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Not Yet the New Normal: ABM Must evolve Into Account-Based engagementuse Four Best Practices to Advance Your Approach From ABM to ABe

by Laura RamosJune 29, 2018

FOrrester.COM

Key TakeawaysABM Milestones show Maturity Is ProgressingB2B marketers are enjoying more measurable, substantial results from their ABM efforts in 2018. More than half now dedicate budget to ABM activities and have amassed practical experience targeting specific accounts. Tighter alignment between sales and marketing leads the list of notable accomplishments.

setting the right strategy And Account selection Are Prerequisites For successDespite progress, marketers still face an overabundance of technology offerings touting sure-fire ABM results. Settling on a strategy that accomplishes specific business objectives and prioritizing accounts with the greatest likelihood of satisfying those goals requires more thought and collaboration than expected. Getting these two right upfront is also the surest path to success.

Four Practices Convert ABM From Account-specific Marketing Into Lifetime engagementTop ABM marketers tier accounts based on fit with and interest in your solution. They put salespeople in the lead role when building account relationships and use personalization to capture attention and help orchestrate interactions. Finally, they increase tech investment to help scale their best-performing approaches.

Why Read This ReportAccount-based marketing (ABM) is more than just marketing. From fostering tighter alignment between marketing and sales to engaging customers across their entire life cycle, it accelerates a firm’s transformation to customer obsession. Read this report to understand how four practices help B2B marketers convert the promises of ABM into lifetime customer engagement.

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How webinars help you evolve from ABM to ABEA message from ON24

What is the most important element of an account based marketing (ABM) strategy? Your audience.

After all, ABM is all about truly knowing the people within the accounts you’re trying to reach,

understanding their goals and empathizing with their business problem.

At ON24, we believe that webinars are a powerful tool to make ABM about your audience. Through an

interactive, data-driven ON24 webinar, you can engage hundreds of prospects in 1-to-1

conversations in real-time, understand their pain points and offer meaningful solutions specific to their

needs. That’s true personalization at scale.

In this Forrester report, we’ll explore best practices for incorporating ABM across teams and

departments. We’ll examine how ABM can help align and focus your marketing and sales teams. And

we’ll tell you how to leverage an ABM mindset to jumpstart your business and tangibly impact your

ROI.

Check it out, and let us know how we can help you start personalizing prospect engagement today!

-Joe Hyland, CMO, ON24

https://www.on24.com/contact-us/

http://www.on24.com/

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Table Of Contents

ABM Matures From Nascent Novelty To Promising Practice

Four Best Practices Convert ABM Into Lifetime Customer Engagement

Recommendations

Account Engagement Accelerates Your Move To Customer Obsession

What It Means

Customer Intimacy Becomes ABM’s Legacy

Supplemental Material

Related Research Documents

Account-Based Marketing Will Elevate, Not Eclipse, Lead-To-Revenue Management

Q&A: 10 ABM FAQs — And Five More That B2B Marketers Should Ask More Often

Retro Yet Revolutionary: Demystifying Account-Based Marketing

FOR B2B MARKETING PROFESSIONALS

Not Yet the New Normal: ABM Must evolve Into Account-Based engagementuse Four Best Practices to Advance Your Approach From ABM to ABe

by Laura Ramoswith Caroline Robertson, Steven Casey, Allison Snow, Matthew Camuso, Alexander Bullock, Jacob Basseches, and Kara Hartig

June 29, 2018

http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES133981






http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO827





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© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

ABM Matures From Nascent Novelty To Promising Practice

ABM looked like yet another fad in early 2017. The interest and excitement around it outpaced practical results: 64% of surveyed B2B marketers were just starting, planning, or not yet considering ABM.1 Only one in five said they saw tighter alignment with sales because of this approach.

Despite these modest findings, we predicted ABM would quickly lose some of its shiny-object attraction, settle into practical execution, and deliver promising results throughout 2017.2 To test that prediction, we recently surveyed and interviewed more than 200 B2B marketing and sales professionals and found ABM progress is now living up to the hype as practitioners:

› Gain practical experience engaging accounts. While most ABM activity was just developing in 2016, a majority (61%) of respondents today claim to have amassed at least a year of experience or put a couple of account-specific campaigns under their belts (see Figure 1). This dramatic shift highlights one of ABM’s core benefits: It aligns marketing activity with sales effort to deliver better results. Invoca used targeted direct mail to surpass its scheduled-meeting goal by 276% and to deliver a 28:1 return on pipeline-to-target account spend at Adobe Summit. National Instruments sourced $12.6 million in opportunities from its ABM activities since beginning its program. And Contently grew its marketing-sourced pipeline by 33% and its sourced deals by 25%.

