ABM In Action - December 2017

Bryant Lau

Christopher Engman

Masha Finkelstein

Amy Holtzman

THE PRACTITONERS

Mark Ogne

Rob Leavitt

Patrice Greene

Laura Ramos

Matt Senatore

INDUSTRY ANALYSTS

Mark Organ

Michael Burton

Tom O'Regan

Peter Isaacson

Stephanie Kidder

Jason Jue

Heidi Bullock

Jessica Cross

Peter Herbert

THE EXPERTS

EDITOR’S LETTER

CATEGORIES

• Greater focus on market, customer, and competitive intelligence, with core teams prioritizing insight-to- action to develop new offerings, optimize campaigns, and strengthen customer relationships • Greater emphasis on cross-organizational (and partner) collaboration to ensure customer value, success, and innovation within existing accounts, with strong integration across marketing, sales, service, and R&D • Strong commitment to business, commercial and even sales education and training for marketers to ensure they understand and can address the business needs of targeted accounts, mostly within more industry- focused thought leadership and programs • A continued decline in mass marketing approaches, such as broad-based advertising, content, and events

Top Experts Share Thoughts On What ABM Will Look Like In 2020

Practitioners

The

GROUP THREE

Industry

Analysts

GROUP TWO

Bryant Lau

Director of Growth Platforms and Analytics, HighSpot

Christopher Engman

Author and CMO/CRO, Climeon

Christopher Engman Climeon

Bryant Lau Highspot

Masha Finkelstein BetterWorks

Amy Holtzman Splash

The

Practitioners

What Will ABM Look Like In The Year 2020?

CMO, Engagio

Heidi Bullock

Laura Ramos

VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

Rob Leavitt

SVP, ITSMA

Mark Ogne

Founder, ABM Consortium

Amy Holtzman

VP of Marketing, Splash

Masha Finkelstein

Head Of Growth, BetterWorks

Patrice Greene

Co-Founder & President, Inverta

Mark Organ

Matt Senatore

Michael Burton

SVP Data Sales & Co-Founder, Bombora

Tom O’Regan

Peter Isaacson

CMO, Demandbase

Stephanie Kidder

Founder and CEO, Influitive

CMO, Azalead

CMO, Triblio

Jason Jue

EDITOR'S LETTER

Experts

SPECIAL ISSUE

December 2017

In 2020, account-based marketing will be the de facto approach to B2B marketing. It’s hard to argue with an approach that efficiently focuses on an aligned go-to-market team — sales, marketing, customer success and community — on engaging the right people at the right accounts with relevant, personalized, highly valuable content about solutions that will help them. By 2020, the technical, operational and organizational challenges with executing ABM will be in the rear-view mirror. Here are four major predictions I have for ABM in 2020: First, in 2020, CEOs, investors and revenue leaders will all support and expect that companies can execute highly targeted go-to-market strategies. Clearly, efficient growth is attractive to all these stakeholders. Today, too many leaders still recommend high-velocity, broad-based approaches and expect to see traditional marketing and sales development metrics. For example, we hear “How many calls do you make in a day?” versus “How much engagement have you created and measured with the buying committee at your target accounts?” Once the paradigm has shifted and our most influential leaders expect efficient growth over high-velocity activity, and know how to advise and teach their organizations on these approaches, everyone will get better. Second, go-to-market team leaders will know that competitive advantage, or survival, will depend on their aligning as one revenue team, with a significant focus on account-based success. We still have a schism in the system of most B2B companies that is largely caused by traditional lead-based metrics and activity management, as well as organizational structure. When the revenue team acts in silos — when they are responsible for measuring results in silos — it causes conflict. Today, we still hear how “Sales doesn’t follow up with leads,” “MQL quality is poor,” and “We’re too outbound, we need more inbound” (or vice versa). Collaborative mindsets and accountability for one set of pipeline and revenue numbers makes all the difference. Winning together as #OneTeam is a solid strategy. Third, measurement of the revenue team will evolve from lead-based, inbound/outbound metrics to account-based metrics. The ABM scorecard will evolve from an innovative quirk to the foundation of B2B practice. Today, we don’t see many organizations focused on adapting to and making decisions based on an account-based scorecard. In the future, our practices will focus on what’s happening in accounts with the highest fit based on AI-assisted scoring. At Terminus, we use the “secret formula of account-based marketing” which is Fit + Intent + Engagement. This helps us understand who is actively in market for a solution based on data signals, and I believe more GTM teams will adopt this model. B2B teams will prioritize accounts based on a lot of data that is consumed and analyzed, not by basic characteristics of accounts or our excitement about certain brands. And as we prioritize these accounts, we will measure awareness, engagement and progression through our funnel seamlessly. We will care more about how different types of sales and marketing activities influence the buyer’s journey rather than the “source” of a form fill. And, we will no longer run our businesses off of form fills: we will tell stories to create customer relationships and orchestrate incredible buyer experiences. Finally, technology in 2020 will enable anyone to do data-driven, dynamic ABM that is also more human. Today, a complex ABM program requires hacking and a lot of spreadsheets. In the near future, we will have an abundance of integrated platforms and data, the ability to plan and automate our tactics for specific accounts and important people in them, the tools to orchestrate relevant and personalized content in a variety of channels, and the analytics to watch our success and adapt quickly when we don’t realize success. There is a lot of energy going in to solving integration and orchestration issues around ABM now, and we will soon see the benefits. One of the main benefits will be our ability to easily create buyer experiences that are more tailored or personalized and more valuable for the buyer. By 2020, B2B marketing will be account-based. We’re getting closer, and soon our organizations will be aligned and empowered with the tech to efficiently grow.

