Rethinking ABM as a strategic tool
Background to ABM
Account-based marketing (ABM) is nothing new. It has been around as an idea since at least the early 1990s and as a named concept since 2004.
The precursor to ABM first came to prominence in the eyes of the marketing community in ‘The One to One Future’ by Peppers and Rogers in 1993. At the time, this book was a radical rethink of some of the fundamental rules of marketing, envisaging a future where mass-marketing (focussed on building market share) would be bypassed by a focus on identifying a smaller group of the highest consumption propensity customers and selling more to them on a one-to-one basis (building share of wallet). To do this, companies would need to make use of the latest in one-to-one channels such as ‘fax’ and ‘touch tone phones’. Fax marketing may have gone the way of the dodo, but the principle of shifting to an individual customer-focused mindset was pretty revolutionary and stuck.
By 2004, ITSMA had formally coined the term Account Based Marketing. By this time, a lot of the leading B2B companies had already cottoned on to the huge potential of the idea and were using it to varying degrees of effectiveness, but it finally had a name. And B2B marketing agencies the world over rejoiced in the addition of a new initialism with which to bamboozle their clients.
Almost 20 years on from the birth of the term, ABM is almost everywhere. Depending on your source, between 70% (Hubspot’s ‘State of Marketing’ report) and 94% (Terminus’ ‘The State of Modern Marketing’ report) of B2B marketers say they use ABM. That is remarkably high – given a 2013 study by Bristol University found that 78% of British women regularly use deodorant, based on the higher estimates, we can conclude that marketers are significantly more likely to use ABM than deodorant. Make of that what you will.
What’s the problem?
ABM is self-reported as being exceptionally highly used. The big issue here is that there is very little agreement on what ‘ABM’ actually means.
Gartner says: “Account-based marketing (ABM) is a go-to-market strategy targeting certain accounts with a synchronized, continuous set of marketing and sales activities. ABM activities engage those accounts and individuals through all stages of the buying journey.”
So according to them a) ABM is a go-to-market strategy, b) ABM targets specific accounts, c) ABM integrates sales and marketing, d) ABM engages accounts and individuals, and e) ABM engages throughout all stages of the buying journey.
However, if you spend ten minutes speaking with B2B marketers, reading the myriad published articles, or delving into the LinkedIn debates, you will find a smorgasbord of different conflicting interpretations.
The following are précised versions of statements I’ve heard during conversations with B2B marketers at tech companies over the years:
ABM is a technology: ‘We bought ABM in last year and are focussing on getting the team making the most of their licenses this year.”
ABM is general lead generation: “Our ABM programme focuses on generating MQLs from the 5,000 accounts in our target segment.”
ABM is retention marketing: “Our ABM programme is based around getting renewal messages to our existing customers.”
ABM is all marketing: “We believe all good marketing is ABM.”
The understandings of what ABM means are so diverse that stats around usage are largely meaningless. But why does it matter?
It matters because companies are missing out on the value that ABM can bring. Many companies are either missing out by viewing ABM as having too narrow of a definition (if you only view it applicable to retention marketing, you are missing out on a wealth of opportunity around acquisition and upsell, for example) or as so broad as to become meaningless (if you view marketing to a very wide set of accounts with no meaningful personalisation as ABM, then ABM is adding nothing to your mass-marketing efforts).
What’s the solution?
One of the most important parts of the Gartner definition given above is that ABM is a go-to-market strategy. It’s not a campaign, it is a strategy. We go less far than this however and describe ABM as a strategic tool. We argue that it is not a strategy in its own right. A good strategy has a thorough diagnosis, a clear guiding policy and coherent actions. The risk of defining ABM as a strategy is that it risks positioning ABM as a marketing cure-all or ‘silver bullet’ solution which it is not.
Hence why we like to talk about ABM as a strategic tool. Think of ABM as a lens which you can apply to the diagnosis of marketing challenges and a principle that you can apply to the policies and actions you take to solve them.
Is it a market problem or a specific account problem? Should we solve this with a whole market/segment-focused solution or an account-specific solution? What actions can we take at an account-specific level to support the overarching strategy?
Consider a common marketing challenge: a tech company wants to break out of the mid-market and establish itself as an enterprise solution.
It is useful to look at this through the lens of ABM to help identify what’s at the heart of the challenge and what a solution could look like.
An essential step in becoming established as an enterprise solution provider is to win quality enterprise engagements that can provide case studies and proof points that their product is, indeed, an enterprise solution. A key part of the challenge is how to deliver a case-study-worthy implementation with an enterprise account when all their current clients are mid-market.
Traditionally the most obvious steps here, depending on the specifics, might include broadening their messaging and media targeting to address larger accounts, and/or identifying a shortlist of prospective enterprise accounts and building out individual strategies to win them (a traditional application of ABM).
However, if they treat ABM as a lens through which to think about what might be possible, by focusing on how marketing to specific accounts could help them, they might arrive at some different options.
For example, it might just be that they have an existing account that is on the borderline of Mid-market/enterprise. In this case, there could be an argument made for growing the use of their product with this account, supporting their growth as they go, until they are actively delivering an enterprise solution to an enterprise account (and having upsold and cross-sold to increase revenue as they go), thereby giving them their first case study and proof-point.
The opportunities are endless. In some cases it will reveal tactical opportunities to enhance your effectiveness, in others, it will fundamentally alter your marketing strategy, and in others, it will be of limited relevance.
ABM is not a silver bullet, and it will not solve every one of your marketing challenges. It is not a campaign or project that you can undertake and tick off a list. It is one of the tools in your arsenal that you can apply to the diagnosis of problems and the building of solutions.
This doesn’t diminish its role- if anything, it opens up exciting possibilities about its application and ensures that ABM is used in flexible service of effective marketing, rather than as a set play.
Next time you’re faced with a knotty marketing challenge, think about it through the lens of ABM- it just might reveal a new way to tackle it.