› dedicate budget dollars to ABM. The attention and resources focused on ABM are increasing: 32% have a senior team member formally leading the charge, and a majority (53%) now dedicates program dollars specifically to ABM (see Figure 2). Headcount growth — a more substantial indicator of commitment — has not been as strong. While 40% have headcount assigned to ABM, most of these people act as a shared resource because only 22% are dedicated exclusively. Across all ABM marketers, 87% are spread thinly, handling more than just a few accounts at a time.

› Connect measurable business results to an account-specific approach. Better sales and marketing alignment tops the list of realized benefits (see Figure 3-1). Adopting ABM boosts per-account pipeline, said 68% of respondents, while 58% agreed it also leads to significant increases in revenue (see Figure 3-2). The most interesting correlation, however, occurred between revenue results and ABM maturity: Firms that exceeded their revenue goals in the previous year were more likely to have more ABM experience and tenure than those that missed their goals (see Figure 4).

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FIGure 1 ABM Crosses Over From Early-Stage Experiment To Mature Practice

Base: 78 global B2B marketers

*Base: 199 global B2B marketers

Note: Some percentages may not total 100 because of rounding.

Source: Forrester’s Q1 2017 International B2B Marketing Panel Online Survey

*Source: Forrester’s Q1 2018 Global B2B Marketing Benchmark Panel Online Survey

2017 2018*

Experimenting

Established

Experimenting

Established

41%

61%

64%

36%

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FIGure 2 Marketers Dedicate Dollars More Than Headcount To ABM

“Which statement reflects how you are applying (or intend to apply) your marketing resources to your ABM program?”(Multiple responses accepted)


Source: Forrester’s Q1 2018 Global B2B Marketing Benchmark Panel Online Survey

12%

16%

32%

53%

40%

22%

13%

5%

We do not have headcount or programdollars allocated to ABM

We have an ABM tiger team focused onexperimentation with speci�c accounts

We have a senior marketing leadershipteam member responsible for ABM

We have dedicated marketing budget/program dollars for ABM

We have marketing headcount working onABM but not dedicated exclusively to it

We have marketing headcountdedicated to ABM

We are working with an outside agency thatprovides resources to execute our ABM program

We have an ABM center of excellencethat acts as a shared service

87% of people working on ABM campaigns target 10 or more accounts at a time.

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FIGure 3 Current And Anticipated ABM Value Comes Mainly From Internal Efficiencies

Tighter alignment and coordinationbetween marketing and sales

More ef�cient use of marketing programdollars or spending

We haven’t been able to demonstratevalue from ABM yet

Greater lift in conversion rates fromprospect to quali�ed lead

Greater lift in conversion rates fromquali�ed lead to opportunity

“Which best describes the value you can demonstrate from ABM today?”(Top �ve responses shown)

3-1

“Do you agree that ABM delivers . . . ?”3-2

68%“ . . . signi�cant increases in

per-account pipeline”

58%“ . . . signi�cant increases in

per-account revenue”

43%“ . . . highest ROI of any B2B

marketing approach”

20%

21%

26%

29%

37%


Note: Not all responses are shown.


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FIGure 4 More Experienced ABM Practitioners Are More Likely To Exceed Revenue Goals

Early stage Experimenting Re�ning Mature

Exceeded revenue goals

Missed revenue goals

13%

21%

31%35%

22%

38%

22%19%


Note: Not all responses are shown. Percentages may not total 100 because of rounding.


ABM COMPLICAtIONs CONtINue tO IMPede resuLts

Our study uncovered many impediments that keep ABM from becoming the new normal. More than half of respondents (53%) said they still find the term “ABM” confusing and lacking clear meaning because it is used inconsistently.3 One-quarter said they are still challenged to measure ABM’s impact on pipeline and revenue and to demonstrate its value as an approach. The tech landscape remains a confusing litter of vendors: We asked marketers about 37 brands of possible use in ABM tech stacks, and respondents added another 16 to our list.

Before getting too caught up in ABM euphoria, marketers have much work to do before marketing to specific accounts, or segments of accounts, becomes conventional practice. Our study shows many marketers are still challenged to:

› deliver content personalized in an account-relevant manner. Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of MongoDB, puts it best, “Account-focused programs are successful because they are personalized.” An overwhelming 95% of respondents agreed. But developing custom content — and getting the right people to pay attention to it — topped the list of challenges ABM practitioners face (see Figure 5). Machine-driven B2B personalization today supports online ads, website pages, or email, with customizable video, direct mail, and embedded recommendations delivering the most quantifiable

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returns. For personalized content, human-driven creation is the norm and involves a patchwork of technologies to execute, manage, or report on results. The best solution for creating relevant content at scale has yet to emerge.

