The Account-Based Marketing (ABM) movement is in full force — and for good reason. Marketers are seeing the value in becoming more targeted, more personal and better aligned with sales. The momentum in the category is real, but many organizations are still just getting started with ABM.
To create a high performing Account-Based Marketing organization, marketers must first build a strong foundation. They must start with planning, investment choices and impact measurements — and they must understand how these categories change as their organization moves to ABM.
In this webinar, Engagio’s Jon Miller and Allocadia’s Sam Melnick will discuss why marketers must start with these core elements of an ABM strategy or otherwise risk failure. Some key questions that will be answered:
- How can I incorporate ABM into my strategic marketing plan?
- What changes do I need to make to my marketing mix when I invest in ABM?
- How do I prove the impact of ABM on Marketing Performance?
This webinar should be attended by marketers who are already utilizing, in the midst of planning for, or just starting to consider Account-Based Marketing.
Join us in the third webinar in our “Run Marketing” Series, designed to enable marketers to Run Marketing with confidence and drive business impact.
8. 88
Today’s Marketers Have Two Jobs
Customer
Create Engaging Customer Experiences by
Overseeing the Customer Lifecycle
Do Marketing
CMO
Manage and Optimize the
Business Of Marketing
Run Marketing
Must Coexist
9. 99
Do Marketing – Front Office of Marketing
Actions:
• Drive Demand
• Grow Market Share
• Execute Campaigns Across the Organization
Technologies:
• Marketing Automation
• Ad-Tech
• Content Marketing
Customer
Create Engaging Customer Experiences by
Overseeing the Customer Lifecycle
Do Marketing
10. 1010
Run Marketing – Back Office of Marketing
Actions:
• Strategic Planning
• Investment Planning & Budget Management
• Performance Measurements & Optimization
Technologies:
• Marketing Performance Management
Software
• Excel
• PowerPoint
CMO
Manage and Optimize the
Business Of Marketing
Run Marketing
11. 1111
Marketers Must Merge Both Jobs To Successfully Manage the New
Customer Lifecycle
Plan
Convert
Run Marketing
(MPM)
Do Marketing
(Execution)
14. 14
Marketing Planning
• Includes: “what are we going to do”
and “what is our excepted output”
• Iterative process – adjustments
should be expected
• Must align with corporate objectives
Marketing
Investments
Marketing
Planning
Measurements
& Insights
20. Level 1: Reps Self-Select
Level 2: Basic Data
Level 3: Advanced
Level 4: Predictive Analytics
Sophisticated predictive
scoring and modeling.
Adding purchased data and
more advanced scoring or
modeling
Adding in manually collected
data and simple scoring
Based on intuition and experience.
21. 21
Marketing Investments
• Without the “I” there is no ROI
• Think about investments in multiple
dimensions
• You are what you invest in!
Marketing
Investments
Marketing
Planning
Measurements
& Insights
24. 24
Measurements & Insights
• Measurements must tie back to targets
• Different audiences will needed different
measurements & insights
• Insights are the end goal – You want to
make better decisions!
Marketing
Investments
Marketing
Planning
Measurements
& Insights
41. 41
3 Take-Aways on Building the Foundation of ABM
• Demand generation is fishing with nets; account based
marketing is fishing with spears
• The key to ABM success is planning – picking the right
accounts, in alignment with Sales
• Leads are insufficient to measure account-based
marketing; measure via coverage, awareness,
engagement, reach & impact
James:
-Introduction to topic.
Excited to partner with Jon on such a hot topic.
Why Plan Invest measure? Marketers want to jump right in and execute.
However not the right approach – must take the time to set the foundation of whatever they are doing, whether it be ABM, content, predictive.
So excited to really dive into this on the ABM side and give everyone some key take aways as you go down this ABM journey and reiterate the importance of the operational aspects of marketing!
James:
Introduce Jon & Sam.
Introduce format
– Jon will walk through ABM @ a high level,
- then sam will introduce the Plan/invest/measure framework and how we look at it at Allocadia, specifically around MPM
- Go through each stage Plan/invest/measure for ABM
Hand over to Jon.
ABM is an investment in time and resources so you MUST focus on accounts with highest ROI
Why now? What about mobile, social, cloud, etc. makes this inevitable?
Harder than ever to reach decision makers with traditional tactics
New ways to reach buyers (individually-addressable touch-points, real-time ad buying)
Shift from campaign-marketing to “always on” mindset requires integration
Big data / predictive analytics allow marketers to understand the complexity of relationships and buyer context, and match personalized content accordingly
Buyers delaying engagement with sales ; harder to reach CXOs {happened in velocity, needs to happen in XYZ}
Decomposition of the nice/clean customer funnel… no longer just awareness, familiarity, consideration, etc. Useful model, but. Really a set of nodes, interactions (through a connected device)
New ways to reach buyers
Proliferation of “connected customers” and customer data -- smart phones, smart devices (50B connected devices)
behind every device is a customer → data proliferation
From campaigns to “always on”
Big data / predictive (understand the complexity of the relationships, context)
Needs new ways to measure
Ok thanks Jon, so that was a great overview on ABM, certainly a topic that a lot of people are focused on today and we are all learning more about in large part your leadership in the space.