GROUP ONE

Mark Organ Influitive

Michael Burton Bombora

Tom O’Regan Madison Logic

Peter Isaacson Demandbase

Industry

Analysts

What Will ABM Look Like In The Year 2020?

Mark Ogne The Account-Based Marketing Consortium

Rob Leavitt ITSMA

Patrice Greene Inverta

Laura Ramos Forrester Research

Matt Senatore SiriusDecisions

VP of Marketing, Terminus

Peter Herbert

Service Director, Account-Based Marketing, SiriusDecisions

CEO, Madison Logic

Head Of Customer Lifecycle, AdRoll

Jessica Cross

In 2020, ABM will be a well-adopted strategy. Most B2B companies will leverage it in some form or another. I think there are a few key areas we will see improvements around. 1. Technology – There will be a standardization on platforms. As more technologies and tools emerge to support ABM, companies must rely on a platform to normalize account data and information. I think the winning platforms will be open and will support integrations that support customization. In some cases, in the enterprise for example, we will start seeing marketing automation being phased out of some companies. Predictive capabilities will be more fine-tuned and accurate. 2. Process – This is currently where a lot of revenue teams struggle (how to implement a new process – especially with heavy sales involvement). Technology will make orchestration easier and there will be more published examples from companies and analysts. 3. People – The reality of marketing being the steward of the customer journey will be more accurate because technology will have evolved to support this vision. Marketers will be the ‘go to’ for sales and customer support. In fact, I predict in the next few years that ABM will be another team within marketing – much like how organizations have demand generation teams, they will also build ABM teams. And, in the next handful of years, ABM will be a core skill of tomorrow’s CMOs.

I don’t think anyone could have predicted how significantly ABM would have changed the MarTech world this year, but as we create our 2018 plans, it is increasingly apparent that marketing teams no longer think, work, or measure performance in the same way as they did just a year ago. With the increased popularity of account-based ads, ABM-centric platforms, and increased dependence on clean data, marketers will continue to experience significant change. Here are a few of my predictions for ABM by the year 2020: 1) Tech Stacks Will Be Account-Based By Default Many marketing automation and CRM solutions still have a lead-first mentality. This has resulted in the need for lead-to-account matching solutions. By 2020, CRM and marketing automation solutions will be account-based by default without any additional solutions. 2) Open-Source Database Of Accounts And Their Associated Unique IDs When moving from leads to accounts we inherently lose the ability to leverage the lead’s email address as a unique ID. Being that accounts don’t have a comparable identifier, tools that wish to aggregate their account data will have to find a common source of truth. This will lead to the adoption of a common open-source list of accounts with unique identifiers. 3) Our Tactics Will Change Dramatically, Again One of the primary reasons that ABM works, is that you can invest in channels that have comparably less noise than more traditional channels. This dynamic has shifted many marketers from “spray and pray” tactics to leveraging more targeted channels like sales development teams and account-based ads. I predict that we will see many of the tactics that have a low barrier to entry become over-crowded, resulting in diminished returns. Astute marketers will realize that greater resources will need to be applied to more costly tactics to cut-through the noise. 4) The Rise Of The Demand Gen Team What historically has been thought of as Marketing and Inside Sales will converge into a single demand gen team. Companies that adopt this approach will gain a significant advantage as it increases collaboration and drives greater alignment across campaigns. It eliminates the wall between the two teams and instead holds all directly accountable for funnel goals. With the value of ABM being demonstrated by many companies, there will be a new role created for marketers that specialize in account-based marketing. This role will be a combination of field marketer and demand generation with a strong focus on collaboration with the Sales Development function.