› turn customer data into rich account and decision-maker insights. Respondents solidly agreed that better customer data and more research ensure ABM success. But one out of three found it hard to gain insight into account-specific issues or to enrich contact intelligence on key stakeholders inside those accounts. We see B2B data management players win big with ABM as marketers shift data strategies from ad hoc data procurement to maximizing customer lifetime value in their efforts to make ABM pay off.4

› Quit fixating on ABM as only a way to acquire net-new accounts. While half of B2B marketers said they chose ABM to deepen relationships and expand business with existing customers, they struggle to extend ABM activity across the entire customer life cycle. Nearly three-quarters believed ABM could deliver increases in current-account cross-sell and upsell, but only 11% said they could demonstrate that today (see Figure 6). Even worse, just 4% found ABM helped increase buyer loyalty, and a mere 3% said it increased customer satisfaction. A preoccupation with new acquisitions causes marketers to chase leads instead of winning the loyalty and long-term value that comes with obsessing over your existing customers.5

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FIGure 5 Content Personalization And Account Intelligence Are Top ABM Challenges

“Which describes the biggest challenges you have (or anticipate) with ABM?”(Multiple responses accepted)

Agreeing with sales on the rightstrategy to market to accounts

Deciding when to apply ABMacross the buyer’s journey

Measuring ABM impact onpipeline and revenue

Gathering contact intelligenceat each account

Gathering insight into the keyissues accounts face

Getting target people to engagewith our content

Developing personalized contentfor speci�c accounts

“What is key to ABM success?”




24%

25%

26%

32%

33%

38%

39% 95%say “personalized contentand engagement.”

92%say “better data and more research.”

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FIGure 6 ABM Needs More Post-Sale Focus And Success

Higher average deal sizes/value

Increase upsell and cross-sell withintarget accounts

Increased referenceability, case studies,and other forms of advocacy

Higher loyalty among customers

Higher customer satisfaction 3%

4%

7%

11%

12%




“Which best describes the value you can demonstrate from ABM today?”(Bottom �ve responses shown)

72% agree ABM can deliver increases in cross-sell, upsell, and enrichment.

suCCessFuL ABM PIONeers stArt WIth strAteGY

ABM is not only a new set of tactics for boosting leads but also an approach that changes the fundamental relationship between sales and marketing (see Figure 7).6 But it will not wholesale replace well-performing demand creation practices.7 This reality is sinking in, as an overwhelming majority (96%) believed that ABM would coexist alongside their current marketing practices for demand generation and customer marketing. And half expected it to become their primary marketing strategy over time. To set ABM practices up for success, B2B marketers must first:

› see ABM as a customer engagement strategy, not a set of tactics. Emerging technologies or clever analytic techniques won’t make ABM as successful as picking the right approach for your company and market. Today, marketers aren’t clear on strategy — more than half of respondents selected multiple objectives when we asked why they chose to start down the ABM path. Forrester believes that the shortest path to success starts by deepening relationships and wallet share with existing customers before diving into acquisition. Top marketers quantify what they are trying to accomplish for the business before they select accounts, gin up playbooks, or target specific roles with content that connects their value proposition to specific account challenges.8

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› Make account selection a team sport. When talking about the unexpected challenges in ABM, we heard the hardest lessons were learned when selecting accounts. “Never let sales pick the accounts on their own,” or, “Marketing should always bring a data-backed model to the table,” are typical of the admonishments heard. Aligning marketing and sales throughout the process of agreeing to accounts that belonged on the list frustrated many and consumed more time than expected. To keep the peace and get to successful account selection outcomes faster, top marketers fill in customer data gaps, encourage healthy back-and-forth discussion, and let sales include a few pet accounts.

› Prepare to try out different things quickly. What guarantees ABM success? Marketers are just figuring this out. Experimenting with multiple ideas and approaches is important to achieving positive ABM results. To set the pace, Eileen Chow, director of demand generation and marketing operations at Evergage, holds stand-up meetings with sales every other day to review account-specific campaign results and to plan outreach coordinated around client meetings and events. Betterworks highlights new content such as upcoming webinars, online ads, and direct mail options — what it calls marketing “bait” — in weekly meetings and includes email templates that help the sales and sales development teams coordinate account activity for the following week.

