Is account-based marketing the key to B2B sales success?

If you are on the fence as to whether account-based marketing (ABM) is a lasting strategy worth investing in, or merely the latest buzzword on B2B marketers' lips, tech industry giant Oracle Corporation's recent foray into this space should warrant your attention.

At Demandbase's third annual Marketing Innovation Summit, held a few weeks ago at Pier 27 in San Francisco, Kevin Akeroyd, Oracle Marketing Cloud's GM and senior VP announced the integration of Demandbase's ABM advertising, personalization, conversion, and measurement solutions into Oracle's Eloqua Marketing Automation platform.

According to Akeroyd, Eloqua users will be better able to nurture accounts they are targeting through new features such as: auto-appending contact data and rolling them up by company; generating a behavioral account score based on both contact and overall company actions on your website; and the ability to holistically market to businesses as entities, rather than just target one or two individuals within those companies.

I first reported on ABM last year when I attended Demandbase's Summit at Giants Stadium. At the time, there were a lot of folks from small, "buzzy" companies in attendance, and the atmosphere was a mix of exuberance and uncertainty.

This year, while some uncertainty remains, Oracle's buy-in has lent a great deal of credibility to account-based marketing as a bona fide business strategy. Further contributing to ABM's credibility was the launch of the Certified ABM Strategist designation, granted to attendees of an all-day training course at the Summit, as well as the inception of the ABM Leadership Alliance comprised of technology and data vendors seeking to educate B2B marketers about developing and deploying a successful ABM strategy.

Benefits and barriers

While it is too early to assert that firms will invest in ABM solutions en masse in the years to come, statistics provided by research firm SiriusDecisions point to a healthy future for service providers in this space.

According to their 2016 State of ABM Study, among the more than 200 B2B companies surveyed:

More than 70 percent have staff that are fully or partially dedicated to driving ABM-specific programs.

58 percent are running a pilot or test program.

41 percent have a full program in place. In comparison, last year only 20 percent of companies had full programs in place.

The main perceived benefits of ABM are increased revenue, increased pipeline, and higher quality leads.

Neil Mooney, sales development representative for Bizible, expressed optimism when I asked him what he felt the impact of AMB will be on marketing in the future, saying, "It's just starting, it's going to take off -- sky's the limit. ABM is a marketer's dream because marketers love having a lot of information on a lot of different people, and that is what ABM is. It's highly targeted: they know who you are, they know what you want and like, and can act on that."

There were some in the crowd who weren't so confident, however. I surveyed a handful who were sitting around me during the certification course, and the prevailing attitude among these was that, while ABM seems like something they would love to implement as marketers, they would face a tremendous amount of resistance from their sales teams -- who are set in their ways. They pointed to the classic divide between sales and marketing teams as a barrier.

When I mentioned this to Chris Golec, CEO at Demandbase, his response was "I think that's a false perception…when you go to the sales team and you say we want to reallocate marketing dollars to the accounts you want to sell to, they're all ears. The success of ABM is generally sales-driven. Higher close rates, bigger deal sizes, more pipeline, fewer crappy leads…it's the thing which is driving sales and marketing teams together."

Golec cautioned that as part of this greater alignment between sales and marketing, however, marketers cannot continue to rely on their traditional measurements of success.

A shift in focus

"We are going to see some of these traditional marketing metrics shift. Because the VP of sales, the CEO, doesn't [care] about MQLs or web traffic -- what they care about is pipeline growth, deal size, close rates, revenue. CPM, CTR -- these things are sort of meaningless in the B2B world."

Therefore, in order to be successful with ABM, B2B marketers must adopt a viewpoint that they are as responsible for revenue as the sales team is -- and that they must work together with sales to not only identify the most desirable business accounts, but develop a joint approach to nurture them, flag buying signals, and capture the deals. Technology is the bridge to making this as seamless as possible.

Continued Golec, "You can identify who downloads the white paper, but you have 20 times the amount of people who are anonymous. We are finding out who they are and joining all that data together. Every online interaction has an IP address, but only 2 or 3 percent are cookied. So [identification by IP] gives you much better insight. It makes marketing automation more intelligent."

Technology has clearly arrived to make ABM a technical reality. Whether it takes off as a business strategy beyond forward-looking, first-adopter companies into mainstream American enterprises is of course not known. But based on the inroads made in just the past year, it seems many more B2B marketers have it on their radar.

Do you have an ABM plan for your company? Are you already using it? Comment below!

Source: Is account-based marketing the key to B2B sales success?