My specialty within ABM revolves around ‘Mega Deal ABM.’ In my experience gained from a few hundred ABM programs, Mega Deal ABM is only suitable for lists of up to about 50 target accounts. For lists of up to 100 accounts, a more segment-based ABM strategy can be applied where segment-specific marketing can be mixed with one or two account-specific marketing activities. Moving into 2018 (and 2020), I think we will see more mature Mega Deal ABM programs, such as the one that we have at Climeon. Climeon is the world leader in converting low temperature heat into electricity. Our focus is about 40 existing and potential customers that we have divided into three different engagement and spending levels. Here is how we will approach ABM in the future: Great: This is our largest list. For these accounts, we mix IP-targeted ads, emails, InMails, letters and account-based social selling. Each account gets to see five to seven ads that we blend uniquely per account. We have a “library” of more than 100 ads that cover all subjects that we want to promote to our potential customer. Should we feel that we miss a subject that is important to promote to an account, we create an ad so the ad library is constantly growing and evolving. The emails, InMails and letters are written and executed by sales with limited coaching from marketing. All social selling is also driven by sales. A few might say that having sales spending their time on ABM is too slow and it doesn’t scale. My experience is that you need to write the communication per recipient if you want to have a high response rate. Climeon’s response rate is about 50%. It is OK if one email takes 30 minutes to an hour to write. The top 20-30 names in each top account are incredibly valuable. Excellent: The accounts that are on this list get all the TLC that the accounts on the "Great" list do. On top of that, we create account-specific content. This content is then distributed using IP-targeted ads, emails/InMails and letters. We also add tailor-made lunch-and-learn sessions for each target account. Lunch-and-learn in the customer's offices or delivered via an account-specific webinar is highly effective. The lunch-and-learn format must truly deliver value and cover a subject that is bigger than what you sell. Ludicrous: Needless to say, this is our smallest list. These companies get all of the above. In addition, we also buy outdoor advertising around the key offices. This is a rather expensive component so the accounts that we target for this must have both a good likelihood of closing and a very big business potential. Other trends that I see within ABM is to have the account-based marketers reporting to both the marketing team and to the head of the account. Many Mega Deal account teams are five to 20 FTEs. At least one of these is an ABM resource. In line with this, we will also see more and more CRO titles where marketing and sales are coordinated by one person in the top. I believe that we will see more significant spending on ABM. More and more companies are starting to see a good ROI on their ABM spend, which will make ABM go from a hyped trend to an established marketing form. In my experience, most large companies have a very top-heavy profitability distribution from their customers. The top percentages (1-5%) of their customers often contribute with over 80% of revenue and profitability. Given that, it makes total sense to move marketing spend to the customers that can fuel revenue and profitability.

• Marketers will no longer need to spend any budget on showing ads to non-targeted accounts and people not involved in buying decisions within the target accounts — every channel will have filtering on an account and individual role level. • Sales will know exactly which accounts to outbound to as defined by their CRM system settings and optimized as they close more customers. • Account nurturing will be completely automated through all stages of the funnel starting with ad and website personalization, serving optimal content experiences for the viewer based on who they are and whether or not they are on the named account list, and ending with sales follow-up on active opportunities. • Product features will be customized based on the named account usage and needs to keep attracting more customers from similar backgrounds.

With ABM gaining traction, it will continue to be the primary marketing methodology for B2B companies going after specific accounts. Because ABM has been around forever in some form, more companies will come to realize that they need to adopt it as a formal approach to how they tackle sales and marketing. Technologies around account-based marketing and selling will continue to become more advanced, and will be able to support businesses in a more efficient manner and lower cost. Technology stacks for a B2B company will likely stop growing with fewer technologies being able to solve more problems, but I can see new players emerging in the market. Marketing automation systems will likely develop more functionality to support an ABM approach as we already started seeing this year. Marketers will be able to optimize top-of-funnel spend as targeting becomes more advanced and the universe of potential prospects can be narrowed down further to only target people who are either decision-makers or influencers on buying decisions for the product. ABM will not be limited by prospect marketing. Customer marketing will evolve, as well, and get more integrated with product planning and strategy. Product teams will collaborate with marketing and sales teams in even deeper automated ways and response to the top-of-funnel marketing from named accounts will inform feature planning and product development. This will result in products becoming stickier — specifically with the named accounts making businesses more successful in the long run. To summarize:

By 2020, ABM will have proven itself as the key way for B2B companies to acquire and grow enterprise accounts. It will no longer be seen as a fad that marketers are struggling to put into practice. Instead, it will be a much more integrated approach that's common practice in any good B2B marketer's strategy. We'll also finally see which of the waves of ABM technologies work — and those will be integrated into the B2B marketer's core tech stack — while the ones that never realized their promises will have fallen into the abyss.