FIGure 7 Account-Based Engagement Follows Four Key Steps

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4

Set strategy, prioritizeaccounts, and identifyand target contacts

Identify key issues,develop insights,and set thecommunication plan

Create assets,messages, orplays to engageaccounts

Execute alignedactivity, captureinteractions, andtrack progress

Select and target Gather insightsDesign

engagementOrchestrateinteraction

Assess, revise, and repeat

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Four Best Practices Convert ABM Into Lifetime Customer Engagement

ABM is more than just marketing. It encompasses every aspect of creating long-term customer relationships — and many parts of your company must play their part in reaching this goal. To keep ABM from becoming just another bygone marketing approach, we believe now is the time to replace the “M” in ABM with a new letter, and we nominate “E” for engagement.9 B2B marketing and sales teams ready to move from ABM to account-based engagement (ABE) must adopt four key practices to get there (see Figure 8).

FIGure 8 Four Practices Accelerate Account-Based Engagement

Usetechnologyto engagedigitally.

Ensure asmooth handoffbetweenfunctionalteams.

Lead brand anddemandbuilding activity.

Conductgeneral-purposesegmentation.

Segment and prioritize accounts based on their �t with your business and interest in yoursolution. Then set a go-to-market strategy foreach level.

Use marketing techniques and tools to putindividual salespeople in a starring role whenbuilding and sustaining account relationships.

Personalize and coordinate the delivery ofsuperior customer communications andexperiences.

Start with your current tech stack, �ll in any keygaps, and then scale your investment andprocesses after you prove out your strategy.

Build an accountpyramid.

Enable sales tobe more humanand helpful.

Choreographyour customerdance steps.

Use technologyto expand yoursuccessful efforts.

Now practice Best practice What it means

ONe: BuILd AN ACCOuNt PYrAMId tO BALANCe resOurCes

ABE practitioners quickly discover that successful account selection involves reexamining the characteristics and circumstances that created their best customers. This process requires clean, rich customer data to get it right. It also requires reinstituting often-neglected principles like fact-based segmentation and targeting to make this process work. Fancy analytics alone won’t point the way to account-selection success, and we found leading account-based engagers:

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› define an ideal customer profile (ICP). Marketers must determine which characteristics define the best prospective accounts for their business objectives.10 Predictive marketing analytics can help, but regular discussion between sales and marketing is the best approach.11 Besides attributes like size, industry, and revenue, Cloudera’s VP of global inside sales analyzes wins and catalogs the different influencers touched during each deal. Using labels like “champion,” “decision maker,” “economic buyer,” and “blocker,” sales teams study who they spend time with and at what stage in the process. By matching these roles with industry-relevant titles, Cloudera inside reps identify the right buying center faster and find contacts from sources like Discover.org or LinkedIn more accurately.

› segment based on market fit and intent. Top marketers quantify the total available market (TAM) opportunity associated with their ICP and then prioritize new and existing accounts or build segments from within that TAM. They use fit and behavioral cues to narrow selections and ensure accounts both fit the ICP and show interest in specific topics. To augment its tech vendor client business, TechTarget studied the growth rates of different enterprise-tech microsegments and chose to focus on those with the highest trajectory and penetration potential (see Figure 9). CMO John Steinert found marketing philosophy helped refine this segmentation, “We found DIY marketers invest internally, so we lead with intelligence solutions when marketing to them, while do-it-for-mes (DIFMs) prefer an integrated campaign and services approach.”

› divide segments into tiers by go-to-market objectives. Successful ABE prioritizes accounts into three or four tiers to balance resources between engaging marquee accounts, building a bench, and maintaining lead inflow (see Figure 10). Zenoss identified more than 10,000 accounts that matched its ICP. Partnering with Leadspace to map contacts and predict likelihood to buy helped whittle this number down to 2,500. Based on territory coverage, alignment with ICP, and behavioral engagement, marketing mapped accounts into one of three tiers. A small number of must-pursue accounts in the first tier receive customized 1:1 sales engagement while marketing alone simply nurtures those in the third tier through personalized ads and emails. As a result of Zenoss’ ability to prioritize sales rep outreach, it achieved engagement with more than 64% of its top-tier accounts.

› deepen their account-specific intelligence. Learning precisely what’s happening inside selected accounts or within segments is important but difficult to do well. An explosion of customer insight technologies can help fill in data gaps. We asked respondents about vendors they use for data enrichment, and respondents turn to Bombora, Discover.org, Radius, and ZoomInfo most frequently. To uncover deeper insights, apps like Detective by Charlie and FirstRain by Ignite scour the internet for news and other unstructured information to help teams gain a more nuanced understanding about executive moves, acquisitions, new partnerships, expansions, and the like. Even so, most marketers say their teams continue to rely on old-fashioned legwork, industry experts, or agency partners to comb through financial reports, news, and social media to build their understanding, leaving this deep intelligence gathering process ripe for automation.

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FIGure 9 TechTarget Takes A Microsegment Approach To Profiling Its Ideal Customers

• Pick microsegments with high growth.

