you are missing.

POINT OF VIEW - CHRISTOPHER ENGMAN, CEO Vendemore

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CLOSING REMARKS

Consortium members have shared a great deal of information about where we should place our investments, what mistakes we can learn from, what successes we need to scale, and where to focus our energy in 2017.

The following three main themes emerged from the discussion:

1. ABM practitioners need to target key people within accounts - the account itself is not enough for targeting.

2. ABM practitioners need to understand and use multiple channels strategically.

3. ABM practitioners need to identify and remove lines between sales and marketing.

The webinar replay is now available. Click Here to Watch the Full Presentation!

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ABOUT DEMAND METRIC

Demand Metric is a marketing research and advisory firm serving a membership community of over 90,000 marketing professionals and consultants in 75 countries.

Offering consulting methodologies, advisory services, and 500+ premium marketing tools and templates, Demand Metric resources and expertise help the marketing community plan more efficiently and effectively, answer the difficult questions about their work with authority and conviction and complete marketing projects more quickly and with greater confidence, boosting the respect of the marketing team and making it easier to justify resources the team needs to succeed.

To learn more about Demand Metric, please visit: www.demandmetric.com.

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