Over the next three years we’ll see the account-based marketing story play out like “big Shiny” movements of yesteryear. Hype surrounding movements and new acronyms will give way to strategy and the need for content, team allocation, new KPIs and perhaps some new technology investments. The indicator I’m focused on right now is the perception of B2B marketers to execute ABM. Contrasting the heady, hand waiving stats for adoption and intent (around 90%), we see a stark contrast in confidence (less than 20%). The gap is precisely where marketers indicate their needs. Moving aside gigabytes of E-books and countless hours of vendor presentations, ABM practitioners will shift their focus: A platform is not a strategy: Early stage, vendor-centric content will give way to the right ideas. B2B tech innovation is like the movie Groundhog Day. The repeated story … “Big Shiny” Tech goes to market, solves everything, and is easy, beautiful, mysterious and venture-backed. Remember the early pitches around marketing automation, lead management and social media marketing? Have they changed over time? Yes, and they will for ABM. Those who seek confidence in their ability to execute ABM will realize that ABM is not a top-of-funnel, media-driven silo of data and activity. They will appreciate and understand the way that target accounts interact with them today and use that knowledge to prioritize and bolster those relationships. All engagement is not created equal: An “Account” has never bought anything. Period. However, people at those accounts buy things all the time. This will become the leading strategy element for ABM as the market matures. The only way marketers can progress an account relationship, and help their sales counterparts, is to identify personas that make purchase decisions, identify and acquire relationships with more of them at each target account, and help the sales team engage them. ABM shifts the success metrics from volume, even at an account level, to value … value based upon the role of the person engaged and the strength of the touch point. Engagement occurs across channels, data exists across platforms: Buyers at your target accounts don’t care about your tech stack and don’t realize that different people manage different platforms. They simply want to find what they need faster and easier … and reward people that can do this with deeper consideration and engagement. The ability to reassemble this cross-platform understanding of target accounts will become the new table stakes. The ability to act upon this information will separate the winners from losers!

ABM has been evolving since the term was coined about 10 years ago. In the last two years, there has been a growing interest in ABM because technology allowed account-specific targeting and measurement, but also because marketers realized there had to be a better way for generating demand. By 2020, the biggest change to how ABM is approached will be that research will once again be a key capability marketing brings to the table. But research and advertising changes could change how marketing operates. Collaboration — not alignment — with sales will be the norm, and we’ll have a new term to add to our marketing vocabulary: revtech. Fast forward three years and what is old will be new again. There will be a resurgence in account-focused research, which used to be a key deliverable from marketing organizations. ABM is all about understanding your target audience, whether that is a person, an account or a group of accounts. That insight informs your strategy, messaging and programs. Which, in turn, allows your buyer to receive and understand the value of your solution that they want to learn more. The only way to create and execute such compelling messages and programs is through research. The trend now is to gather intent data and find large segments of accounts that show some indication of being interested in a topic. While that is a key tactic, that is not research. Market research consists of investigating hypotheses, suggesting new interpretations of data and communicating the knowledge acquired to a larger audience. By 2020, marketing hones their research capabilities again so they have a seat at the executive table. That insight is what will drive their company strategy and ABM programs. Producing sound research relies on having accurate primary and secondary data. Technology will play a big role here to secure the level of data required to deliver key insights to their teams. Other factors we see affecting ABM in 2020 include tighter collaboration with sales — on both strategy and execution of ABM programs. Collaboration will replace alignment in how sales and marketing work together. It will no longer be a baton toss of MQLs for sales to work, but instead a team effort to engage and close accounts. Both will have an appreciation for the skills the other brings to the partnership. Technology still will loom large in 2020 with adtech, martech and salestech merging to become “revtech.” You heard it here first — #revtech.

The rapid growth of ABM in recent years will no doubt continue into 2020 as more and more companies take the plunge. Buyers will continue to demand increasingly personalized solutions; marketing processes and tools to support account-based approaches will continue to improve; and early ABM leaders have already shown persuasively that the approach generates more substantial results than less targeted alternatives. At the same time, though, the reality that moving to ABM at scale is actually quite difficult will cut down on the hype that has also taken hold over the past few years. At the risk of wishful thinking, I suspect that we’ll see a lot less of the “five simple steps to kill it with ABM” blog posts in 2020 than we’ve seen in 2017! Most companies today are still quite early in their ABM programs, and have yet to grapple with the organizational challenges that come with building a sophisticated, segmented approach. They’re either in the pilot phase with a few strategic accounts, or in the first year or two of a targeted demand generation effort with several hundred named accounts. Only a relative few companies are well along with a blended strategy that provides both breadth and depth across multiple tiers of accounts. We’ll see a much more mature ABM landscape in 2020, with a great many B2B organizations implementing all three types of ABM: One-to-one with their most strategic accounts, One-to-Few with the second tier, and One-to-Many for broad coverage across hundreds or even several thousand named accounts. ABM will be a fully established part of the strategic marketing landscape, with debates focusing more on how to optimize than whether or not to try and where to begin. As important, we’ll see several important shifts in how marketing leaders and organizations prioritize investments and program development, as follows: Some things won’t change by 2020, unfortunately: continued complaints about the gap between sales and marketing, the lack of full respect for marketing across the C-suite, and the endless debates about art vs. science to ensure the greatest possible impact. ABM can help with these, but it can’t work miracles!