• Choose growing industries.

• Discover where penetration opportunity is high.

• Determine where TechTarget uptake is relatively low.

• Identify good �ts for coverage with TechTarget data/products.

• Choose good �ts because of closed/won account history.

• Determine who is likely to be a forerunner in the market.

• Based on marketing philosophy:

• “Do it for me . . . ” — lead with integrated campaigns and services.

• “Do it myself . . . ” — lead with intelligence.

Ideal customer pro�lingstrategy

Total available marketanalysis

Account prioritization

Targeting approach

Marketpenetrationheadroom

John Steinert,CMO, TechTarget

Growth

High

Low

HighStable

Source: TechTarget website

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FIGure 10 A Tiered Approach To Account Pursuit Balances Resources, Effort, And Results

1,000s or more

100s to 1,000s

100s

Five to 50s

Incr

easi

ng e

ffort

s by

acc

ount

num

bers Full engagement

Demonstrated intentor expansion of relationship

Good ts or lookalikes

Traditional inbound

tWO: heLP sALes BeCOMe MOre huMAN ANd heLPFuL, NOt Just huNGrY

Engaging accounts pulls B2B marketing and sales into the same orbit and diminishes bickering over lead quality, marketing campaign impact, and sales enablement responsibilities.12 Experienced practitioners also help salespeople use account-specific research and approaches to find and interact with the right individuals associated with specific opportunities or buying centers worthy of pursuit. Simply put, marketing’s job is to put sales in the best position to engage. To help sales create more meaningful dialog and interaction, these marketers:

› use personalized outreach to increase awareness within an account. Technology from firms like Demandbase, Jabmo (formerly Azalead), and Rollworks (formerly AdRoll) deliver industry- or account-specific online ads and blanket accounts with individualized touches. Chart Industries, maker of industrial gas systems, uses Terminus to personalize ads by company, job function, and buying cycle stage. This precision approach increases ad dollar efficiency dramatically, says Judson Voss, business development and digital marketing manager. “Every impression we pay for now hits someone we want to engage and lets us see exactly what content of ours they are clicking on,” explains Voss.

› Capture the attention of specific decision makers or influencers. ABE is breathing new life into direct mail, with PFL and Sendoso emerging as the leading choice among those with whom we spoke. Bizible Marketing VP Dave Rigotti teams with PFL to send door-openers — like personalized boxes of chocolate — to the people with whom sales wants to get a meeting.13 For enterprise accounts, he works with FastCMO.com to custom-develop magazines featuring stories,

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interviews, and blog posts that share helpful information with key prospects and their teams. This approach helped Bizible grow its inside sales team from eight to 40 people in just one year because, as Rigotti puts it, “ABM helps marketing keep inside reps focused and busy.”

› Increase the salesperson’s visibility into and around key accounts. To build long-term relationships, Climeon makes key account managers (KAMs) the star of their own thought leadership and social media show. CMO Christopher Engman’s PR team researches, writes, and tests topics about clean tech and waste heat recovery. Marketing helps sales turn the hottest of these articles into email, LinkedIn in-mail, and physical letter templates for KAMs to use. Sales posts blogs and engages in social media to build its personal brands, and marketing then shares the best posts through the company’s social channels. This approach — and the visibility Climeon receives through companywide social sharing — helps KAMs build personal, helpful relationships with more than 20 contacts in each of their key accounts.

› reward patience and persistence rather than scoring the quick win. ABE won’t magically generate a bunch of new leads because — depending on the strategy you choose — not all accounts you target may be in the market for what you’re offering. To raise brand awareness and win trust before sales calls, marketers target the right people in the buying team with helpful tailored content that delivers value first. DocSend targets four different personas in ICP accounts, and COO Dave Koslow — who runs both marketing and sales development — established a rule that reps can’t retire an account until they’ve touched at least two people in each of the four personas multiple times. Standardizing sales outreach tasks and reinforcing perseverance with recognition helped DocSend triple its booking rate at target accounts.

three: ChOreOGrAPh YOur CustOMer dANCe stePs

ABE is not a relay race but a dance ensemble, moving as a coordinated conversation between members of the buying center and customer-facing functions. While one function may lead at different times, other groups remain involved in the process and stand ready to step forward when appropriate. Marketing acts as the choreographer to ensure every customer interaction stays in step with the brand promise. Orchestrating this customer dance will affect those who have daily interaction with customers — sales, support, and customer success managers — the most. Pacesetting marketers ease the burden by helping these teams:

› View accounts as a corporate asset. Just as there is no “I” in “team,” there is no “mine” in ABE. Target accounts need to hear from you on a regular basis, and you must share that task among marketing, sales, and post-sale teams — according to purchase stage progression — to keep costs low and communication consistent. Henry Bruce, senior VP of marketing at Contently, credits a simple rule with account engagement success: “Make it clear that the company owns the accounts, not the reps. Don’t allow reps to hang on to 100 accounts if they can only interact with a few in a meaningful manner. Marketing will always win on a cost-per-touch basis and can better scale interactions with relevant interesting content.”

