Editor’s note: The sales and marketing relationship isn’t always hearts and roses. Account-based marketing can change that, as Joe Chernov recently explained to Chief Content Officer magazine’s Jonathan Crossfield. This article recaps his comments.
Account-based marketing arose to address a massive shortcoming in the classic content-driven demand-gen model: It takes a long time for a company to produce enough content to drive the business.
Each blog post you write, each e-book you create will provide some increment of leads. But what you need is an accumulation of lots and lots of content to be able to drop enough hooks in the water to catch enough fish to feed your town. Companies got frustrated with this. Boards got frustrated with this. Executives got frustrated with this. Marketing leaders got frustrated with everyone being frustrated with them.
Along comes ABM, which is essentially a better way to do outbound marketing.
Account-based marketing 101
If you’ve never encountered it, the term account-based marketing might seem vague and unhelpful. However, the central point of ABM is to create greater clarity and specificity within both marketing and sales departments.
In an ABM strategy, the traditional wide-top-narrow-bottom sales funnel becomes more cylindrical. The goal is to pursue fewer accounts, and convert a whole lot more of them. ABM represents a reversal of the usual demand-gen approach taken by most marketers – particularly content marketers.
In ABM, there is no concept of a lead. Marketers have a casual relationship with the word “lead.” To most, it means somebody who’s not yet bought. But if you’re in operations, lead has a very specific meaning as it relates to the CRM.
Leads are essentially people that are untethered to an account; they’re just floating around. It’s a person. In ABM, you need to have accounts, and all of the people on those accounts – the employees – need to be associated with those accounts.
We have a swear jar internally. If you use the word “lead” you have to put a dollar in it.
Account-based marketing difference
In content marketing, the burden shifts to sales. Marketing’s job is to build as large an audience as possible, shove that audience into a funnel, and then let sales worry about which leads are good and which leads aren’t so good.
But I’m prone to say, “Show me how I’m measured, I’ll show you how I behave.” And if marketing is measured on a raw number of leads coming in, then marketing is going to do what marketing does, which is write content that appeals to the widest audience possible with relevance taking a back seat.
Along comes ABM. It reverses the whole thing. Marketing now bears the burden. Sales says, “What specific accounts do I want to sell to next year?” And they come up with a list for marketing to worry about.
In a perfect world, marketing would help them come up with this list, but usually sales comes up with this list and then says, “Hey, marketing. Joke’s on you this time. You’ve got to figure out a way to command the attention and get me in front of these companies.”
It’s really in marketing’s best interest to have some say in the companies that are on the list.
How marketing and sales can work together
Sales and marketing need to start by coming together and developing an ideal customer profile (ICP). Before naming accounts to try to sell to, the head of sales and the head of marketing can look each other in the eye and say, “We’re going to sell to companies with this employee range, in these industries, that have this particular role on the account, that are in these geographies, that have these types of technologies in their technology stack.”
Collaboratively, get really specific about the attributes of the companies you’re trying to sell to. Then, and only then, go about figuring out who is going to do what and when to try to get in front of these organizations.
In the content marketing world, a lot is made of sales and marketing alignment, but in ABM, alignment isn’t enough. You almost need the two functions to be integrated because it’s very much a dance. Jon Miller, CEO and co-founder of Engagio and co-founder of Marketo, uses the word “orchestration” a lot. It’s a very good term because each plays a part. Sometimes one part leads or one part is louder. Then there are times when that part recedes, and the other group takes the fore. It tends to go back and forth. Simply being aligned – that is, one side knowing what the other is doing – is not enough. It really needs to be orchestrated.
Ideal customer profile in account-based marketing
Account-based marketing changes the fidelity to (the customer profile), the degree of rigor applied to it. You really cannot get too specific.
I’ve talked about ICP…
