How New-age Technology Is Enabling ABM Transformation
More B2B marketers are moving to ABM. Learn how technology can enable this transition to ABM.
B2B marketers are moving to account-based marketing (ABM) because it is a more effective way to sell to business customers. Technology can supercharge the migration to ABM. Bonnie Crater, president and CEO, Full Circle Insights, explains how and discusses how B2B marketers can shift to an ABM strategy.
Business-to-business (B2B) marketers face different challenges than their peers in the business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing world. B2B marketers sell complex products that may come with a heftier price tag. According to Gartner, there are typically between six and ten decision-makers the B2B team has to convince to make a sale rather than an individual consumer. Often, more decision-makers are involved if the product is particularly complex. The sales cycle can last months or even years.
Of course, the most obvious and fundamental difference between the two types of sales is that the buyer in a B2B sale is a company, while the B2C customer is a consumer. Despite this and other significant differences in the two types of sales, university-level training for marketers focused exclusively on B2C marketing for decades. Until relatively recently, most marketing technologies were built around a B2C framework.
SiriusDecisions, a B2B research and advisory firm founded in 2001, recognized the disconnect and created the “demand waterfall” model that gave B2B marketers a framework to analyze and track leads through different stages of the sales funnel. The group coined popular B2B marketing terms like “marketing qualified lead” (MQL) and “sales qualified lead” (SQL). It provided best practices for B2B marketers until Forrester Research acquired the company in 2018.
SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall Mode
Source: Full Circle Insights
In 2021, Forrester Research debuted the Forrester B2B Revenue Waterfall, an updated version of the demand waterfall tailored to the account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. ABM centers on pursuing target accounts rather than individuals, so it is a better fit for B2B marketers. The rise of ABM was an important shift, and technology made it possible. Here is a closer look at how technology supercharged the migration to ABM and how B2B marketers can make the change to an ABM strategy.
How Intent Data and Digital Profiles Enabled ABM
ABM is not a new concept. An account-based approach to marketing first came on the scene in the 2010s, and marketers immediately recognized its potential as a game-changer. The approach makes sense for B2B marketers since ABM focuses on accounts and buying groups instead of individuals, and it gets marketers on the same page as sales since sales reps always have focused on accounts.
The problem a decade ago was that the technology was not yet available to scale ABM campaigns. Hyper-segmented messaging is required to target B2B buying group members effectively. But finding out which employees at a target account were researching relevant topics required too much research and manual data entry, so while the ABM concept held promise, it was difficult to operationalize.
B2B buying groups tend to conduct online research and gather information about products before contacting a sales rep. Ten years ago, those anonymous encounters were invisible to marketers without onerous research. Now intent data providers like 6sense, Bombora, and Demandbase can give B2B marketers a stream of data on potential buyers who are researching relevant topics, enabling the hyper-segmentation needed to target accounts at scale effectively.
Using intent data and profile information like location, industry, subindustry, business size, technology usage, etc., B2B marketers can target buying groups affordably. New measurement tools also enable marketers to attribute revenue to campaigns (digital and non-digital), compare current performance with historical data, etc., to get insight into trends.
Helping Marketers Make the Transition From Person-based To Account-based Marketing
Thanks to these enabling technologies, ABM has become the most popular approach in B2B marketing. However, many B2B marketers still struggle to make the transition to an ABM strategy or bring their ABM program to a more mature stage. That is where the Forrester B2B Revenue Waterfall can help. It provides an excellent framework for tracking ABM campaigns, so it is important to be familiar with it.
Once marketers understand the B2B revenue framework, the next step is to understand how the demand waterfall, which describes funnel stages in a response- or person-based strategy, maps to the new Forrester B2B Revenue Waterfall. For example, the “prioritized” stage in the Forrester model maps to MQL in the demand waterfall; the “qualified” stage is equivalent to SAL, SQLs map to “pipeline,” etc. Closed/won business is the same in either model.
The new revenue waterfall segments targeted accounts into candidates and current customers and categorizes targeted opportunities as acquisition, retention, upsell and cross-sell opportunities. The “detected” stage is where intent data comes into play; B2B marketers who get data on targeted account intent can identify accounts and engage them with targeted marketing campaigns.
Perhaps the most important thing for B2B marketers to remember is that their top job in an ABM strategy is to activate accounts by moving members of the target buying group down the funnel by engaging them with hyper-segmented content. The goal is to move them to the “prioritized” stage, where the sales team follows up on inbound leads.
So, for example, if marketers can entice members of a target account’s buying group into downloading whitepapers, engaging with a webinar, and then viewing a product demo, they can pass the baton to sales. This confirms that the targeted account fits the ideal customer profile and then works toward closed/won business status.
See More: Conversational ABM: A Solution to the Personalization at Scale Challenge
Better Marketing and Sales Alignment Yields Better Results
When B2B marketers adopt an ABM strategy, marketers can play a more strategic role in collaboration with their sales colleagues. Marketing and sales choose target accounts together and monitor progress down the ABM funnel. Measurement capabilities are critical too, and it is imperative to integrate marketing data inside the CRM, which serves as a single source of data truth that can be shared across the organization.
When B2B marketing and sales teams build a mature ABM program and put the necessary technologies and measurement tools in place, they can outperform peers who do not use ABM by reaching out to target accounts with unparalleled specificity. At its core, ABM content enables purchase decisions by putting the right content in the hands of buyers looking for products to solve their pain points.
IT teams can help by providing support to the B2B marketing and sales teams, ensuring they have the technology and data they need to target business customers and the right ABM framework to manage business-to-business sales in a changing environment.
How has technology enabled your marketing transition to ABM? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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