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› Create a repeatable account cadence. Planning a sequenced set of steps that tells a story and mimics a conversation is an important part of a successful ABE strategy. Instead of a weekly drip-email campaign, Cloudera sends out a burst of four emails within days of each other, interspersed with phone calls from inside sales reps. Marketing and sales plan this activity burst around a specific reason — an upcoming event, an upgrade in features, or an interesting market development — and refers to it in every interaction. Each interaction also requests feedback — “Let us know if this was helpful,” or, “Can you refer me to someone else who might be interested?” — before closing with the bigger ask for a meeting or demo.

› understand the end-to-end buyers’ journey. Marketers help teams advance from account-specific marketing to engagement by capturing the steps buyers take to advance from stage to stage in the purchase process. SilkRoad brought in Engagio to help sales reps and marketing understand activity across the entire account by tracking engagement minutes by all contacts across an account. It uses Seismic to tag marketing content by industry, persona, and buying stage and make it easy for sales and field marketing to assemble and execute a broader array of customized plays. This type of visibility, insight, and modularity gives SilkRoad reps new confidence to pursue target accounts, resulting in a 98% adoption rate of ABE practices and tools.

FOur: use teChNOLOGY tO exPANd YOur suCCessFuL eFFOrts

For fast-growing companies like MongoDB — which supports more than 40,000 downloads of its product a day — targeting hundreds of well-segmented accounts assures you reach many of those ready buyers faster than the competition. Companies like Microsoft and SAP win big by mining their vast installed bases. ABE success depends on nailing your strategy, not building a whole new tech stack. Before investing in new technologies, top marketers:

› Prove their strategy and then invest to scale it up. Advances in marketing technology make it easier to automate account selection, data enrichment, and content personalization. But successful scale only follows successful strategy. Smart ABE practitioners start out modestly by designing approaches that win, retain, and grow specific accounts without breaking the tech piggybank. Adobe mainly leveraged its own tools to help grow its ABM program in the Americas from 22 strategic accounts in 2013 to a target list of more than 12,000 in 2018. LiveRamp hired Lattice to model the characteristics of successful deals and score prioritized accounts. After launching highly personalized outreach that boosted contact-to-meeting conversion by 33%, it then used Lattice models to uncover an additional 500 most-likely accounts.

› Fill in significant gaps in their current tech stack. Since we started tracking ABM technologies in 2016, the number of options crowding the field has more than doubled.14 Our recent Forrester New Wave™ focused on 14 of the most significant providers in the emerging platform category and found most currently deliver only a few key elements of functionality.15 While cloud-based solutions make it easy to switch suppliers if something better comes along, we continue to advise marketers to let their strategy guide technology choices — not the other way around. Regardless of your

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solution-level choices, customer data management and integration must be part of your marketing technology foundation because rich insightful data sets are the backbone of any account- or industry-focused approach.

› explore pay-for-play models with agencies and service providers. To reduce the time-to-value for human-resource-constrained marketing departments, B2B marketers turn to agency partners or managed service suppliers like eMedia, MRP, PureB2B, and TechTarget. These firms carry the technology investment load while helping target selected accounts, build personalized content, and syndicate it for general promotion. While more expensive than building engagement with internal resources, ABE marketers only pay for interactions created in target accounts and skip the headaches associated with a rapidly changing technology landscape. They also gain some room to experiment with different account-centered strategies.

recommendations

Account Engagement Accelerates Your Move To Customer Obsession

To ensure your firm’s offerings and experiences meet customers’ needs — and your brand promise comes through every customer interaction — marketing must lead the way in focusing your strategy, budget, and execution on winning, serving, and retaining customers. Forrester calls this being “customer obsessed,” and engaging customers around their specific account circumstances aligns with this end state. B2B marketers: To accelerate your evolution from ABM to ABE and customer obsession:

› Pick a strategy that solves a specific business need. Whether you target a handful of accounts or several thousand, no single approach to account-specific engagement is correct for every situation. The most successful examples today enjoy great working relationships between sales and marketing and align go-to-market strategy with specific business objectives — everything else is immaterial. Whether you are a novice or a seasoned veteran, continue to read the articles, talk to peers, and pick up tips at conferences, but distill all that intelligence into a strategy that makes sense for your specific circumstances, strengths, and deficiencies. Then forget about what everyone else is doing and get to work.

