One of the highlights for us at B2BMX was a panel discussion where four experts talked about ABM strategies they’ve deployed at their companies.
The panel featured Som Puangladda, VP of Global Marketing at GumGum, Adam Goyette, VP of Marketing at G2 Crowd, Eric Martin, Senior Director of Demand Gen at SalesLoft, and Justin Gray, the well-known founder of LeadMD.
Som, Adam, Eric, and Justin joined forces to address topics like deployment, personalization, scalability, measurement, and alignment. Today, we’re focusing on some of our biggest takeaways.
Here’s what we’re unpacking:
- Defining what ABM means to your organization
- Remember, it’s ultimately about personalization
- Keeping your accounts engaged, even after they’ve signed the deal
This post is based on a #FlipMyFunnel podcast. If you’d like to listen to the full episode, you can check it out here and below.
Defining what ABM means to you:
One of the main challenges with ABM is simply figuring out what type of ABM strategy fits best with your organization.
There’s so many directions you could take your strategy.
For example, there’s what we might call Vanilla ABM. This strategy tends to land at the epicenter of ABM. In this scenario, you’ve got a number of accounts, probably 50 or fewer, that you can really afford to understand at the granular level.
You can understand what those executives are going to identify with, put a lot of effort into the creative, and thread that across your marketing, sales, and executive teams to get that conversation going with your target. That’s a pure ABM play.
But most people probably need something more like a gradient hybrid, or targeted Demand Gen as we might call it.
When you’re ready to operationalizing ABM, make sure you define what ABM is going to mean to your organization.
Leverage personalization:
With ABM, people usually want to automate everything right off the bat.
You can do that, but the power of ABM is in being targeted and personalized. Right?
ABM is not about applying your traditional demand gen strategy to the same audience, and simply putting more money behind it.
It’s about being smart about what you’re putting in front of that target.
ABM really is marketing’s return to hyper-personalization, to the ability to really interact one on one.That’s what’s so unique about it.
And when you take that personal approach, you get real value.
Keeping your accounts engaged:
After a project gets signed, it can be difficult to keep accounts engaged.
Justin and his team have a great way of solving this issue.
They run something called the Marketing of Angels Network, which is actually a podcast. But the focus is on reaching out to those CMO’s, getting them to come on the show and talk about what’s driving their organization.
And just through that conversation, often times they’ll learn something valuable to bring back to the delivery team and the account managers.
So, they’re keeping the account engaged, but they’re also continuing to develop that relationship, to learn more about what they need.
That way Justin and his team can make sure their projects are addressing that target’s concerns, helping them reach their objectives.
So, as you begin to operationalize your own ABM strategy, think about the version of AMB that fits best with your organization and how you can leverage personalization to help your targets truly achieve their goals.
