Account Based Marketing FAQ

Account based marketing for demand generation is taking the B2B marketing space by storm. While account based anything has been the main objective for any sales team, marketers have just begun to hop on the ABM bandwagon within the last two years. Consider this post your one stop shop to begin to understand account based marketing and what you can do for your organization.

What is Account Based Marketing?

Account based marketing, or ABM, is a marketing strategy that increases focus on marketing to individual accounts through highly customized marketing campaigns. The ultimate goal of ABM is to position yourself as a trusted advisor within strategic or target accounts thereby increasing their awareness of the total value you offer. ABM can be supplemented with advanced targeting technologies such as Engagio, Terminus or Demandbase.

Why should we develop an ABM strategy?

Account based marketing allows organizations to highly target their top strategic accounts. In doing so, marketers tend to do a few things:
Align closer to business objectives by focusing on top opportunities for revenue and growth
Align closer to sales by helping them reach their target goals more directly
Provide a much more personalized customer experience
Organizations who leverage ABM have seen increased ROI and better relationships with customers. (See the statistics below for more evidence.)

How do I develop an ABM Strategy?

With the market flashing best practices left and right around account based marketing, beginning to develop a strategy for ABM can be very overwhelming. In fact, many organizations purchase an account based marketing technology first without defining a strategy. We see this happen all the time and have addressed how your organization can develop a strategic approach.
What makes an ABM strategy different from traditional demand generation marketing?
We love this question because it showcases that you are beginning to understand the nuances between the strategies! Organizations typically have both ABM and DG programs running as it fits the need of the business, but ABM is an entirely new level of personalization.

Do I need ABM Technology?

Account based marketing technology has grown like wildfire in the last 2 years. To successfully select your technology, you must first develop an account based marketing strategy and evaluate your current martech stack to develop the right requirements for your organization. Here are a few links to account based marketing technologies available today, it should be noted that each of these vendors offer different facets of ABM technology solutions.

Do you have any statistics you can share around ABM success?

Since ABM is everywhere, we are blessed with many statistics around account based marketing to help you build the case for ABM the right way for your organization:
When ABM has been in use for at least a year, 60% of users reported a revenue increase of at least 10% and 19% reported a revenue impact of 30% or greater [Demandbase]
Almost 85% of marketers who measure ROI describe ABM as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach; half of those marketers saw significantly higher returns [ITSMA]
83% of those using ABM report that increased engagement with target accounts is the top reported benefit [Demandbase]
Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions experience 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates [MarketingProfs]
Large companies are currently the heaviest users of ABM, but small companies are the most aggressive testers at this time [DemandBase]
84% of marketers said that ABM had significant benefits to retaining and expanding existing client relationships [Alterra Group]
More than 90% of marketers believe that ABM is essential to B2B marketing [SiriusDecisions]
ABM had higher ROI than other marketing activities, according to 97% of marketers in a survey [Alterra Group]