In three years, ABM will look more like top-notch segment marketing — driven by rich data analytics and enhanced by personalized content — than like marketing resources dedicated to specific accounts to support sales. Dedicating marketing headcount to specific accounts creates early wins through more consistent communication and deeper relationships that open wallets and earn more trust. But this approach fails to scale beyond a few dozen accounts. Marketing’s strength is its ability to scale — to reach specific audiences, accounts, and buyers at volume using messages, content, and information that creates awareness, increases interest, and depositions the competition. Replicating marketing resources in accounts won’t be cost effective or practical. Scaling ABM does not require more resources or different technology. We have already seen how martech can put too much focus on generating individual leads, and not enough emphasis on whether those leads are the right kinds or are from the right kinds of accounts. ABM will help marketers to get their martech stack right and to focus working budgets on the right kinds of programs that engage the right accounts and buyers. In the near term, more marketers will move from experimentation to execution with ABM and find out that it is not a magic cure for poor demand generation approaches and poorly executed automation. This realization will force marketers to make better decisions when selecting accounts — and base choices on similarity with ideal customer profiles, not on just gut feel. The selection process will include not only sales’ input, but an analysis of account readiness — whether the account has sufficient need for the solution and whether the key buyers in the account are showing signals of interest or intent to buy. By 2020, we will stop calling ABM “account-based marketing” and shift to a term that encompasses the entire customer lifecycle. The most successful marketers will take the lead in getting their entire organization to obsess over delivering customer experiences that matter to the customers. These experiences will delight buyers in the degree of simplicity, reliability, and empathy these experiences create. ABM marketers will shift their mindset from campaigns and broad-based communication to creating customers experiences that are human and helpful. Marketing will use data and tools to become more agile and accountable — and to help the whole business do the same. Marketers will use personas and journey maps to better understand the dynamics of the buying center, but offer more self-service educational experiences, and helpful advice that encourages target buyers to learn more about what the marketers and sellers have to offer. With greater deal flow predictability, marketing and sales will work together better and help customers solve real problems, not just push product.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen increased focus on ABM as companies emerge from dipping their toes in the waters by piloting, to expanding their efforts with better account coverage and increased budgets. As initiatives have expanded from pilots to more substantive programs — and obvious results are being achieved — it is not surprising that organizations are allocating a greater share of marketing dollars toward accelerating the deployment of ABM. Our SiriusDecisions 2016 State of ABM Study illustrates that with only 17% of respondents reporting that ABM garnered more than 30% of their marketing budget. Whereas this year, larger percentages of the budget are being allocated to ABM — our 2017 study shows that 54% of respondents reported that more than 30% of their marketing budget is earmarked for ABM! This increased momentum will continue to accelerate over the next few years into 2020, including investments in technology, services, processes and people. Regarding technology, companies will be investing more in key areas, including account/contact data and insights, predictive modeling, intent monitoring and the use of artificial intelligence for real-time personalization (e.g. Web, advertising, content, offers). Vendors will continue to build, buy or partner to provide a more complete solution to B2B companies seeking to optimize their ABM efforts. Companies should be building a two-to-five-year tech roadmap, and allocate budget and other resources to pilot and implement emerging technologies. Another area where we anticipate increased focus is on large opportunity marketing pursuits — a subset of what we call large one-to-one account-based marketing. Mid-to-large enterprises will establish more formal cross-functional “win swat” teams, processes, governance and measurement to support a more disciplined approach to land major deals. Overtime, we’ll see guidelines established around percentage of SG&A budget for overall program spend and specific opportunity budgets in line with deal size and expected outcomes. In addition, we anticipate outside agency support often being involved to complement the internal account teams, bringing compelling creative and additional executional support. Lastly, by 2020, we might expect to see more comprehensive demand creation teams or demand centers that are designing and executing across multiple go-to-market approaches more regularly. Each approach should have different team members with their own capabilities, require different insights and customization, necessitate different interlock and communication responsibilities, as well as have different metrics for success. High-performing marketing organizations of the future will embrace multiple approaches to optimize their growth.

