Flipping Funnels Weekly: Predictive MarTech, Smarketing, and Scaling ABM

In this edition of Flipping Funnels Weekly, we share a great article on how predictive marketing can help you better target the right accounts in ABM. There’s also a great piece on how account-based marketing can better align your sales and marketing teams. To round things out, we share great tips on how to scale ABM.

1. 80% of Marketers Using Account-Based Marketing Believe that Predictive Marketing is a Critical Piece of the MarTech Stack

Predictive marketing is a very important component of ABM. Every marketing strategy begins with identifying your target accounts, and in this article by Rachel Lefkowitz, we learn just how critical predictive marketing can be in this process.

Flipping Points:

Identifying your target accounts is the first step to becoming an account-based marketing organization. Because predictive demand generation uses data to determine the best accounts to target, your ABM efforts become much more focused and effective.
Using a predictive strategy allows marketers to have relevant conversations with the right people on their terms.

Key Takeaway:

Today’s buyer journey has changed drastically. Buyers are self-educating — they do their own research, and interact with brands on their own terms, making decisions about the brand before ever contacting a sales rep. With great change comes great responsibility, and that responsibility has landed on marketers.

Rachel Lefkowitz, Content Marketing Manager at EverString

2. Personalization- One of the Best Ways You Can Improve Engagement Across Marketing

One of the key components of ABM is targeting and successfully advertising to your key accounts. By making all interactions as personal as possible, you gain a better close rate and improve your customer experience. In this article by Kelly Waffle, EVP & Co-Founder of Markistry, we learn the importance of personalization in all customer interactions.

Flipping Points:

Personalization is more than just adding a name to the greeting. It is really about creating an individual and relevant customer experience based on data and insights.
Most marketers that leverage personalization only apply it to known prospects or customers. Imagine if you could get ahead of the game and begin engaging with anonymous prospects. It could be significant enough to be identified as a new revenue stream.

Key Takeaway:

If you are not leveraging personalization today, please make it the one enhancement to your marketing tomorrow. Personalization is a key pillar of success for many channels such as email, website, and advertising.

Kelly Waffle, EVP & co-founder of Markistry

3. How ABM Can Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment

This blog post written by Mark Emmons, a writer for LeanData, gives readers an insight on just how helpful ABM is to bring sales and marketing teams together. Emmons shares many statistics from a recent survey about sales and marketing relationships before and after ABM in addition to quotes from sales and marketing professionals.

Flipping Points:

Organizations using Account-Based Marketing are seeing quantifiable improvements in the sales and marketing relationship that are upgrading their ability to close more deals.
The focus is on pursuing those high-value accounts rather than spending time generating vast numbers of leads that are not qualified and can lead to friction between the teams.

Key Takeaway:

The survey found that communication and trust issues exist between sales and marketing. A deeper look, though, revealed something encouraging. Respondents indicated that cooperation is measurably better at businesses that have adopted an ABM strategy.

Mark Emmons, Writer at LeanData

4. It’s Time to Charge Up Your Laser Guns for Digital ABM!

Mike Telem, VP of Product Marketing at Marketo, gives us a great article highlighting the future of Digital ABM. A large part of ABM is reaching your target audience across many channels and this article highlights how to use technology to best reach your prospective customers.

Flipping Points:

The ability to directly engage with prospects at the earliest stages of their journey, while they’re just beginning to look into your product, is priceless.
Digital ABM helps build a bridge between sales and marketing efforts by letting companies pursue the “big fish” and target them with much more accurate laser guns, instead of the traditional nets, spears, or harpoons.

Key Takeaway:

Today, marketers have the opportunity to not only target, but also engage directly with the right people from the key accounts they’ve identified— and they are able to do this much earlier in the sales cycle.

Mike Telem, VP of Product Marketing, Real-Time Personalization at Marketo

5. 15 Account-Based Marketing Stats To Convince The ABM Skeptics

In this article written by David Crane, Content Marketing Manager at Integrate, we can read the most important stats that prove that ABM is better than the traditional lead-based marketing strategy that you are currently using.

Flipping Points:

B2B companies’ inability to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies has cost them upwards of 10% or more of revenue per year, or $100 million for a billion-dollar company.
A fully developed account-based marketing strategy enables marketers to engage key personas at their target companies, which is why more than 80% say that ABM outperforms other marketing initiatives.

Key Takeaway:

Heightened alignment via ABM is meant to directly challenge the 50% of sales time wasted on unproductive prospecting.

David Crane, Content Marketing Manager at Integrate