› Collect and distill insight to use and share it. You’re likely wondering which tactics and channels will appeal to your target accounts best. Stop and refocus your promotional lens: ABM succeeds through insights, and insights come when you pay attention. Whether they “like” posts on LinkedIn, share their ideas on Twitter, or publish or comment on blogs, the people you want to connect with are making their needs known. Before you start marketing to your next set of select accounts, spend a week or two researching their market and competitors, commenting on their social channels, and generally following them digitally.16 Host a show-and-tell session with screenshots and other visual examples to share what you learn with sales, product, services, and success management teams to develop a holistic perspective against which you can determine your engagement plan.

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› Modernize your marketing mindset. B2B marketers say they understand customers but often lack empathy for buyers’ real motivations — and the trials they face during the purchase journey.17 Now that you’ve made the commitment to focusing on fewer, more targeted accounts, you can’t continue to shape your current planning and execution with a mindset from the mass marketing era that fails to understand buyers as people. To increase innovative, empathetic thinking, assess your team’s dominant mindset, consciously work on ways to dislodge it, and create some space and resources to foster three new habits: Be human, be helpful, and be handy.18

› revisit the assumptions that inform your ICP and tAM often. Market and competitive changes, or simply the close of a deal, will alter your available market. Add a new capability, and your ICP changes. While it is important to pick an account engagement strategy and stick with it, successful practitioners know when to flex to accommodate changing conditions. This means objectively evaluating whether account selection, research, engagement plans, and orchestrated execution really improve on business objectives. If you fall short, then reexamine your hypotheses about market conditions and buyers’ needs. The more narrowly you focus, the better, which is counterintuitive to how many marketers approach ABE today.

› Curb your enthusiasm. Guess who else scanned headlines, heard from peers, and saw some tweets? Your sales counterparts and executive stakeholders may find assertions like, “ABM is the most effective marketing tactic,” appealing even if they never hear any evidence to back it up. To keep account-focused fervor under control, make any promises or objectives measurable and specific. While results can speak for themselves, it’s better to set expectations around what engagement means — and how you will measure it — before launching into a host of different tactics targeting specific accounts. Anna Fisher, senior director of marketing at ZoomInfo, said it best, “You only get one chance to make a first impression, so if the account is important to you, plan, test, and revise the plan again before you turn any ABM campaigns on it.”

What It Means

Customer Intimacy Becomes ABM’s Legacy

As they mature their adoption of and practices around ABM, B2B marketers will drop the qualifier “account-based” and just approach all marketing from an account-specific perspective. These marketers will think of themselves as relationship developers, not simply promoters of brands, products, and services. They will know their customers intimately and engage more empathetically than the competition. As more appropriate engagement leads to increases in wallet share, loyalty, advocacy, and shared successes, we expect:

› engagement to become marketing’s primary metric. As they become more effective at defining an ICP and scoping TAM, B2B marketers will limit go-to-market contact to just the best accounts. This will alter marketing’s primary responsibility from building brand and demand to creating lifelong engagement. Struggles to attribute marketing’s impact on the business will give way

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to measures like interaction, involvement, and intimacy, judged by the number and strength of metrics like “people actively referring us to peers,” “conversations about [topic X] in process,” and “community-validated proof points shared.”

› emotional appeals to replace the feature/function hard sell. Focusing on fewer or more specific accounts gives marketers the time and resources to understand buyers’ motivations and desired outcomes better than ever. After years of trying to sell features and capabilities, B2B outreach will adopt empathetic content and stronger emotional appeals to bolster its arguments for consideration and change.19 As a result, digital advertising — and the use of ad targeting and retargeting — replaces PR as B2B marketing’s primary brand building tool. All CMOs, not just those at the biggest firms with the biggest budgets, will put advertising creative to work and generate measurable ROI with it.

› ultra-personalization to displace outreach with intimacy. Personalization that targets every person in the buying committee will return the purchase power back to companies. Customer data management platforms that tease out relationships and shared histories allow marketers, sellers, and post-sale staff to shift seamlessly into and out of long-running account conversations. Detailed connections, such as, “Our CTO went to IIT Bombay with the CEO,” will inform engagement strategies at scale and shift the balance of business interactions from transactions to relationships. Teased out connection details turn sales into super sleuths. Messaging focused on decision-maker outcomes will replace product appeals and help buyers understand the real net-present-value and future potential of the purchase options they evaluate.

