Account-Based Marketing – Target Marketing

Keeping Up With ABM: 14 Tips From the FlipMyFunnel Conference

I attended my first FlipMyFunnel conference this month, and picked up some fresh insights into Account Based Marketing (ABM). The event helped me understand how ABM has grown, thrived and settled itself into an established part of modern B2B thinking.

I attended my first FlipMyFunnel conference this month, and picked up some fresh insights into Account Based Marketing (ABM). I’ve explored ABM before — with interviews here and here, for example. But this event helped me understand how ABM has grown, thrived and settled itself into an established part of modern B2B thinking. Launched three years ago by the digital ad platform company Terminus, #FlipMyFunnel has taken on a life of its own. Here are some of the many ideas I gleaned.

The opening keynoter was Sangram Vajre, co-founder of Terminus and its chief evangelist. Vajre is a fluid and engaging speaker, with a lot of pizzazz. The theme of the conference was “Humanizing B2B,” which leads me into my observations from the day.

It’s clear that B2B marketing has been revolutionized by technology — from the Internet itself, to the myriad (nearly 7,000) martech point solutions available these days. While speeding up the process, marketing automation can unfortunately make us less effective. “Don’t hide behind the technology,” said Vajre. He recommended that we marketers adopt more personal, meaningful communications vehicles, and he suggested techniques like handwritten notes, and 1to1 video embedded in email.
ABM is being adopted widely, but it’s not a replacement for the traditional demand generation funnel. It’s a supplement. “You need both,” said Vajre. This reminded me of the longstanding debate about inbound versus outbound in B2B. How refreshing that the ABM community recognizes that it’s not a matter of one or the other.
Sales and marketing must share the same metrics. “We need one scorecard,” said Vajre. His recommended metric: the amount of time the teams spend on developing the right customers.

Big ideas came thick and fast for the rest of the day.

Think of the customer journey as an “account journey,” said Lindsay Becker and Lisa deDonato form LogMeIn. Track all the touches, inbound and out, at the account level. So doing, you can not only determine the best touch sequence into an account, but you can also legitimately claim marketing involvement in sales results. LogMeIn reports that 97% of their opportunities are impacted by marketing.
Deliberate communications between marketing and sales is key to success in ABM. Catina Martinez of Pluralsight makes sure to meet weekly with her sales counterparts, to explain their specific roles in upcoming campaigns, and work together on effective account penetration strategies.
Go back and look at the search terms that brought in your customers over the prior three, six or nine months, says Mike Madden of Marketo. You’ll be surprised at the breadth of topics people searched on, and you’ll generate great ideas for fresh content to attract more buyers like them.
Marketers need to go out on more sales appointments, says Kristin Novak of National Instruments. She once found herself in a very technical meeting, where she had to ask several questions to get the conversation straight. On the way out the door, the National Instruments sales rep thanked her, saying he had gained many new insights into the account and its needs thanks to her willingness to step back and probe on the basics.
Under the ABM approach, it’s less important to generate form-fills, and more important to build relationships. So Elle Woulfe of PathFactory recommends that, with target accounts, you un-gate your content. Makes a lot of sense when you are trying to demonstrate your capabilities inside a specific set of companies.

The FMF exhibit hall offered a trove of clever ways to practice ABM more effectively. Tchotchke alert: Crazy colored socks were everywhere.

Your employees are likely having conversations with more individual prospects in target accounts than may actually get key-entered into your systems. How to capture and leverage this asset? Have Sigstr keep track of corporate emails at the account level, pulling in fresh contacts to your database as they turn up. Sigstr will also enable personalized banner ads within your company email signatures for an extra marketing touch.
Marketing automation has had the unintended consequence of narrowing our outbound communications options to mostly email. But marketers must find ways to deepen customer relationships via other channels, too. PFL and Sendoso can help. Their tools operate within your CRM system to let marketers and sales reps order up direct mail shipment of collateral, gift boxes, logo merchandise, even food, on a global basis.
As getting a sales meeting requires more and more touches, and we seek improved relevance through personalization, the messaging process can become overwhelmingly complex. Conversica offers a nifty way to automate some of the drudgery, by reading customer responses and sending out prearranged messages based on what the customer is actually saying. With the added benefit of a bit of sales rep supervision: If the next touch is supposed to be a SDR call, the tool can check with the prospect about whether the call ever came in, and schedule it again if needed.

