What is the most important thing for a successful Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy? Of course, you need to identify the right buyers. As Ms. Beaton has always advised in her cookbooks, catch your rabbit first!
It sounds simple enough when you put it that way, but in practice it can be one of the – if not the – most difficult tasks, especially if you have to do it manually.
However, this is a challenge that needs to be addressed given the growing importance of ABM in broader marketing. As I already noticed in August last year, the direction of travel is clear from my seat:
ABM will be the new B2B marketing cloud with data as a hub. One thing B2B marketers do that is critical to their success is creating a new data architecture that brings all of the account-level data together in one place. Taken together, the data from engagement systems such as email, advertising, chat, and all interactions can form a more informative data model. ABM becomes the new backbone as companies move to the account-based model.
AI everywhere
Given this manual “heavy lifting” challenge that ABM advocates face, it makes sense that Salesforce would focus on AI capabilities in its own latest ABM announcement today. Salesforce, which focuses on AI, isn’t unusual in and of itself – the cloud company’s Einstein technology spans the vendor’s various product lines, from sales and service to analytics to marketing and commerce. For example, the integration of Einstein AI with Pardot’s marketing automation technology has improved that offering, including better behavioral assessments, attributions, and campaign insights.
In the case of its ABM offering, Einstein uses Key Account Identification AI to display the accounts that the AI realizes have the greatest chance of actually making a buy. Once these accounts are identified, insights and recommendations are offered to educate marketers and sellers and take action to target those with spending / buying or other decision-making responsibilities within these organizations.
The Salesforce problem with this is that companies can now analyze data in their CRM and marketing systems to stack accounts and prospects in order of priority. This, in turn, helps marketing and sales teams focus on deals that are most likely to close quickly and most profitably. Marketing can then optimize its spending and focus on top-notch accounts that have a bigger chance.
Get personal
Another important part of the Salesforce ABM game is the Campaign Member Accounts features. This allows users to leverage AI insights to create highly personalized campaigns for individual buyers in top tier accounts.
The personalization aspect is another focus of the further development of ABM as a category. As I found out in 2018:
Once you understand the personas to target in your identified accounts, you can examine the role each person plays in the purchase decision and create the content you want. Each person usually has a different perspective on the weaknesses and challenges that your product or service is trying to solve.
But I’ve also highlighted a challenge here:
Value proposition and content development are heavily customized in one-to-one and one-to-little ABM programs. This means the marketing team needs to do their research and understand these accounts and the roles they target within the accounts well enough to develop very targeted content. And that’s a struggle – not just to create this content, but to create it on a large scale.
With Salesforce’s Campaign Member Accounts technology, companies can target the most valuable touchpoints in an account even if they don’t have personal contacts for that account, and those new names and associated data automatically sync existing marketing campaigns as soon as this new information is identified.
This means that the ability of marketers to target accounts depended on whether individual contact details were in their CRM database. It is now possible to start ABM campaigns very quickly and add contacts on the fly to deliver targeted campaigns across multiple channels.
In practice
Meredith Brown, SVP and Product Manager at Salesforce Pardot, introduced me to a potential use case that focuses on account prospecting. In this case, sales would add an account to the campaign to find contacts. Another example would be the ability to add accounts that Marketing or Sales might want to invite to an event before they know exactly who to invite.
These are theoretical use cases, but there are also a number of real-world examples. Derek du Preez yesterday highlighted McAfee’s collaboration with Salesforce to align sales and marketing efforts. There’s an ABM angle here, as CMO Brett Hannath notes:
We have simplified our data visualization to better involve our customers and prospects. Over the past year we have shifted our organization to work from home and changed the way we involve customers. ABM has helped us personalize customer loyalty, align our sales and marketing teams, and improve data accuracy. “
Other reference examples cited include Wärtsilä, a leading global provider of solutions for the marine and energy market, in which Jaime López, General Manager for Marketing Operations, notes:
Pardot’s groundbreaking AI-based features like Einstein Attribution and ABM Account Identification have fundamentally changed the way our marketing team makes decisions and strengthened the relationship with our global sales teams.
My attitude
Anyone who reads my analysis or works with me knows that I am a big proponent of ABM programs and that marketing and sales as functional units must be closely coordinated. I’m also interested in how the tools evolve to support this critical account alignment.
Einstein Key Account Identification and accounts as campaign members are expected to be generally available later this year. These new ABM capabilities in Salesforce are another positive step by the vendor in creating an ABM solution that looks like it could compete with pure games in the field like Demandbase or Terminus.