The point of ABM is to provide a better buying experience by being highly personalized and treating target companies as "markets of one." This means connecting directly with each individual influencing the purchasing decision, sometimes across multiple departments, in a way that acknowledges their specific role and perspective. The challenge today is that traditional marketing channels rarely connect with anyone.   In 2020, successful companies will go-to-market “Advocate First,” leveraging their customers’ trusted relationships to connect with new prospects. The way to deliver the best buying experience is for everyone to be sold and marketed to by highly relevant and credible peers, rather than commission-based sales reps and vendor-generated marketing material. Why ask questions of someone who only gets paid if she sells you something when your trusted peers are able to give you the straight story? Who wants to play with a hypothetical ROI calculator when they can talk to someone in a similar situation who has real-world experience with the solution being considered? Companies that design and develop ABM programs with an “Advocate First” mentality will rely on advocate input for better target account selection, warm introductions to members of the purchasing team and customer validation of success throughout the buying cycle. This triad of advocate support from the top to the bottom of the funnel will accelerate sales. And the bonus is that these same customer advocates will even get involved post sale to ensure customer success, renewal and growth. Most of this process will be enabled to occur naturally via advocate communities that target account prospects are invited to enter for a self-paced path of discovery. “Communities that convert” will offer buyers the information they seek, delivered by individuals that they trust, at a scale that only exists in the dreams of today’s marketing leaders.

ABM will continue to evolve from a campaign strategy to a company culture. We’ve seen significant progress in the last 12 months, as sales and marketing teams realize that deep alignment is creating tangible lift. Leaving account-based strategies to individual campaigns, or even individual departments, is like resolving to launch a healthy lifestyle by only changing your diet. To fully transform, an individual would have to focus on exercise, diet, sleep, work-life balance and more. ABM is the same. With each department that aligns around one unified strategy, all the participating departments feel the positive impact of their own efforts. As an illustration, we saw one customer deploy a specific type of account-based sales development strategy at the inside sales level, and they grew their percentage of pipeline contribution from 12% to 24%. When marketing joined them by aligning programs using the same strategy to target the same companies, the same inside sales team started contributing 33% of pipeline. Now, to take it further, imagine product and product marketing homed in on the specific account types that were driving this success. They could understand commonalities in pain points, benefits and use cases, and accelerate product features and documentation that focus specifically on the same strategies that are driving the success across inside sales and marketing. ABM is smart. Unified account-based targeting across Sales, Marketing, C-Suite, product, etc. is smarter, and it will continue to become more apparent as account-based strategies permeate more departments.

According to SiriusDecisions, at least 62% of the B2B companies they surveyed this year have an ABM system in place. That’s considerably up over last year when only 41% reported using ABM in some form. That’s not meteoric growth, but it is significant. By 2020, I expect that we’ll be pretty much at 100%. These stats indicate that, for many organizations, ABM is still in the nascent stages. Both the end-users and the technology itself are still maturing. Right now, ABM tends to be a siloed practice. But by 2020, I see it far better integrated into the tech stack — part-and-parcel of marketing automation and CRM — an important tool for sales and marketing teams alike. And that’s a crucial point. The earliest ABM adopters, B2B marketers, have seen its benefits. The same SiriusDecisions ABM survey reports that 91% of those they surveyed reported that their average deal sizes are larger for ABM accounts than for non-ABM accounts. It’s clearly working for them. But soon — probably even sooner than 2020 — sales teams are going to realize the advantage that ABM insights can give to them. In short, by 2020, ABM will be an end-to-end program that can take a prospect from contact all the way to conversion … and beyond.

By 2020, account-based marketing (ABM) as we know it will cease to exist. Much in the same way demand generation became an integrated and accepted part of B2B marketing 10 years ago, ABM will soon become the rule, rather than the exception. We’ll see B2B marketers rely on the strategy to engage and convert their audiences, but instead of relying on a static list of companies, they’ll leverage new AI-powered intent data to create an evergreen, dynamic list of accounts — immediately prioritizing and aligning sales and marketing resources to the accounts showing higher levels of intent based on what they’re researching, reading and writing about. This type of personalization and engagement will pave the way for an era of 1:1 marketing, one where marketers can recommend content for each individual visitor based on their needs and interest. Alongside ABM’s widespread adoption, we’ll see an influx of new vendors enter the ABM technology space — offering solutions for every piece of the strategy, from account identification to ABM measurement. But the companies that will see success in 2020 won’t be the ones patchworking all these point solutions, instead they’ll be the ones investing in vendors that offer end-to-end ABM platforms and integrate seamlessly into broader marketing, advertising and sales technologies, including their CRM and MAS. As a result, marketing teams will become even more focused on collaboration and will be able to create audiences, run coordinated campaigns and measure through one ABM solution. Finally, we’ll see ABM’s influence in 2020 extend beyond enterprise and mid-market companies. B2B agencies will find themselves at the center of the ABM conversation, counseling their clients on how to best approach the crowded ABM landscape and its many nuances. In addition to increased B2B agency involvement, we’ll also see an increased focus on ABM education. ABM classes, certifications, conferences and programs will continue to crop up, and will showcase new ways to innovate on the strategy.

