What’s Different About Account Based Marketing/Selling?

Account Based Marketing/Selling is all the rage today. if you haven’t jumped on that bandwagon, you clearly aren’t one of the cool kids.But having played in this space for more than a few years, a lot of what I see is deja-vu all over again, echoing concepts from the 80’s, 90’s, even before (look at some of the original books on account based selling and when they were published. There are some differences in ABM/ABS–ironically, very few people talk about them, except some of those grizzled veterans who have lived this through their careers. It seems marketers in ABM have discovered something really unique. It’s called personalization and relevance. Apparently with ABM, we target our marketing programs to the right people within an account, talking about issues we know to be relevant to the account. Hmmm, isn’t that what good marketing is supposed to do anyway? Aren’t we trying to target everyone we inflict our marketing efforts on? Aren’t we trying to be relevant to each of them? Technology, has given us huge capabilities to do this, but it seems (if my inbox is any indicator), that we don’t leverage the capabilities we are paying for, instead choosing to inundate the world with the same messages that may have relevance to a fraction of the audience. Granted, ABM enables us to narrow the focus more, but we can target our messages by industry group, by persona within industry group, by organizational demographics within those industry groups, by functions within those organizations. We can increase our relevance by any number of dimensions for 100% of our marketing, improving the results we get from 100% of the marketing.