Head over to Twitter and LinkedIn and give these folks a follow to hear from some of the top professionals in the account-based marketing space!
Account-based marketing is the culmination of many developments in B2B marketing, sales, and technology. Across the B2B world, marketers and salespeople look to social media for guidance on getting started with account-based marketing and implementing it successfully at their own companies. The best and brightest B2B thought leaders are active on Twitter and LinkedIn, consistently posting content to social media as well as their own websites and blogs.
These are some of the top account-based marketing experts who can help guide you on your way to doing account-based marketing at scale:
Jill Rowley
Jill Rowley is more than just the Queen of Social Selling; she’s also the master of the #SocialSelling universe. Jill held top positions at Salesforce, Eloqua, and Oracle before launching her own consultancy. Forbes magazine named Jill one of the “Top 30 Social Salespeople In The World,” and she’s not showing any signs of slowing down.
Jill’s definition of account-based marketing starts by engaging the right contacts on social media. According to Jill, social selling includes using social networks to do research to build relationships that drive revenue. Social selling is all about “social proximity,” or degrees of separation based on social networking. Her B2B marketing and sales framework includes metrics to measure the ROI of social selling. These metrics include size of network, volume of content shared, meetings booked, pipeline, and most importantly, revenue generated. Jill says, “The modern consumer is digitally driven, socially connected and mobile empowered. Sales reps need to adapt or be replaced.”
Click here to follow Jill Rowley on Twitter.
David Raab
David Raab is a graduate of the Harvard Business School who has spent almost 30 years in the B2B marketing and technology industry. David views account-based marketing as the “integration of advertising with marketing technology [that] potentially gives salespeople another route for generating their own prospects.”
David’s written hundreds of articles on marketing technology for publications including Information Management, DM Review, DM News, Relationship Marketing Report, Bank Marketing, Target Marketing, and The Journal of Database Marketing. He’s also the author of the Guide to Demand Generation Systems, Marketing Performance Measurement Toolkit, B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool, and Guide to Customer Data Platforms. His new research appears regularly on his blog, Customer Experience Matrix.
Click here to follow David Raab on Twitter.
Craig Rosenberg
Craig Rosenberg is the brains behind the Funnelholic blog. As the co-founder of TOPO, a research and advisory firm, his mission is to help B2B companies sell and market more effectively primarily through the use of account-based marketing strategies and processes. Craig is legendary in the B2B world for his insights on best practices for demand generation.
Craig believes that with account-based marketing, sales and marketing work together to create an “always-on” series of touches and relationship-building aimed at these accounts. According to Craig, one meeting with an account is just the beginning – not the end – of an ABM program.
“ABM requires a truly coordinated effort between sales, sales development, marketing, and executive staff,” Craig says. His analyst team at TOPO is spending more time than ever before answering client inquiries about ABM, and he anticipates ABM becoming a critical sales and marketing capability for B2B companies.
Click here to follow Craig Rosenberg on Twitter.
Jon Miller
Jon Miller is the CEO and co-founder of Engagio, an “all-in-one” platform for account-based everything. Previously, Jon was a co-founder at Marketo, a leader in marketing automation. He is a speaker and writer about marketing best practices and is the author of multiple marketing books including the Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation, the Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing, and the Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics & Analytics. Jon has a passion for helping marketers everywhere, and is on the Board of Scripted and is an adviser to Optimizely and Newscred. In 2010, The CMO Institute named Jon a Top 10 CMO for companies under $250 million revenue. Jon holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard and an MBA from Stanford.
Click here to follow Jon Miller on Twitter.
