A Common Sense–Based Approach to Account-Based Marketing

ABM “aligns marketing with the way successful salespeople have always sold: To close a deal, multiple individuals inside an account need to be brought in,” Medina continues. “Account-based marketing is all about marketing working in lock-step with sales to wage successful campaigns to all stakeholders in an account.”

Experts agree that account-based marketing is best suited to large opportunities that involve multiple parties. David Ratcliff, CEO of Vendemore, a provider of account-based marketing solutions, points out that the technique “is a way to reach as many stakeholders and decision makers as possible.”

“The bigger the deal, the longer the sales cycle, the more complicated the purchasing process, and the harder it is for sales teams to get access to the right stakeholders,” the more effective an account-based approach will be, he adds.

“In general, account-based marketing is effective for buyers who aren’t actively looking for your solution or may look elsewhere to solve their problems,” says Amber Kemmis, client services director at SmartBug Media, an inbound marketing agency. “[Also], if your B2B company is very niche and only serves a specific market, account-based marketing is definitely going to be effective for you.”

As an example, she points to a company whose medical devices can only be purchased by a handful of qualified surgeons around the world. “You know exactly who you need to reach, and account-based marketing is the best way to do that,” she says.

IDENTIFYING THE BENEFITS OF ABM

While experts identify a range of benefits to account-based marketing, those benefits largely stem from the strategy’s ability to increase vendor influence with particular clients. Citing research from Gartner, Ratcliff notes that 68 percent of the conversations concerning any purchase take place entirely within the buying company and exclude the vendor. For this reason, he says, account-based marketing “is a crucial piece to influencing that conversation, even when you are not a direct participant.”

Using account-based marketing to reinforce the company’s position with specific clients is particularly important because of the changing buying process at most organizations today. While individual consumers make purchases in a quick, automated way, the purchasing process within organizations—particularly legacy ones—has become more collaborative, according to Renton.

She notes that there are “often many people who can influence and have an impact on a purchasing decision,” and that account-based marketing “enables you to broaden your reach within an organization and to become familiar with and establish relationships across multiple functions in a way that will ultimately enable you to be more embedded in that organization. It strengthens your grip inside of an organization.”

B2B companies often have just one or two contacts within client organizations, Renton says, and are at risk of losing the sale if those people ever leave. Account-based marketing acts “like a security blanket that provides stability” should that happen, creating a larger network within an organization.

Account-based marketing also strengthens the relationship between marketing and sales. Tyler Lessard, vice president of marketing at Vidyard, a provider of a video management platform for businesses, says account-based marketing promotes this connection by “having marketing teams focus more resources on generating demand within the same set of accounts that the sales teams are actively prospecting.” This starkly contrasts with the strategy of flooding sales teams with “leads that appear to be hot but in reality are part of a business that doesn’t align with their target market.”

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