› Marketing to play a stronger role in the post-sale experience. Understanding a buying team’s life cycle and aligning customer-facing functions around every stage dramatically shifts post-sale strategies from cost containment to fostering engagement. Operational excellence takes a back seat to the imaginativeness, storytelling skills, customer insight, and communication expertise that marketing applies to onboarding new customers, getting them up to speed, introducing best practices, and ultimately converting them into advocates.20

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Supplemental Material

surVeY MethOdOLOGY

Forrester’s Q1 2018 Global B2B Marketing Benchmark Panel Online Survey was fielded to 151 B2B marketing professionals. For quality assurance, we screened respondents to ensure they met minimum standards in terms of content knowledge, job responsibilities, and budget insight.

Forrester fielded the survey from December 6, 2017, to January 5, 2018. Respondent incentives included a summary of the survey results and a copy of a previously published report.

This survey used a self-selected group of Forrester contacts knowledgeable about B2B marketing and is therefore not random. While nonrandom, the survey is still a valuable tool for understanding where users are today and where the industry is headed.

The data from this independent study is not guaranteed to be representative of the population, and, unless otherwise noted, statistical data is intended to be used for creative and not inferential purpose.

http://www.forrester.com/app

http://forr.com/1einFan

http://www.forrester.com/Analyst-Advisory/-/E-MPL172

https://www.forrester.com/events?N=10006+5025

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Forrester’s Q1 2017 International B2B Marketing Panel Online Survey was fielded from January to February 2017. As a result of online marketing and outreach to our customer base, we received 270 completed surveys, and as many as 121 responses on selected questions, from companies that sell primarily or exclusively to other firms. Survey respondents come from 16 different industries, with the majority working in business software (35%). Nearly 60 either are the topmost marketing executive (16%) or occupy a senior marketing role (13%). More than 130 (57%) work at companies with 1,000 employees or more. For quality assurance purposes, we required respondents to provide contact information and answer basic questions about their firm’s location of operations, industry, and number of employees. Respondent incentives included a complimentary copy of a Forrester report.

Exact sample sizes are provided in this report on a question-by-question basis. Survey responses are not guaranteed to be representative of the population at large. Unless otherwise noted, statistical data is intended to be used for descriptive and not inferential purposes.

COMPANIes INterVIeWed FOr thIs rePOrt

We would like to thank the individuals from the following companies who generously gave their time during the research for this report.

Adobe

BetterWorks

Bizible

Chart Industries

Climeon

Cloudera

Contently

DocSend

Evergage

Intacct/Sage

Invoca

LiveRamp, an Acxiom company

MongoDB

National Instruments

Salsify

SAP

ServiceMax/GE Digital

SilkRoad

TechTarget

Zenoss

ZoomInfo

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Endnotes1 Source: Forrester’s Q1 2017 International B2B Marketing Panel Online Survey.

2 See the Forrester report “Predictions 2017: ABM Boosts B2B Marketing’s Customer Obsession IQ.”

3 This percentage decreased from 73% in our previous survey, but it still represents the majority of respondents. Source: Forrester’s Q1 2017 International B2B Marketing Panel Online Survey and Forrester’s Q1 2018 Global B2B Marketing Benchmark Panel Online Survey.

4 See the Forrester report “Predictions 2018: Digital Disruption Is The New Normal For B2B Marketing.”

5 See the Forrester report “The B2B Marketer’s Guide To Benchmarking Customer Obsession Maturity.”

6 See the Forrester report “Account-Based Marketing Brings Marketing And Sales Into The Same Orbit.”

7 See the Forrester report “Account-Based Marketing Will Elevate, Not Eclipse, Lead-To-Revenue Management.”

8 See the Forrester report “Metrics That Matter In Account-Based Marketing.”

9 See the Forrester report “Retro Yet Revolutionary: Demystifying Account-Based Marketing.”

10 See the Forrester report “B2B Marketing’s Big Data Destiny.”

11 See the Forrester report “What’s Possible With Predictive Marketing Right Now?”

12 See the Forrester report “Account-Based Marketing Brings Marketing And Sales Into The Same Orbit.”

13 In May 2018, Marketo announced its intention to acquire Bizible.

14 See the Forrester report “Vendor Landscape: Account-Based Marketing, Q4 2016.”

15 See the Forrester report “The Forrester New Wave™: ABM Platforms, Q2 2018.”

16 See the Forrester report “Add Social Selling To Your B2B Marketing Repertoire.”

17 See the Forrester report “Empathy: The Hallmark Of The Customer-Obsessed B2B Marketer.”

18 See the Forrester report “Three Steps To Modernize Marketing Thinking.”

19 See the Forrester report “It’s Not About You: B2B Marketers Need To Change How They Think About Branding.”

20 See the Forrester report “Advocate Marketing Creates B2B Customer Relationships That Last A Lifetime.”
















