The Case for Account-Based Marketing (Video)

IntelliPhi CEO Anand Thaker explains the value of integrated account-based marketing (ABM) for B2B operations in this clip from CRM evolution 2018.

See more clips from CRM evolution in the CRM evolution Conference video portal. Learn more about CRM evolution here. 

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Anand Thaker: The idea of account-based marketing really is all about orchestration. Traditionally, you know all about the sales and marketing wanting to be its own departments, doing its own thing, and that's all changing. Consumers don't give a crap. Why should we?

What you really want is an orchestration of your organization, your team to work with the marketplace generally speaking. But there's a lot of challenges to get to that point. And sometimes the most obvious things have to be stated. And that's part of why ABM came about. It reinforced the number of a series of metrics.

This applies a lot to the B2B space and not so much the B2C space. That is a caveat. There are some interesting numbers that take an enterprise deal with 17 influencers. It is incredible how many people we're talking about.

So even in a small or medium-sized business, there's usually more than one decision maker. And it's usually ranging from three to this number of people that you've got to work on in some capacity. Don't forget that there are peers who are influencing those people who aren't even in this organization that you have to work on as well.

There's a reputation at hand that you're working on to make that happen. Someone told me that account-based sales is like, "It's sales, isn't it?" We used to call that B2B marketing. But it's multifaceted because a lot of the tools that are out there are integrated solutions. There are a few that are trying to orchestrate across the board. CRM solutions are starting to actually talk about themselves in terms of ABM, that they can orchestrate across sales and marketing.

There's marketing automation companies that are saying they're doing ABM. There's a hell of a lot of confusion in this space. A lot of buzz, a lot of opportunity.

I came from the marketing automation space and I think this was part of the aspiration in the first place: getting people to work together.

You got to hustle, right? We call it dialing for dollars. For the marketer it's like trying to churn out as much great material and get as many likes, get as much stuff going on. The reality is you want to be a little more specific.

The expectations of consumer companies is that you should know something about them. You can't just go in blind and try to make that happen.

A coordinated effort between sales and marketing is incredibly important. I wrote a blog post and I've been talking about this for a while too about why I was struggling with sales, with account based marketing as a term, especially since I was working on a company that was driven on trying to get sales and marketing together. Then we just left sales out of the picture.

I'm pretty allergic to hype. However, I respect its power. If we can get marketers to realize that what they need to accomplish is the interesting aspects of sales in terms of building a relationship at scale, that's a really nice aspiration to try to achieve.

 

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