ABM is really transforming how companies talk to and engage with their best prospects on a direct and personal level. By 2020, the level of personalization will only deepen — and not just from a technology standpoint — but in terms of relationships and conversations. B2B marketing will evolve to be much more like the consumer shopping experience we are used to today on Amazon or Netflix, with more meaningful and tailored interactions happening both on and offline. While some of this will be enabled by technology advances in areas like AI and machine learning, the real transformation is the shift towards ultra-personalized engagement from content, information and interactive conversations across the entire seller’s organization. ABM will be as much about what you say to customers — who, even if they are in the same company, often have different needs depending on their role within the buying committee — to keep them engaged and informed throughout their respective buying journeys. We also foresee ABM becoming much more widely adopted by companies who might not necessarily be early adopters of marketing technology, such as in industrial manufacturing, for example. The platforms are more intuitive, there are more services available to get people started and productive, and the sales and cost benefits are hard to ignore.

Leading companies will have adopted the account funnel for demand generation. In two years, the account-based approach will be a proven competitive advantage. Any remaining leads-focused marketers will be left playing catch-up. The lead gen model relies on email form-fills to connect with prospects. However, when you look at the modern B2B buyer journey, this model faces two main roadblocks: one is that most stakeholders don’t fill out forms. And two, even for those who do convert on forms, form-fills no longer indicate early purchase interest. We analyzed hundreds of thousands of form-fills in our client database, and we found that out of those who did eventually fill out a form, 45% took 90 days or more from when they first visited the website to complete a form. The account funnel is a framework, where marketing works with sales to move target prospects and customers from initial interest to engagement, sales opportunity, and finally closed-won. Currently, companies are adopting elements of ABM to prepare for the full account-funnel approach to demand generation. Here are two examples for how clients are making the transition: • Account-Based Tactics for Leads – Winshuttle uses account-based tactics in existing cross-sell and upsell campaigns. Its marketing team serves ads exclusively to in-target visitors and then personalizes its homepage to engage and convert view-through ad traffic. • ABM Carve-Out Programs – Salesloft runs account-based web and sales enablement programs for top-tier accounts. The program began as one-to-one account nurturing for tier-one accounts and has since expanded into other account segments. In-target traffic sees personalized web pages that align with sales messaging. Marketing also sends out daily email reports on in-target visitor behavior to help sales shape messaging around buyer needs and activate sales at the point of interest. Eventually, these one-off tactics and programs will be shaped into the account funnel. Vendors need to play a role in developing new marketing technology to meet growing ABM demands.

By 2020, I expect to see sales and marketing teams converge into one revenue team, which will report up to a chief customer officer who oversees all aspects of ABM. In the past 10 years, we have already seen marketing teams grow to be more responsible for a revenue number and earn their seat at the table. In contrast, sales teams have started handling more of the nurturing and education process of turning target accounts into customers. It only makes sense to have the two teams reporting to one C-suite officer. The other change I hope to see is that this new revenue team will finally have a holistic point of view on the health and engagement of all target accounts and customers thanks to a fully integrated technology platform. Gone will be the days of pulling bits of analysis from a marketing automation platform, CRM, predictive analytics and business intelligence just to get an understanding on the health of one’s customers. We’ve seen some decent consolidation of the martech space in 2017 and fully expect that consolidation to continue for the benefit of end users. I expect the leaders in the martech space to deliver end-to-end reporting to give revenue teams the insights they so desperately need to take action on servicing their target accounts. Finally, as data becomes more commoditized and readily accessible, things like account insights, predictive analytics and personalized content will all be built into the ABM tech of the future. CRMs and marketing automation platforms are honestly empty engines that need loads of quality, up-to-date, standardized data in order to properly run. By 2020, I expect relevant data for ABM will be readily available in all platforms, allowing the revenue team to focus on engaging and servicing their target accounts and customers rather than spending time trying to cleanse and prepare data.

Peter Herbert Terminus

The

Experts

What Will ABM Look Like In The Year 2020?

Stephanie Kidder Azalead

Jason Jue Triblio

Heidi Bullock Engagio

Jessica Cross AdRoll

If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be?

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: RAD. I’d be able to perfectly categorize accounts by R-retention; A-acquisition; and D-Development. For existing customers that are categorized as D accounts, I’d know what their needs are so we can expand share of wallet with the right marketing campaigns and sales activities. Why focus on D accounts? Acquiring new A accounts costs substantially more than growing existing ones, and R accounts already are spending as much as they can with you. The RAD superpower would be pretty RAD.

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: If I could choose an ABM superpower, I would know what companies are interested in buying the moment they started thinking about it. We’ve already gotten incredibly close to this. Gone are the days of waiting for a hand-raise based on form-fills from registering for a webinar or downloading a white paper. Today, we’re able to identify companies that are interested in a particular product or service based on IP address, but we’re also able to use real-time intent data to figure out what a prospective customer is reading, blogging or posting on social media. The only way to get any sooner in the buying cycle is to be a mind reader.

