Demand generation powered by people: the future of effective account based marketing (Part 3)

In the third and final instalment of his assessment of Account Based Marketing (ABM), Paul Stacey, Head of BNZSA UK, considers the necessity for quality data and appropriate human intervention in successful ABM.

Let’s not kid ourselves, ABM is difficult

A truism is that not all ABM campaigns are created – or executed – equally. Indeed, some are definitely more equal than others. Don’t be confused by having a TAL. That’s not really Account Based Marketing. ABM is personalising tactics to the account and targeting only those accounts that matter.

Very often organisations do the targeting but not the personalisation. Relying on flooding the internet and social platforms with ads or hiding behind unsolicited email is a sure way to fail.

You can have all the delivery tools in the world, but ABM is utterly dependent on data – and the quality of that data.

You need quality data to select the right account, and quality data to personalise to that account. You can’t personalise if you don’t know who you’re communicating with. Online and offline, ABM requires data to be able to personalise.

Your data needs to be both demographic and behavioural. Who are your prospects and what are they doing? Can you understand what they care about and what problems they are trying to solve? Get this right and deliver valuable insights and solutions, and you’re getting there.

The smartest companies are able to combine every piece of first-party data gleaned from multiple channels – online, social, webinar, events, media etc. When combined with strong third-party data, an organisation can establish a single view of what every account and every known individual within that account is doing.

In my opinion, very few organisations can do this. Some claim to. Others want to. But only few can.

Smart companies also use data to re-target within and across multiple channels. They also use smart scoring models to track engagement and convert leads from MAL to MQL at just the right time. But be wary of self-fulfilling prophecies. If you re-target a small audience, they will over index on engagement and you’ll get false positive leads.

Demand generation powered by people

So, you’re a smart company. You have your well-oiled multi-channel market plan in place. You’ve nailed your scoring. Congratulations! How are you converting leads?

Ultimately, unless you’re selling a solution with very low consideration and a short sales cycle someone actually has to speak to the client or prospect at varying points during the cycle. I wholeheartedly believe in the principle of Demand Generation Powered by People.

As mentioned in the first article in this series, traditional ways of meeting prospects and nurturing relationships is out the window. But that doesn’t mean conversations can’t be had. They just need to be by phone or video conference. Indeed, the very nature of how we work today may offer greater opportunities for the personal touch. People are more captive at their desk at home today than ever before. And with a greater sense of physical isolation, staying connected with the outside world is particularly appealing to many of us – your clients included.

But this requires intelligence and a relational approach. It also raises a number of questions:

When do you speak to the prospect in their journey?
Who speaks to the prospect?
How do you know what to speak to prospect about?
How engaged does someone have to be before they get a call?
Is it right for phone calls only to be at the end of the customer journey?
Should it be “we notice that you are interested in,” or “is there anything we can help with?”

There’s no hard and fast rule here. It truly depends on the campaign you’re running and your relationship with the client – but the personal touch is essential for successful Account Based Marketing.

The simple fact is that personalisation through digital alone is hard. Even with the best DCO solution it’s hard and expensive.

Good agents beat bad digital; good agents complement good digital. In short, every ABM campaign should involve humans.

So, can an organisation scale and engage at the right point in the customer journey? Yes, but to do so you need the right data to determine when to engage at the right time, coupled with the human capital to support the outbound calls. Humans can identify bad data, rescue poor leads and convert good leads in a way that machines can’t.

Lead qualification is a good example of using people early in an ABM journey, while BDRs are good example of using them at the end.

I’ll say it again, my mantra is Demand Generation Powered by People because I believe that the best demand generation campaigns are personal.

ABM is no longer an alternative B2B strategy. It feels like it’s the only one that matters.

To summarise

Account Based Marketing is the only true approach to B2B marketing today – especially for complex solution selling for IT companies operating at significant scale.
The key is to marry the right software to your data and to your people. But don’t be sold on the notion that tech alone can deliver your ABM for you.
It’s essential that people are involved at the appropriate point – or points – in your customer’s journey with you.

Demand generation powered by people: the future of account based marketing (Part 2)

In a series of three articles, Paul Stacey, head of BNZSA UK, examines the current state of Account Based Marketing (ABM). In this second instalment, he provides an appraisal of the ABM vendor landscape and where to invest.

Can software alone solve ABM today?

There are multiple activities involved in creating and executing a successful Account Based Marketing programme. These span lead management and marketing automation, sales intelligence and intent data collection, content marketing, email marketing, CRM and customer data management, predictive analytics, and ad serving and re-targeting.

For some companies, investing in one or more of these types of tools is a great way to start an ABM programme.

Many ABM products specialise in one or a few of these areas. While these tools are often complementary to larger account-based engagement platforms, they do not provide a comprehensive ABM solution.

