This document discusses how marketing automation can help address common challenges organizations face in achieving account-based marketing goals. It outlines an end-to-end workflow for customer lifecycle ABM and highlights key barriers such as a lack of sales/marketing alignment, siloed thinking, and challenges personalizing at scale. The document then explains how marketing automation can help by enabling web personalization, nurture track automation, integration with CRM systems, and providing objective data. It provides best practices for implementing a marketing automation strategy, including having a clear plan, understanding your audience, setting expectations, experimenting, and starting small.
5. We need to up-sell/cross-sell
more to our key accounts…
...by understanding our target audience’s pain points
...through engaging in a more personal way
...as well as defending against competitive
propositions
We need to win
new target accounts…
...through initiating relationships with decision makers
...by driving and shaping buying cycles (pre-RFP)
...by engaging target accounts as part of bids
Our customers’ common drivers
7. Only 33% of the buyer journey consists of a direct engagement with a brand
And so, the challenge is simple. When a buyer does engage, how do you
manage an-insight driven, timely engagement using the right content and channel?
Dealing with a self-guided buying cycle
Acquire Engage Pitch Win Retain Upsell Evangelise
‘Visible’interaction‘Invisible’research
67%
*SiriusDecisions
33%
8. Struggling to personalise at scale
Not enough time
Personalisation of engagement efforts is rated as the number one priority by
33% of CMOs*, the highest of any factor. However, a number of barriers stand
in the way of this:
*Adobe
The wrong insight Lacking skills Not utilising
technology
9. A lack of Sales / Marketing alignment
Issue #1:
50% of sales time is wasted on
unproductive prospecting —
but sales reps ignore 50% of
marketing leads
(The B2B Lead)
Issue #2:
Across the board, 87% of the
terms used by sales and
marketing to describe each
other are negative
(CEB)
Issue #3:
90% of marketers can’t
calculate the
ROI of their digital marketing
spend
(Fournaise)
10. Silo-based thinking, preventing
a joined-up approach
Sales
pick target accounts based on
assumptions and
generalisations
Research/ analytics
seek to understand accounts
with limited context and often
at single point in time,
meaning output is bland and
high-level
Marketing
lack time, resource or
understanding to interpret
insight, so resort to generic
campaign briefs and activity
Creative
builds a campaign based on
overarching messages and
non-specific personas
Campaign execution
resort to tired mass-marketing
tactics hoping to reach leads with
generic messaging and content
Marketing ops
invested in a range of
technologies but struggle to
track success of campaigns
through to the impact on sales
CMO/CFO
struggle to see value of
programme and cut budgets
12. How Marketing Automation helps
Problem faced by Marketing team How Marketing Automation helps
Self-guided buying cycle Web tracking and web personalisation
Personalising at scale Automation of nurture tracks, web experience and
access to objective data
Lack of sales/marketing alignment Objective scoring, integration with CRM
Silo-based thinking Objective data to provide evidence for future
activity
14. Have a plan
● What are you trying to solve?
● Why are you trying to solve it?
● Which other stakeholders do you need to explain
your thinking to - CFO, IT director, sales director
● Have they bought in to your vision?
● What other resources/tools/skills do you need?
● Are your current sales/marketing processes set up
for this?
● What will success look like and how will you know
if you’ve succeeded?
15. ● Don’t be swayed by shiny lights and promises
● What is the functionality you really need versus the
nice to have
● Are you planning on integrating with your CRM?
● Are there any data compliance issues unique to
your business/industry sector?
● What is the business case behind your answer to
each of the previous questions?
Achieving your plan
16. “Don’t count the people that you reach,
reach the people who count”
David Ogilvy
Understand your
audience
21. ● Be clear on what you’re trying to
achieve
● Understand your audience
○ What journeys
○ What content
○ What channels
○ What message
● Set expectations
● Experiment!!!
● Start small and celebrate success
Things to
remember