WEBINAR: How to Activate Enterprise ABM for Maximum Results

Marketers recognize the value of an effective account-based marketing (ABM) program, but most ABM solutions today are focused on addressing silos and individual needs, creating significant barriers to growth. The real magic happens when you align your organization for success by implementing a rule-based integrated ABM solution that allows teams to perform independently while simultaneously sharing insights across the entire organization.

Enterprise companies are fundamentally multinational; they often have multiple product offerings, serve multiple geographies, and speak multiple languages. This involves not only multiple teams and stakeholders, but also multiple CRMs, systems of record, and marketing automation platforms, as well as tools and systems to drive customer engagement.

However, as each division of the company selects its own ABM strategy and technological solution, costs skyrocket and teams compete for business, creating anarchy within the organization and uncertainty among target accounts. The risk is that everyone ends up fighting for resources, and too often those resources are misallocated when it comes to supporting the overall business strategy, which requires a holistic understanding of what's going on.

MRP addressed the key issues inhibiting enterprise organizations in a new webinar, Collaborative ABM: activating your enterprise to achieve peak performance, with strategies to ensure the ABM is actionable through departments, encouraging professionals within each team to apply their expertise.

Enterprise organizations must focus on real-time data for administration, Integrated Data Intelligence, Actionable Target Account Insights, Omnichannel Orchestration, and Revenue Driving Analytics.

“Data is what drives your commitment, and that customer knowledge needs to be integrated; to take data from multiple sources and operationalize it practically,” said Pierre Custeau, MRP's chief technology officer. “If all of the [engagement] channels are operationalized in silos that do not share data or processes, your customer experience can seem quite messy, and it is a representation of how the internal systems are.”

One size doesn’t fit all

Many ABM platforms are designed with a certain kind of user in mind - a generalist. In contrast, in the enterprise, you can have a large number of people, including experts, collaborating around ABM.

“The ability to share insights, target, and form a consistent and comparative framework for measuring outcomes becomes extremely important,” Custeau said. “If organizations do not do this and continue to use resources independently in silos, the company that may have the ambition to be a customer-centric organization falls into the pit of also being so much product-centric - the means of marketing one product takes over the need to engage in meaningful ways with the buyers.”

Building for collaboration

The role of ABM is to manage a cross-functional collaboration through departmental silos, while still creating a shared view and understanding of the customer - but many ABM platforms aren't designed for this.

“When it comes to making decisions at the highest levels of an organization, not providing the data or a way to benchmark actions done in one line of operation against another poses additional challenges,” said Ajay Subherwal, senior vice-president of enterprise sales EMEA/APAC, MRP. “It makes it challenging for other functions in the revenue-generating side of the enterprise to make use of the data and use it in a useful manner. It is critical to have a more balanced view of data around the enterprise and also enable professionals within each team to contribute their expertise and create better customer engagements.”

Complexity in the decision-making process

Another difficulty is to be able to implement, orchestrate, and measure ABM efforts across the organization without confusing clients with a jumbled series of voices and messages.

“This necessarily requires a solution that helps you to work across multiple teams, execute across multiple platforms, and provide a clear point of truth,” Subherwal said. “It must allow you to measure and refine your efforts on a client-by-client basis. If a solution allows you to do that, it can result in higher engagement and a more unified, less fragmented customer experience.”

Companies need a common framework for using these tools to assess efficacy through multiple channels, silos, tactics, and regions to scale their efforts. Currently, 66% of ABM cannot execute across multiple platforms, channels, or funnel stages, and 75% are unsure of which metrics to present. Having disparate systems and data silos makes measuring the ABM strategy and the activities of sales and marketing on a client level very difficult.

“Having the ability to conveniently connect all of those systems and centralize the data is table stakes for us,” Custeau said. “Within this framework, each business unit profits from autonomy by being supported by the larger organization and having the ability to look through business units and geographies to optimize engagement and achieve business goals more straightforwardly.”