ABM and the Manufacturing Marketer: Back to the Future

Safe to say, I’ve been around awhile. When I left business school to take my first “real” corporate job, the web wasn’t really a thing yet, my phone would balance a scale with a brick, and my “laptop” was a Franklin planner. But guess what? We had ABM. In a real sense, it was all there was. I’ll spare you the details, but we made very specialized products – stuff only a very few people in the world wanted or needed. That meant we had an extremely narrow slice of prospective customers to sell to. We had a VP of Sales and Marketing, which mainly meant “Sales” because we did almost no marketing. Why would we?