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: To provide clean, accurate data!

Moving into 2018, I think we will see more mature Mega Deal ABM programs.

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: I'd be able to figure out the perfect recipe of how many and what types of touches across all channels it takes to convert a lead to a customer and a customer to an upsell at a 75% rate. I'd also be able to apply that recipe to convert all of the named accounts to customers that are still out there.

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: Accurate account and contact data identification. Complete and accurate account and contact data is the backbone of your entire ABM approach — and it's a beast to get the depth of information often needed. Typically, one vendor doesn't have it all and either multiple vendors and/or manual work is required to get the insight into the account needed to run effective account-based plays, i.e. What core technologies do they use? Which departments would be involved in the purchase — and usage? Who are the key decision-makers and influencers? What will entice them to buy?

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: Data X-ray vision. While every B2B marketer likes to talk about data, few can see through the fortress of silos that blind them throughout their tech stack. Consider one amazing question … if you had Data X-ray vision and could see target account buyers in your marketing automation system, what would you do with that knowledge?

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: And if I had an ABM superpower, it would be orchestrating collaborative innovation. Effective ABM demands constant innovation, and we’re always more creative together. But making that work effectively and consistently is one of our toughest challenges in marketing today, and likely will continue as such in 2020.

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: If I were to have an ABM superpower it would be the ability to be invisible and listen in on my target accounts' board meetings / C-level strategy meetings.

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: My ABM superpower would be the ability to freeze salespeople’s voice boxes, so they must listen more to prospects and customers than speak at them, combined with teleportation, so that I could put marketers inside customers’ businesses where they can experience first-hand what it is like to be their customer.

Companies will be investing more in key areas, including account/contact data and insights, predictive modeling, intent monitoring and use of artificial intelligence for real-time personalization."

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: Super Relationship Vision (SRV) that exposes unknown connections between target account prospects and customer advocates from thousands of miles away, so I can quickly bring relevant references, content and insights into deals in real-time as they are progressing through the sales cycle

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: If I had one ABM superpower, it would be to automatically scale account-targeting strategies as resources and product features allow for a broader approach. At Bombora, we’ve grown our sales team significantly, and have had to expand from Key Accounts to Target Accounts, and had no perfect way of widening our lens in real time for sales or marketing to account for more resources.

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: There are two aspects to ABM campaigns: executing them and understanding them. Both are important to doing ABM right. My superpower would fall on the understanding part of the spectrum, having the insight to be able to see how my ABM efforts are moving the needle with my most important accounts, and being able to react quickly and decisively with the most active accounts, and to be agile enough to optimize my programs for accounts that need more attention.

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: My superpower choice would be the ability to sense people's needs and preferences even when they are anonymous — a.k.a. to be hyper-aware. It’s kind of like the character in the movie “What Women Want” who can hear what people are thinking. I don’t think I want to go that far, but if you can be more aware of people's needs, you can build a much stronger relationship with them on any level

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: For an ABM superpower, it would be ‘CRM Transformer’ of Parent/Child relationships – how they get structured and rolled up. This is an area I see every company struggling with and I think everyone would appreciate a super hero that made this painless, easy and just done!

Q: If you had an ABM superpower, what would it be? A: If I had an ABM superpower, it would be the ability to make all data and platforms come together and intelligently orchestrate wonderful buyer experiences.

Brian Anderson

Sincerely, Managing Editor

EDITOR’S LETTER

· Deeper investment in areas such as account/contact data and insights, predictive modeling, intent monitoring and use of artificial intelligence for real-time personalization; · An emphasis on data existing across platforms to meet account stakeholders’ expectations for cross-channel engagement; · Commitment to cross-organizational (and partner) collaboration to promote customer success and value; and · A convergence of technology to help marketers focus on driving revenue into the pipeline.

While 2016 showed that marketing and sales teams were still experimenting with account-based strategies and setting a foundation, 2017 turned out to be filled with unique, refined campaigns that accelerated deals, prioritized high-value accounts and drove considerable revenue. In our year-end issue of ABM In Action, we connected with 18 of the top industry experts, analysts and practitioners to share their predictions for ABM in 2018. Some of the key trends include:: As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts about the growth of ABM. We’re looking forward to covering the space as more practitioners perfect their skills and processes for targeting, engaging and converting target accounts. Here’s to a great 2018!

Throughout 2017, we here at ABM In Action had the pleasure of sharing a variety of real-world case studies highlighting practitioners that are creating and fine-tuning innovative ABM programs.

2017 turned out to be filled with unique, refined campaigns that accelerated deals, prioritized high-value accounts and drove considerable revenue.