Why ABM is for everyone in 2021 — Randi Barshack // Rollworks

Quotes

• “What you mention is a common misconception we see all the time. The irony here is that it is companies with fewer resources that really have to focus on efficiency that can benefit the most from ABM. As the industry evolved, it felt like something you had to graduate to you finish getting your CRM in place and then your marketing system and you got that level of sophistication and maybe if you’re lucky and if you have growth, you’ll graduate into some sort of ABM.” - Randi“ABM is account-based. It’s just about understanding where you’re gonna get the most value and focusing on them whether that’s targeting your outbound efforts to accounts that is gonna matter the most or understanding that when you have inbound leads coming in, that it’s actually accounts that matter the most.” - Randi “We sometimes have the challenge of articulating the benefits because it’s so obvious. Wouldn’t you rather spend your time on the accounts that matter the most. Wouldn’t you rather redirect your budget to the accounts that bring you the most value. And that’s hard to articulate in a way that sounds new because it’s such a no-brainer.” - Randi“That’s the underlying philosophy of ABM. That you should be prioritizing the accounts that are going to be the most valuable to your organization. There’s a level of complexity that I want to dig into. There’s a couple of parts that goes into prioritizing those accounts. First off, it’s figuring out who they are and understanding the signals that you’re getting that highlight existing customers you have that drive the most value and finding companies like them, doing your research and trying to figure out who is the highest value cap.” - Ben“With the amount of data we have right now and the algorithms, it’s pretty easy to actually come up with characteristics of accounts that are gonna matter the most. Another misconception is, when we talk about ABM, a lot of times, people’s minds go to the very tip of the iceberg. Those top ten accounts.” - Randi“That may be where you focus the large buckets of dollar and the most efforts but we at RollWorks in ABM at scale so we very much believe in looking at a target account list that are able to identify the number of accounts that your entire sales and STR team could and should be working to your goal and that’s very often gonna look like ten to hundred accounts. The trick there is being able to score those accounts and understand within these buckets of 5,000 accounts, there’s a top tier that’s gonna warrant a bigger budget and more effort. There’s a middle tier where I’m gonna see a lot of return, I just maybe don’t have the bandwidth to do one-to-one outreach all the time and then there’s a broader tier that if those accounts come inbound, I would still rather focus on those accounts rather than the whole universe.” - Randi“So it can be done at scale. That's one of the biggest changes we’ve seen recently is people realizing that ABM can and should be looked at as a scaled program.” - Randi“I think of ABM not only being about identifying the most valuable accounts but I also think about being about personalization. You’re changing your marketing message and strategies based on your highest priority account list.” - Ben“It doesn’t necessarily mean that the top of the pyramid are the largest accounts. It just might mean that those are the priority. So maybe you have a part  of your sales team that prioritize enterprise accounts and another is focused on the SMB market. So the SMB market top tier accounts are going to be smaller accounts. So your motion might be different in your enterprise top tier account vs SMB top tier account but they are still considered Grade A, top tier accounts.” - Randi“Essentially, it’s high priority, a priority, and low priority.” - Ben “There’s a long standing definition of what those priorities look like. That would be like your core target account list. But now with the data we see in terms of the readiness like people exhibiting intent on the internet or engagement with brands visiting your website multiple times, if you see those readiness signals that might boil those accounts up in terms of priority.” - Randi“At RollWorks, we say, ‘you’re doing ABM but you don’t realize it’. The reality is that B2B marketers, you’re doing a degree of ABM whether you realize it or not. Marketers have been doing it in their heads for decades. It’s just now we can do it in a systematic way at scale.” - Randi“Rather than looking at the basic activity, before I even figure out if it’s valuable or not, I’m putting the lens of what account they are coming from and what’s their role within that account and I’m using that as my primary filter rather than just activity and again it feels so obvious. I just think the technology hasn't been packaged up in an attainable way.” - Randi“It’s very much what happened in email marketing and marketing automation. Marketo came out as an enterprise level tool. You’re setting up triggers. Your email marketing is based on interaction and data not just a batch of glass approach.” - Ben“We’re seeing the same thing happen in the ABM market where these algorithms that are looking at not only the company profile but the data that we’re getting from potential customers interaction with web properties and all the other data signals instead of having that computation happen in our brain which inherently is fraught with error. We’re relying on algorithms saying, ‘Look, this is the account you should look at.’ To me, the maturity of that software technology and how long it has been around that now it’s ready to be packaged down market is why we’re seeing this ABM trend for everyone in 2021.” - Ben“So we talk a lot about inbounds and using an account lens to look at what’s coming in. But the backbone of many ABM programs is account-based advertising and it’s not necessarily widely known that I can take this list, here’s the 4,000 accounts that matter the most and here they are by their tier, and I can have pinpointed and targeted advertising going only into the accounts that matter and the roles that matter within those accounts.” - Randi“Sometimes it warrants one-to-one personalization, showing specific ads to specific companies with the company name in the ad. I can actually do that programmatically and dynamically change the name of the company or the person on the ad but there are multiple tiers of personalization.” - Randi“The great thing about ABM solution syncing up with your CRM is I could run an ad campaign that’s very different for a company that I have not engaged with versus a company that’s in an active sales cycle with me and I wanna focus more on product capabilities or ROI or something like that.” - Randi“The reality is that as the event marketing budget went away, people are looking to be more personalized. On Crisis Marketing Week, I talked about what was gonna happen as a response to the pandemic and the smart marketers hold back a lot of their paid advertising budgets to reserve their capital because times are uncertain and they focused more on personalization and using data and channels that were driving organic or inbound growth. ABM strategy is one that fits into that.” - Ben