Top quotes of the day:

“CRM data ages like fish, not like wine.” —Justin Keller of Sigstr.
“The relationships we are trying to build are with humans.” —Nikki Nixon, director of FlipMyFunnel.
“ABM is hard.” —Sangram Vajre of Terminus.

A version of this article appeared in Biznology, the digital marketing blog.

B2B Marketing Success Starts and Ends With Data

Two new studies on B2B data and marketing highlight both challenges and opportunities in putting the workhorse of modern-day marketing — data — to profitable use. They are worth reading.

eMarketer’s B2B analyst Jillian Ryan is lead author on “B2B Marketing Data — Capturing and Managing Data for Actionable Insights.” EverString with Heinz Marketing has published “The State of AI in B2B Marketing” with a focused look at artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive modeling tools in this emerging area.

Both studies say a lot about promise, pragmatism and skepticism when it comes to collecting, integrating, analyzing and using first-, second- and third-party B2B data. The eMarketer study is also particularly useful, as it is culled from dozens of interviewees, plus a scan of multiple published reports in the field.

B2B data — Credit: “B2B Marketing Data — Capturing and Managing Data for Actionable Insights,” p. 2. by eMarketer

Credit: “B2B Marketing Data — Capturing and Managing Data for Actionable Insights,” p. 2. by eMarketer, 2018. Used with Permission.

Consider these current marketplace observations, reported by eMarketer (with additional attribution where other studies are cited):

Skills Gap — We Need Scientists. The top obstacles to data-driven marketing success include (Adweek Brandshare and Dun & Bradstreet, 2017):
(1) lack of data expertise (42%);
(2, tie) the reliability of third-party data sources (38%);
(2, tie) accuracy of audience data (also, 38%);
(4) integration of marketing and sales platforms (37%); and
(5) lack of appropriate audience data (35%).
‘Difficulty’ Does Not Necessarily Refer to Accuracy — but how easily it is to integrate, state, analyze and apply available data. The most “difficult” sources of marketing data include:
(1) channel partner, value-added reseller data, etc. (46%);
(2, tie) social networks and public data (45%); and
(2, tie) internal sales and customer service data (Ascend2, in partnership with ReachForce, 2018).
The Most Productive Data Sources are internal — but not exclusively so. The most “effective” sources are:
(1) internal marketing programs (53%);
(2) internal sales and customer service data (52%); and
(3) third-party information vendors (Ascend2, in partnership with ReachForce, 2018).
Data Quality Woes Persist: “Only 26% of B2B marketers worldwide polled by Ascend2 and Reachforce said data quality and accuracy was ‘extremely good.’ Roughly half said it was ‘somewhat good’ and 21% said ‘somewhat poor.’ ”
Even Dirty In-House. A LiveRamp B2B expert estimates that as much as 40% of internal CRM [customer relationship management] data for B2B marketers is “dirty” — inaccurate by being outdated, entered incorrectly or other inaccuracies.
Data Conflicts Happen (Sometimes Often). When appending data from third-party sources, and a conflict arises between existing values and appended values, respondents (Openprise, 2017):
(1) Maintain the existing field value in the CRM solution, 38%;
(2) Keep both the existing field value and the new data from the data provider, and reconcile “later” (27 %);
(3) Replace existing CRM data field with the newly acquired data from the data provider; or
(4) Keep both fields and never reconcile (11%)
Merging Is Complicated. Fifty-five percent of U.S. B2B professionals “said the inability to merge data from disparate sources in a timely manner was the biggest challenge of leveraging data to achieve go-to-market goals at their company (Harvard Business Review Analytics Services).
Reliable vs. Agile — Make the Choice: “B2Bs frequently make compromises working within the confines of the current technology limitations. At T-Mobile, [Gavin] Warrener [director, B2B demand generation and integrated marketing, T-Mobile for Business] said his data warehouse is ‘fantastic and scales amazingly,’ but the tradeoff – which he believes is a standard most B2Bs encounter — is that it takes a very long time to integrate the data. ‘We are compromising between data reliability and agility. We cannot have both,’ he said.”