Businesses looking to invest in a platform to support Account Based Marketing should look for solutions that allow them to:

Align sales and marketing around goals and efforts
Identify accounts and contacts
Understand and create audience segments
Deliver content and web personalisation
Manage and measure multi-channel engagement
Perform sales and marketing analytics

Fully featured ABM, or account-based engagement, platforms usually include the following set of capabilities:

Account targeting and selection
Audience segmentation
Multichannel outreach orchestration
Account-based web personalisation
Account-based analytics
Account-based advertising
Sales intelligence (demographic and firmographic data)
Intent data (real-time behavioral data)

Other ABM related software include:

Predictive sales analysis, sales intelligence and intent data like Infer, D&B Lattice, Cyance, and Insights
Content personalisation and content marketing including Highspot, Bound and Uberflip
Lead management such as the mainstream CRMs, Zymplify, Vainu and LeanData
Ad serving and retargeting software like Kwanzoo and Jabmo
Digital and direct mail automation such as Sendoso and Alyce

The challenge is to make the vendor selection that’s right for you, and embed them into your existing sales, marketing and communication programmes.

With careful selection and deployment these solutions can radically improve an organisation’s ability to find, engage and convert target accounts and buying groups.

But these buying groups are all people. So again, I return to my key point – that demand generation in B2B should be powered by people not just machines.

What ABM tools are you using, how are your teams responding, and how are they helping you succeed?

Demand generation powered by people: the future of effective account based marketing (Part 1)

In this series of three articles, Paul Stacey examines the current state of Account Based Marketing (ABM). He looks at the necessary alignment with sales and marketing strategies; an appraisal of the ABM vendor landscape and where to invest; and considers the essential linkage between high quality data and timely human intervention.

Account Based Marketing – A difficult, but rewarding ‘new normal’ for B2B sales

With greater uncertainty about technology investments, the current pandemic has ushered a necessary change in traditional B2B sales and marketing strategies and accelerated a greater need for effective account based marketing (ABM).

ABM has been with us for some time. So, it’s not a new and recent readjustment of B2B sales and marketing augured by Covid-19 per se. But the changes in how sales and marketing teams have had to rethink their alignment – perhaps rationalising their account or industry focus – in the current climate means that companies have this year had to respond quickly to new priorities and audiences.

ABM is an obvious plan of attack in our new world. But effective ABM is particularly challenged today as previous direct and personal – in-person channels like face-to-face meetings and networking events – have evaporated. In-person client activities of yore like hospitality at sporting occasions or the arts were arguably on the wane anyway, but intimacy with clients and prospects has never been so challenged. And yet have never before been so important.

Relationships in our increasingly virtual world are less direct and personal, and decision making far more dispersed – both geographically and organisationally.

Effective ABM is expensive, it’s difficult, but executed well, has the potential to deliver exceptional returns.

As most of you know, ABM, also known as key account marketing, is a strategic approach to B2B marketing based on account awareness in which an organisation considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one.

Despite its name, ABM is really less about marketing to an ‘account’, and more of an understanding that B2B investment decisions are made by buying committees from varied internal silos. So, their collective actions constitute an indicator of interest, intent and engagement. But reaching the decision-making group is hard and is inevitably increasingly complex. Getting your ABM strategy right has never been more important or tougher.

A significant part of the promise of ABM is the ability to personalise messages, content and programmes to differentiate by addressing prospect’s specific needs.

How it works, who it’s for and its benefits

ABM is typically employed in enterprise-level sales organisations. If you do it well, you can realise these benefits:

Identify specific contacts, at specific companies, within a specific market
Increase account relevance
Engage earlier and higher with deals
Get the best value out of marketing
Align marketing activity with account strategies
Inspire customers with compelling, highly relevant content

While business marketing has been typically organised by industry, product/solution or channel (direct/social/PR etc.), ABM brings all of these together to focus on individual accounts. Done well, you will reap the rewards of your tailored solutions. Done badly, you will waste a lot of time, effort and money.

So, sellers today need to rely on integrated marketing and communications in a way they have never done before. Marketing needs to be personalised, and it needs to be intelligently deployed across multiple channels. It needs to be joined-up, complementary and highly relevant.

But going the multi-channel way brings risk. A multi-channel approach inevitably waters down spend levels within each channel. The temptation is to increase media spend at the expense of creative personalisation. When this happens the uniqueness of a message is lost, and marketing activities become commoditised and potential customers see little or no difference between suppliers and their competitors. When that happens, price becomes the only obvious differentiator. Personalisation is paramount.

Organisations which are currently seeing the greatest benefit from ABM are IT, Services and Consulting companies. With complex propositions, long sales cycles and large customers, these organisations are ideal candidates for the approach. This is because ABM is ultimately dependant on data, and these sectors major on the value of data. They have complex solutions, and they have complex buying groups.

ABM is, though, spreading into other sectors and a benefit can be seen to be an increased return on investment. Consequently, there is something of a ‘gold rush’ in the ABM automation space.

If you read the ABM technology vendor’s marketing claims, you would be led to think that automation can overcome marketing and sales teams’ current challenge for intimacy with clients and do it all instead – identify, reach and engage with your highest-value prospects – at the touch of a button. But can these off-the-shelf solutions truly automate at scale while retaining key customer insights and preserving intimacy? I think not.

There is a place for automation of course, but it’s worthless without high quality data, and essentially, the intervention of people.

I would argue that the human touch is necessary in at least one, if not multiple touchpoints in any company’s ABM campaigns. Demand generation must ultimately be powered by people.

But how to achieve the perfect marriage of automation, data and people?

Tune in for the next instalment. But in the meantime, what do you think? I welcome your thoughts and comments.