The closing session at the B2B Marketing Exchange was really fantastic. It was all about ABM — specifically how Oracle brought their ABM strategy to life.
During the session Jungah Lee, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Oracle Cloud for Finance, and Lynn Barnhart, Senior Director, Demand Generation for Human Capital Management Cloud Solutions at Oracle, talked about how they successfully deployed two very different ABM campaigns. The campaigns focused on two different audience groups with two different sets of goals and objectives, two different orchestrations, and two very different timelines.
Even though these campaigns were vastly different, the ABM framework they used allowed them to achieve success in each campaign. So, today, I’m sharing our biggest takeaways from this session on how to implement a great ABM strategy.
Here’s what we’re unpacking today:
- The four step framework Oracle uses to deploy ABM
- What they learned about using (or not using) email
- What their end results looked like
This post is based on a session from B2BMX with Lynn Barnhart and Jungah Lee. If you’d like to listen to the full episode, you can check it out here and below.
The four step framework:
The following are the four quadrants of the account based strategy framework Oracle used to guide the implementation of their two campaigns.
If you were going to start doing ABM today, these are probably the steps you would follow.
#1: Target.
Target is a critical part of strategy and planning. It’s the first step in the planning phase.
This is how the teams at Oracle select the accounts and contacts that will go into the campaign.
#2: Personalize.
Once you know which accounts you’re going to go after, and which personas are within the campaign, you’ve got to think about that extra level of personalization that goes into the messaging and the tactics.
It’s all about tailoring to their needs and delivering a value proposition that really speaks to them.
And Oracle truly takes personalization to the next level. Consider their landing pages as an example. They did things that you would expect to see, like personalizing the target’s first name and their company name. But they also personalized the images and body content on the page based on the target’s industry and on topics the client was surging on at the time.
Today, personalizing names is just table stakes. Consider taking it up a notch. Or five.
#3: Orchestration.
In the third quadrant is orchestration.
Account based marketing is a team sport.
You’ve got to have that marketing and sales coordination throughout the campaign, from start to finish. Don’t wait to work together until you’ve launched the campaign.
You’ve got to focus on orchestration from the get go. Start planning with your sales team. And make sure you’re aligned to their goals.
#4: Measurement.
Lastly, you need great metrics.
The Oracle teams look at email or account engagement metrics, but they also look at deal progression. They look at deal velocity and at total amount of the deal.
They also look at opportunity data, as it’s important to understand if any new opportunities are emerging from accounts they’ve touched.
Learning to rely less on email:
One of the biggest takeaways the team had was that they needed to rely less on email.
They realized that making contact through email was difficult. People get too many emails, so campaign emails just weren’t getting through.
Instead of relying on email so heavily, the teams started to consider other ways of reaching out, like direct mail.
The final results:
So, how successful were the campaigns?
The first campaign, focused on current customers, showed marketing generated pipeline of 9.5 million, after all three waves of the campaign had been completed. They had originally had forecasted 8 to 10 million.
The second campaign, a Greenfield focus, had a target of hitting $5 million in pipeline. They hit $6 million.
And the campaigns generated great qualitative feedback, too. People were excited about the program. It helped open doors for those who couldn’t get in, helped progress deals that may have stalled, and it gave everyone ideas on followup that they could use with other customers in their sales cycles.
I’d say they hit it out of the park.