Now that social data, behavioral data and mobile data — structured and unstructured — are entering the mix, B2B organizations struggle to integrate, analyze and score all these data, in conjunction with more traditional CRM and sales data. Some are building tech stacks internally, some outsourcing to third-party providers, and some are considering adding AI and machine learning tools to the mix.

Is AI Moving Beyond ‘Shiny New Object’?

In its report, EverString/Heinz Marketing finds confidence in AI is still building — with nearly a third of survey respondents uncertain in explaining the nuances between artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive modeling. Fully half are not yet using AI in their marketing strategy. Yet interest is high, with seven in 10 exploring AI use in personalization. More than 63% see AI useful in identifying trends in data, while 58% cite customization applications for AI, and 55% for processing of data.

AI success also is contingent on quality of available data — 70.4% are “somewhat confident” in their achievement of marketing objectives, based on current data access, while 21.4% are “very confident.” Confidence here, however, is increasing — with nearly 90% “somewhat confident” or “very confident” in both their marketing tech and marketing strategy investments.

While it may be tempting to substitute AI where B2B data skills are lacking, AI tools are best handled by data scientists themselves. They are the ones who can recognize “garbage-in, garbage-out” most readily and can verify and validate any patterns discovered and uncovered through AI applications.

Ad tech, martech, AI and other marketing and predictive tool advances are all great outcomes. The biggest prize, however, is strategy that is driven by well-managed, reliable and accessible prospect, customer and account data. As B2B marketers invest in tech — they must also invest in quality.

Exploring the Use Cases for Customer Data Platforms

The key to the successful adoption of a CDP and its capabilities is a deep understanding of the use cases and how they apply to your organization. The use cases are varied and require strategic and organizational planning to realize the financial benefits.

Customer data platform (CDP) technology is capturing the attention of marketers and technologists for some very good reasons. CDP’s solve age-old data management issues that have hung around marketer’s necks like the proverbial albatross. The right CDP can help marketers realize the dream of true one-to-one marketing by powering deep personalization. CDP’s enable the unification and activation of customer knowledge across all marketing channels. Instead of spending our time trying to manhandle data across a myriad of systems, we can spend more time thinking about how to connect with people and align with their personal needs and tastes. Doesn’t that sound like more fun?

Marketers across all conceivable industry verticals — small to enterprise, B2B and B2C – are exploring how a CDP can add value and drive new revenue opportunities for their organizations. Though CDPs promise the ability to capitalize on a unified customer data set in theory, many curious marketers are still wondering how exactly a CDP can be used in practice. The key to the successful adoption of a CDP and its capabilities is a deep understanding of the use cases and how they apply to your organization. The use cases are varied and require strategic and organizational planning to realize the financial benefits.

In a series of posts across the next few months, we will evaluate real-world examples of CDP use cases. These use case stories come from the experiences of pioneer organizations that were early adopters and are now generating real value from their CDP investments. We’ll start here with an overview of those various use cases.

Data Management, First Party Data, and GDPR

Managing organizational marketing data, on its own, is a compelling use case for CDP technology. Reconciling and activating customer data in support of marketing use cases in a system that is fundamentally managed within the marketing organization is a powerful scenario. In addition, the CDP empowers marketers to build a first party data competency to improve the understanding of “known” and “unknown” audiences and users. You can then create more meaningful conversations both on and off your own site with users who are already engaged or re-engage dormant users. And a strong first party data set can power more informed targets for lookalike audiences in the “walled garden” platforms to engage new users. Layer in the ability to address the consent management, profile management, and security/portability requirements of GDPR and these use cases bring a lot of value to a CDP investment.

Account Based Marketing (ABM)

Not just another regurgitated sales methodology, account based marketing (ABM) is gaining in popularity particularly among technology and services marketers because it works. ABM is proven to net larger deals in shorter timeframes and gain a larger share of wallet from key accounts. We will examine how a CDP empowers marketers to deploy data-driven ABM programs by understanding the behavior and interests of the “buyer collective” within key target accounts to then deliver highly personalized campaigns.

