Account Based Marketing – Practical Strategies for B2B Technology Companies

Three Factors that Jeopardize Outbound Program Results

Challenge: Identifying Personas Within Buying Centers is Difficult

I had a brainstorm last week that I believe will lead to more productive outbound programs by identifying a problem inherent in many Account Based Marketing (ABM) programs. In sum, we need to improve how we develop our target buyers at the early stage of program launch. Since this is a new insight for me, this post focuses more on diagnosing he problem rather than recommending solutions. Have you found a better way? Love to hear your thoughts.

We must address several layers of issues to accurately target prospects in a scalable way providing the foundation for outbound/ABM programs. These layers act like concentric circles to get to the ideal program target list. Here are a set of three ‘formulas’ or reasons that describe the top three challenges:

Because:

ABM ≠ Buying Center

AND

Buying Center ≠ Persona

AND

Contacts ≠ Updated

Therefore

ABM ≠ $ROI Potential$

Let me explain.

First, we all love Account Based Marketing and understand that greater customization and effort focused on a limited set of accounts who represent your ideal customer will deliver higher conversion rates. However, when targeting enterprise accounts, there are different buying centers. More specifically, your offering may address the needs of and be purchased by multiple departments, so targeting a ‘company’ does not sufficiently address the buying center because there are actually multiple buying centers. For example, if you sell to developers, your target account many have many different groups of developers who will make different purchase decisions. And this raises further questions. Do these different departments (buying centers) have the same needs, pain points and interests? Do your value proposition, primary contacts and other key elements change across every buying center? If so, then many ABM programs may be missing the mark by not tailoring to a specific buying center within a target account. Factor #1: ABM ≠ Buying Center.

As we dig further into our outbound programs, the buyers are often not in the same department. The personas leading the purchase may be part of one department but in most cases there are personas from different departments involved in the buying decision. To accurately target an ‘Buying Center’, your programs need to consider all of the different contacts associated with the buying center (the collective group of people responsible for making the purchase decision). In many outbound/ABM programs, contacts are selected because they fit key personas but their position in the organization may not be identified in terms of how they fit within the buying center. Factor #2: Buying Center ≠ Persona.

Finally, the targets of our programs often shift jobs — up to 20% of contact details may change every year. While many organizations have deployed CRM account alignment solutions (DiscoverOrg, DataFox, D&B, …), few automatically update contact information. As contact take on new roles/responsibilities and as contacts change jobs, is your database staying current? Likely not. (Personal note — I would love to a cloud solution that automatically updated contact details as they change) Factor #3: frequently Contacts ≠ Updated.

While ABM provides a mechanism for better account and contact selection for outbound programs, there remains a huge gap between this method and how internal enterprise B2B purchase decisions are made. Therefore, your ABM may be delivering less revenue than it could if the programs were more carefully targeted. Clearly there are major gaps in our ability to map organizational buying decisions to a level where our systems can help us execute these programs at scale. That’s the bad news — but realizing this gap is the first step to designing better processes.

If we, as a marketing department, take our ABM efforts to the next level with tailored targeting processes, we will be more closely aligned with the actual purchase process. For now this starts with a careful examination of the purchase process, personas, target accounts and more, in order to develop a strategy with available tools. As we identify target accounts, we must identify all of the personas across the organization associated with the buying decision to increase success rates. We will need to lean harder on our tech stack providers to give us greater insights into these areas for better and easier segmentation at scale. In the end, this will be an optimization of outbound programs to have more precision and greater results.

Lesson: If we take the time to identify and target all of the contacts associated with organization buying centers, our outbound campaigns will be more productive and drive greater revenue.

Eliminating Leads: Migrating CRM to Support Account Based Marketing

Orchestration

Here is a recent presentation I gave at the OpStars event alongside Dreamforce. It describes the motivation behind eliminating the Lead object in CRM to support ABM and gives the experience of one startup making the transition.