But before we really dive into planning, investing and measuring for ABM, I want to take a step back and talk about the importance of these areas, plan – invest - measure. Really as marketers our tendency is to jump right in and “do” or execute. I do it for sure, my natural instinct is to just produce…but, often this is not the best approach ---marketers must take the time to set the stage for their success through planning investing and measuring...
I’m going to quickly walk through how we view these two parts of marketing’s job
And what is so important to understand is – marketers won’t be successful unless both the do --- and run parts of marketing coexist.
They cannot sit in silos and can not be performed separately. This is all encompassing for marketing and certainly true to for ABM.
Just to dive in a bit deeper on each of these
First the do part of marketing this is all externally facing activities ---- demand gen, growing market share, and pretty much any outward facing campaigns.
For technologies you would expect to see automation, ad technologies, the majority of content.
And really lots of attention is spent here and the majority of the MarTech VC dollars go into this area.
The Run part is what you would consider more of the strategic arm of marketing.
This is what we’ll be diving into with Jon in a few moments around ABM.
But it’s the strategic planning and investments. And performance measurements and insights that help optimize marketing.
Unlike the Do side, the run marketing area doesn’t always get quite as much attention from the market ---though that is changing ---
When you look at the tech stack marketing performance management software is a growing market, but the reality is most marketers are using excel and powerpoint or even borrowing technologies from finance or IT --- that’s not ideal.
And really to bring it back all together ---- marketers have to merge the run and do the do parts of their jobs to be successful.
This image is how we look at the merging of these functions at allocadia – often marketing organizations start with the planning moving into investments, then the execution phases, bringing it back to the measurement analyzing and optimizing, which really are the money phases --- this is where the marketing organization is adjusting and making sure the best actions are being taken moving forward.
As you look at this image we excution on the right and then marketing performance management on the right.
And just to take a deeper look into MPM – it really revolves around these three phases.
Planning – investments – and measurements. This what we focus on at Allocadia across the entire marketing organization.
That’s what we will focus today with Jon around ABM.
But most importantly, these are the 3 areas that are constantly occurring for ---EVERY --- marketer. And to be successful there must be a respect and time put into Marketing Performance management.
Understanding where you plan to spend.
Measuring what you actually spent and on what.
Tracking how spend and results align with corporate objectives.
And ultimately, using that information to drive better marketing decisions.
What are you going to do next
So now let’s focus on these 3 phase with Jon…
How this will work is we’ll go through plan invest and measure individually, I will give high level guidance on each and then Jon will dive in on specifics on BM
So first let’s look at planning.
This is includes both what are you going to do and what is expected – this is important as plans must go beyond just the actions you will take, but what your going to get out of them.
Expect plans to change. There is no “set it and forget it” with marketing planning – this must be fluid and you need to be agile.
Finally, plans should align horizontally across the organization and vertically with corporate objectives and goals. This connection must be made otherwise plans will fall short.
Wrong: what we want to say, how we want to say it target the right people
RIGHT: who we want to target what and how to say it
Account-based on Sales and Success; not marketing
open to influence as a metric
Everyone wants to talk about ROI, but often we see almost too much attention on the R, but without controlling and understanding your investments, you will never get to ROI…you need to remeber to start with the I and then move to the R...
Think about marketing investment beyond just a single view ---how much are you spending in different regions? How about across different stages of the buyer’s journey? What about awareness vs demand? Investments are just one dimensional, as a marketing your need to look at your marketing spend similariy to your own personal investments, take different views to answer different questions.
Finally, I’m a foodie – so the phrase ”you are what you eat” rings true. Similary as a marketing organization “you are what you invest in” --- if you invest primarily in ABM tactics you are an account based marketing organization. If you even mostly in events, you are an event based organization...ultimatley the data will not lie and your marketing investment dollars will tell you what type of marketing organization you are.
Funding – how will you know it’s working?
You need to get proper funding for a program that won’t deliver clear revenue immediately – possibly for a long time.
If you hide this fact when you make your business case, you’re putting a time bomb inside your ABM program. Instead, make sure executives all understand the timescales and the metrics you’ll be using to ensure you’re making progress towards revenue.
The companies who stay with their ABM strategies and track the right metrics invariably show significant return on their investment. But success is not measured in weeks (or even months in many cases).
So finally, measurements and insights - --- Key point here, you have to have a target or something you are aiming for when it comes to measurements, this goes back to planning, setting targets are so so important, you can’t do measurements in a vacuum otherwise you don’t know what success is.
Depending on who your audience is ---they will need different types of measurements or insights. Your CMO will want different information than the North American Field Manager. So understanding which questions each key stakeholder wants answered will be integral to determining the needed measurements.
Finally, insights insights insights. The goal of measurement is not just put them into a dashboard and look at them. You want to arm yourself and your organization to make better decisions. We always want to be improving our marketing!
The “law of large numbers” breaks down in narrow funnel -- can’t use vanity metrics, can’t count on volumes
Only need one deal to make a program ROI look good – noisy data