Despite ABM’s lucrative nature — a third of marketers have seen more than 50% ROI on ABM efforts — organizations are still struggling with choosing the right target accounts. New research from Demand Spring, a B2B marketing consultancy, uncovered that despite two-thirds of respondents indicating they implemented ABM as part of their marketing strategy, many marketers are still trying to determine the optimal execution for these strategies.
The company’s first annual “State Of Account-Based Marketing” report surveyed 100 marketers located across North America from a variety of industries. In addition to choosing the right target accounts, other challenges that plagued respondents included:
- Delivering a personalized experience (39%); and
- Selecting the right content and assets (34%).
However, there were several promising, positive findings in the survey, which consisted of:
- 74% of respondents indicating that new business generation is the primary goal of their ABM strategy;
- 53% of practitioners reporting that their ABM campaigns have generated more revenue than other marketing efforts; and
- 47% of marketers seeing a moderate increase in sales and marketing alignment since implementing ABM.
“ABM is continuing to pick up momentum, which isn’t surprising,” said Tracy Thayne, Vice President of Strategy Consulting with Demand Spring, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “B2B has been moving toward consumerization for quite a while, and in the consumer world, the emphasis or focus of consumer-oriented organizations is hyper personalization. And when organizations adopt an account-based approach, it’s about delivering the experiences prospects and buyers are demanding.”
To get more insights into the research and drill deeper into the report’s key findings, the DGR team sat down with Thayne to expand notable discoveries and learn more about the current state of ABM.
Demand Gen Report: Being that most marketers surveyed haven’t seen any notable increases in their sales and marketing alignment, what do you think is impeding that collaboration? Do you have any tips for organizations on how to encourage alignment?
Tracy Thayne: Misalignment between sales and marketing is a perennial issue. Although there’s been improvement, marketers are still struggling to collaborate with sales. One of the reasons is because marketers are becoming more business-driven to deliver positive ROI and represent themselves in their organization’s revenue equation. On the other hand, salespeople run a little looser; they’re very opportunistic and it’s difficult for them for to take a pause and get pragmatic about ABM.
The solution is for marketers to align more directly with the business than the sales organization. Sales is always going to drive toward the revenue objective, whereas the business has a solid definition around how they plan to achieve their growth objectives. When you think about how business leaders are defining their products, they’re looking at total addressable market (TAM), where they’re winning today and how they can improve their current processes. By having that connection with the business leaders, marketers can get more effective in their targeting — and organically increase their relationship with sales.
DGR: The research found that marketers are struggling to personalize account experiences and even determine which accounts they want to pass over to sales. Why do you think that is, and how can practitioners remedy it?
Thayne: Identifying and targeting accounts is probably the key difference between high- and low-performing ABM campaigns. Even in the work I’m doing with my clients, I find a huge gap in time for marketers to build out effective ABM programs. Marketers are doing everything they can to put all their information together in a way that works, but it comes back to misalignment: Things get loose when it comes to collaborating with sales to identify the right targets. Salespeople are opportunistic by nature; they want to knock down the biggest account they can instead of relying on their ICP. Building account-based programs that are connected to the ICP and legitimate business opportunities is where there’ll see the most success.
DGR: What are some of the biggest challenges you see marketers struggling with in terms of account-specific personalization? Do you have any advice for them?
Thayne: High-value accounts deserve high-value experiences, and the experience marketers are delivering is often compared to what their competitors are delivering. Even if they’re not competing with another vendor product-wise, they’re still competing from an experience perspective. Think of it like this: You’d get a much better experience walking into a Ferrari dealership than a used car lot.
Marketers need strong, healthy data for personalization — poor data limits the possibilities. Healthy data opens the full spectrum of personalization opportunities because when you start thinking about ABM and its associated costs, it’s the personalization that gets super expensive.
I’m also seeing that leading organizations use well-designed customer data platforms (CDPs), because they can account for the dynamic nature of a changing organization in real time, whereas customer relationship managers CRMs do not. With an effective CDP, you’ll be able to understand what’s intriguing to an account at a point in time, whereas the only time that data would be put into a CRM is if a salesperson comes across that knowledge.
DGR: As you were reviewing the research, were there any findings in particular that stood out or surprised you?
Thayne: On a positive note, it was startling that 12% of respondents reported seeing a 200% ROI on their ABM programs — that’s incredible. I hadn’t heard of anyone achieving that level of ROI, but it turns out there’s a good percentage of organizations doing that. What we learned from that is well-executed ABM programs have quite an upside if done correctly. We also had nearly 60% of respondents say that they’re seeing a 50% or better ROI, which is impressive in its own right.
DGR: In your opinion, what’s the biggest takeaway from the report?
Thayne: ABM is all about data — but Google is ending third-party cookies in 2024 and companies like Apple are already heavily involved in supporting consumer data privacy. Organizations need to understand that impact and demonstrate to their buyers that they’re trustworthy so they can collect zero- and first-party data. The more you know about your accounts and their goals/pain points, the better you can personalize their experiences.
For more insights in the “State Of Account-Based Marketing,” check out the full report here.