Moving to Account Based Marketing – OpStars Event Presentation

Account Based Marketing Migration Plan

Here are the presentation slides from a DemandBase seminar I gave in January of 2016 describing a planned migration to ABM. I believe the structure and approach has stood the test of time and is still relevant today. Does this look like your ABM approach?

Account Based Marketing Migration Plan

Managing Leads as Contacts: A Marketing CRM Use Case Enhancing Account Based Selling

structured

Challenge: With Sales Increasingly Adopting Account Based Sales, How Do Marketing Systems Support the Effort?

I recently asked a simple question on LinkedIn:

Anyone know of an organization that has eliminated Lead management in Salesforce.com and moved to prospecting solely using Contacts/Accounts? Love to chat with them about their experience.

I was quite surprised to see a resulting 23 comments and over 10K views. Clearly this struck a nerve. Full disclosure: I am currently working with a client to migrate the management of prospects as Contacts rather than Leads.

In most B2B environments, sales reps have long thought about their efforts on an account basis. In fact, this recognition has driven the rise of Account Based Marketing to better support their efforts. Even when selling solutions with smaller ASPs (lets say ~$5-10K annually), reps map out their target account with key target personas. Further they use an array of modern account prospecting tools brought in by Sales Operations to support their outbound activities – tools like Tout, Yesware, Outreach.io, LeadSpace and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, to name just a few. This complexity combined with the marketing team’s involvement in attempting to manage the customer journey at the Account level caused me to rethink CRM structure.

Certainly there is a data sync between CRM and these sales outreach tools, but it is far from perfect in creating a complete view of a given account. As new Leads enter CRM from a variety of sources, how does a rep maintain that complete view of their target prospect or customer? As more tools are added, reps find it increasingly challenging to view Account details – such as people, relationship, and activity – in both CRM and prospecting tools. Just a few short years ago, CRM was the central database as well as the destination for prospecting. That is no longer the case.

Back in the day, marketers used the CRM Lead object for qualification and nurturing until they were ‘sales ready.’ Best practices were for marketers to nurture Leads with content relevant to their sales stage (still a great guiding principle). However, because there is a visibility and reporting gulf between the Lead and Contact objects, this makes rep outbound efforts much more challenging. There are some newer solutions to help both Marketing and Sales ‘see’ an Account view of all Leads and Contacts like Engagio, LeanData and ZenIQ. Mapping or matching Leads to Accounts is nice – IF the reps lived in SFDC – but as noted above, this is becoming less common with new prospecting tools.

With a more complex martech infrastructure and with reps ‘living’ in systems other than the primary CRM, how can Marketing best support these efforts with CRM structure?

I now believe that most sales organizations with heavy outbound prospecting in third party tools would benefit by managing Leads as Contacts. Both marketing and sales teams will enjoy improved Account visibility. Making an effort to map key personas within the account, to convert matched Leads to these Accounts and to update the Account information will prepare marketing to best support sales in their outreach efforts. However, making this move requires a close look at several things, including: lead to account matching, Lead/Contact enrichment, management of Leads that don’t match to Accounts, Account statuses and progression, funnel stages for both Leads and Contacts, MQL processes, Lead/Contact scoring and Lead Development Rep process to submit opportunities — to name a few. As we progress through the customer journey, there will likely be other benefits like improved Contact and Account scoring, better Opportunity management, improved customer lifecycle marketing, etc.

I believe the modern marketing and sales tech stack has matured to a point where managing prospecting efforts in a more structured, account-based way will make sense for many more organizations today, even with lower ASPs. There are certainly many details to consider because this represents a fundamental shift and will require a new set of best practices that will be different for each organization. Additionally, for companies migrating a mature CRM instance, it will take careful thought and deployment.

Lesson: Marketing can better support sales and the account buying journey with an Accounted-based process for managing Leads as Contacts – and this may fit many B2B sales organizations.