A Practitioner's Guide to Account-Based Marketing

Accelerating Growth in Strategic Accounts

Bev Burgess, Dave Munn

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781398600898
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

As some of today's major and complex companies are worth more than the GDPs of some countries, traditional marketing approaches, such as glossy corporate campaigns, will have limited returns. Account-based marketing, also known as client-centric marketing, treats important individual accounts as markets in their own right, to help strengthen relationships, build reputation, and increase revenues in important accounts. A Practitioner's Guide to Account-Based Marketing outlines a clear, step-by-step process for readers to harness ABM tools and techniques and set up ABM programmes. Featuring insights from practising professionals and case studies from organizations including Fujitsu, Infosys, Microsoft, O2 and ServiceNow, it also contains guidance on developing the competencies needed for account-based marketing and managing your ABM career. This updated second edition contains further discussion on how ABM initiatives can go from a pilot to being embedded in a business, new material on quantified value propositions and updated wider research. Meticulously researched and highly practical, A Practitioner's Guide to Account-Based Marketing will help all marketers to deliver successful B2B marketing.

Part One

Setting up an account-based marketing programme

Introduction to Part One

This first part of this book describes what account-based marketing (ABM) is, how and why it evolved and how companies are using it to accelerate growth in their strategic accounts today. It then leverages the Information Technology Services Marketing Association’s (ITSMA) research and experience with account-based marketers around the world to bring you the guidance you need to set up and scale an ABM programme for your own company.

In Chapter 1 we dig into the driving forces behind ABM and look at the benefits it has delivered for those adopting it into their marketing strategy. We look at how ABM as a practice has evolved since it was first codified by ITSMA in 2003, and how three types of ABM have since emerged in response to demand for more from the business, enabled by technologies that can help you adopt ABM principles at greater scale. This chapter helps you to think about whether ABM is right for your business and, if so, which type or types will work best for you.

Chapter 2 moves on to explore the foundations you will need to put in place if you’re planning an ABM programme. We cover the fundamentals, from being clear on what you want to achieve, through positioning ABM as a business initiative (not just a marketing initiative), building your governance framework, and identifying your sources of funding to defining what success will look like.

The technologies that could support your programme are the subject of Chapter 3. We look at technologies supporting communications between marketing and sales, those that help uncover insights about the accounts in your programme, those that help in the planning and execution of campaigns and the systems that allow you to track and report on your ABM results.

Deciding which accounts to include in your programme may appear simple but can actually be problematic, sometimes making the difference between your programme’s success and failure. Chapter 4 introduces an objective process for prioritizing accounts with your business and sales colleagues. We demonstrate how you can use a multifactor matrix to help you decide the appropriate levels of investment and attention for each account in a collaborative way.

Thinking ahead to the success of your programme, Chapter 5 sets out ITSMA’s ABM adoption model, built with our Global ABM Council, and through qualitative research to show the phases companies go through as they launch and scale ABM. We share the seven dimensions and 21 critical success factors that evolve to support your programme’s growth, so that you can be prepared as you start on your ABM journey.

01

The essentials of account-based marketing

Why account-based marketing matters

In the 2020 Forbes Global 500 list¹ Walmart’s revenues stood at US $524 billion (ranked 1st), Royal Dutch Shell’s at US $352 billion (ranked 5th) and Toyota’s at US $275 billion (ranked 10th). The global revenues of just three of the leading information technology companies – Apple, AT&T and Alphabet – were over US $603 billion, which is nearly 3 per cent of the gross domestic product of the United States. To put this into perspective, the combined GDP of the bottom 50 of the world’s countries for which the World Bank has data equalled just US $236 billion in 2019.²

Common sense alone should tell anyone determined to establish new business relationships or cement existing ones with organizations of this breadth and depth in the highly complex and competitive business-to-business (B2B) arena that traditional marketing approaches will have limited returns. Glossy corporate campaigns are proving to be increasingly less effective for winning business, driving growth and keeping performance on track. This is exacerbated by an environment characterized by volatility, uncertainty, discontinuity and the changing demands of customers (see box ‘Driving forces’). And, over the past year, the global COVID-19 pandemic has led companies to reach for anything that helps them stay close to, and support, their clients.

The combination of these forces has led a growing number of forward-looking companies to embrace the principles of ABM for their biggest or most important accounts. First defined by ITSMA as ‘treating individual accounts as markets in their own right’, it is now well established in some of the world’s largest technology companies, such as Accenture, Fujitsu, Microsoft and SAP, while its reach extends beyond the technology sector into professional services (eg KPMG) and other business sectors (eg financial services, real estate and engineering).

And it is proving its worth. An ITSMA 2020 ABM benchmarking survey³ found that 77 per cent of marketers who measure return on investment (ROI) described ABM as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach. Just over a quarter of those marketers surveyed said that ABM delivers more than 10 per cent better ROI than other B2B marketing approaches (see Figure 1.1). ROI improves with time, with double the amount of marketers seeing better ROI after their programme has been established for three years. It is also responsible for driving other significant outcomes, such as client success and advocacy, while providing a source of innovation for the company (see Figure 1.2).⁴ These benefits also improve in more mature programmes.

Figure 1.1 ABM and ROI

SOURCE ITSMA and ABM Leadership Alliance, 2020 ABM Benchmark Study, September 2020

Figure 1.1 details

The details of the diagram are as follows:

A pie diagram shows ‘Does your company measure ABM return on investment (ROI)?’ Percentage of respondents, N equals 290. It is divided into three parts, yes, 61 percent; no, 31 percent and don’t know, 8 percent. The text pointing to yes reads ‘How does ABM return on investment (ROI) compare to traditional marketing initiatives? Percentage of respondents is N equals 172. The diagram on the right shows the following: significantly lower, 2 percent; somewhat lower, 9 percent; about the same, 12 percent; somewhat higher up to 10 percent, 51 percent and significantly higher over 10 percent.

Figure 1.2 ABM delivers valuable business outcomes

NOTE Multiple responses allowed. * Indicates a statistically significant difference.

SOURCE ITSMA and ABM Leadership Alliance, 2018 ABM Benchmark Study, October 2018

Figure 1.2 details

The details of the diagram are as follows:

The percentage of agree or strongly agree with each statement for doing ABM less than 3 years, n equal 79 and doing ABM 3 years or more, n equals 17 are as follows: our ABM accounts have achieved greater customer success with our solutions than other accounts have, 75 percent and 90 percent; our ABM accounts are more likely to provide positive references and advocate for us than other accounts are, 65 percent and 88 percent; collaborative innovation with individual ABM accounts has led to the development of valuable new solutions for our company to take more widely to market, 58 percent and 75 percent.

ABM makes such a measurable difference because it is designed with specific objectives aimed at a tightly targeted audience. Externally, it is an integrated, coordinated programme of activities that brings valuable propositions and relevant ideas to clients. Internally, it ...