Joseph Jaffe
Joseph Jaffe is an innovative entrepreneur in every sense of the word. He’s the CEO and Founder of Evol8tion, an innovation agency that connects early-stage startups with established brands to partner via acceleration, pilot programs and/or investment opportunities. He’s worked with major consumer brands such as Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Target, Anheuser-Busch, and many more. His blog and podcast, Jaffe Juice, won a Readers’ Choice Award for Best Marketing Podcast by Marketing Sherpa. Joseph’s written several books including Life After The 30-Second Spot: Energize Your Brand With A Bold Mix Of Alternatives To Traditional Advertising; Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue and Partnership; and Z.E.R.O. – Zero Paid Media as the New Marketing Model. My favorite book of Joseph’s (which anyone who’s interested in account-based marketing should read) is Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones.
Click here to follow Joseph Jaffe on Twitter.
Chris Engman
Chris Engman is the CEO and founder of Vendemore, a global account-based marketing company based in Stockholm, Sweden and operating in regions around the world. As Chris says, his company’s goal is to be the SAP of the account-based marketing world targeting Fortune 500 companies. Vendemore has truly become a pioneer in account-based marketing. Seven years ago, the B2B marketing industry didn’t even know the term “account-based marketing.” Chris and his team called it “pipeline marketing,” as it used targeted advertising to influence the sales cycle. Now, the martech industry recognizes the capabilities of account-based marketing to eliminate the process of collecting tons of leads and align marketing spend with a revenue opportunity.
As Chris says, account-based marketing starts with good knowledge about your existing top accounts and your most wanted new accounts. “There very few companies that ask ‘How can we influence maximumly our top account?’” Chris told me in an interview. “That starts with proactive marketing.”
Click here to follow Chris Engman on Twitter.
Matt Heinz
Matt Heinz (@HeinzMarketing) is an expert in B2B revenue acceleration using a combined sales and marketing strategy, demand generation, sales pipeline, and process improvement with a keen focus on customer retention and renewals. He has more than 15 years of B2B marketing, business development, and sales experience. In 2007, he launched his firm, Heinz Marketing to help his clients focus on their business goals for marketing and customer acquisition opportunities. Matt’s published several guides to best practices on topics such as marketing automation, secrets to productivity (work/life balance and success), and sales for startups. He recently published a comprehensive workbook (available for free download here) for developing an account-based marketing program, which includes 27 pages of specifics and eight separate worksheets to guide your implementation of ABM.
Click here to follow Matt Heinz on Twitter.
Megan Heuer
Megan Heuer is the Vice President and Group Director at SiriusDecisions, a research analyst firm dedicated to empowering sales, marketing, and product leaders to make better business decisions and accelerate growth. With more than 20 years of professional experience in the world of B2B marketing, Megan has seen firsthand the shifts in technology which allow marketing and sales professionals to become laser focused on the best-fit accounts. At SiriusDecisions, she leads the organization’s account-based marketing and marketing operations services. Megan’s goal is to help her clients bridge the divide between best-practice theory and real-world requirements to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
According to Megan, account-based marketing represents the future of the B2B marketing industry. “We have to embrace the reality of how our buyers buy and what our customers want from us,” Megan said at the #FlipMyFunnel 2015 conference. “Salespeople talk about accounts, they talk about customers . . . they don’t talk about leads. Salespeople think about how they’re going to win accounts in the first place, then how they’re going to keep and grow those accounts.”
Click here to follow Megan Heuer on Twitter.
Scott Brinker
Scott Brinker is the co-founder, president and CTO of ion interactive for content marketing and software programs. Scott’s a mastermind when it comes to the intersection of marketing and technology, especially when it comes to account-based marketing. His main claim to thought leadership fame is his blog Chief Marketing Technologist. Since 2008, Scott has kept the B2B marketing and sales industry informed of the latest trends in marketing technology at Chief MarTec and helped to coin the term “marketing technologist” as an essential employee to any successful B2B marketing team. Every year, Scott produces an infographic outlining the marketing technology landscape, which examines 40 different categories of software, systems, and applications. He has a BS in computer science from Columbia University, and MBA from MIT, and a master’s degree in computer science from Harvard.
Click here to follow Scott Brinker on Twitter.
Want to learn more about ABM? Click here to download the Beginner’s Blueprint to Account-Based Marketing to get started.