Advertising Efficiency

Who wouldn’t like to increase the efficiency of their advertising spend? ROAS (return on advertising spend) is a key use case for CDP technology. CDP’s allow marketers to create more defined customer segments by leveraging data across all sources. Behaviors, interests, channel preferences, transactional details, and any additional data store are all activated for customer segmentation. The full activation of all first party data creates natural efficiency with zero waste of ad spend by delivering a focused message aligned and delivered to only your target audience. You can also leverage your highly defined customer segments in any of the off-site targeting platforms to put a sharper point on your lookalikes, increasing the efficiency of customer acquisition efforts.

Personalization and Orchestration

Right person, right message, right time, right channel. For most this seems out of reach, but basic CDP functionality combined with artificial Intelligence and machine learning is making real personalization and orchestrated customer communication a reality. As much as we like to think that a customer journey is the same for groups of customers, each person is unique and makes decisions in their own way. Does the future lie in predicting and orchestrating the right cadence and messages for each individual rather than formulating rules-based campaign activities for large groups? For some organizations embracing advanced features of a CDP, that future is now.

Data Productization

In this new world where all of your customer knowledge is living within one environment, there are new and unique insights waiting to be monetized. New benchmarks, scores, intent, or other measures could be derived or extracted from your new first party data set. Finding new ways to provide insight and drive revenue through data and analytics is possible with the right CDP strategy.

Getting to ABM: Notes From the Field

David Rowe, SVP marketing and business development, Enli Health Intelligence

Account-based marketing is a hot concept in B2B these days. But how does it really work on the ground? David Rowe, SVP marketing and business development at Enli Health Intelligence, spoke at the BrandHIT marketing conference in Las Vegas last month, and shared candidly some of his firm’s experiences in migrating from traditional B2B demand generation to an ABM strategy. It’s been a long, but productive, journey. David identified four factors key to Enli’s ABM success: process, culture, attitude, and metrics. Fascinating stuff.

As background: Enli is a Portland, Ore., company with a population health management platform for health systems. Increasingly, insurance payors are moving away from fee-for-service payments, toward a “value based” reimbursement model, where doctors are paid on successful patient outcomes. In population health initiatives, the healthcare provider’s goal is to manage an ambulatory patient’s chronic conditions while avoiding hospitalization. Enli’s solution is essentially an electronic patient record that allows doctors to manage and report outcomes that will be reimbursable under the new payment models that will swing into effect fully in 2018. The tool is sold by subscription, either as SaaS or installed. Enli is the market leader, and always looking for ways to maintain their lead.

I posed four questions to David about the journey to ABM.

How Long Have You Been Migrating to ABM at Enli?

We’re about 18 months into the transition. It took us about a year to identify the resources and prepare the background, like doing our persona research and developing our analytics. We announced the new strategy to the board of directors in November of last year. Implementation began in January of this year. It’s changed entirely the way we work in marketing.

In ABM, the lines between sales and marketing blur. We are finding that ABM combines systems and culture in interesting ways. Here’s an example. This week an email came in to an account exec who identified an opportunity within a current account. She said the client wanted pursue a grant and wanted to buy an extra module of our software to support the initiative. She was asking for particular content to support the grant application. So, here we are at the bottom of funnel, and an opportunity has emerged.

In the old world of marketing as demand generator, we would have said, “That’s not our job. We run campaigns.” But in the new world of ABM, we jump on opportunity across the funnel. We had reconfigured the marketing department layout as a quad, with no cubicles. Everyone started talking about how to help. Together, we decided to get the customer on the phone and better understand the need. We took the ball.

The account manager handed the customer over to the marketing team. Three of us spent about 15 minutes on phone with her quickly figured out that we had exactly what customer needed on hand, all ready to go. (Although we were willing to create fresh content if needed.) The customer was blown away. “This is incredible,” she said later. “This fast response is amazing. If we don’t win the grant, we’re going to find a way to buy the module anyway.”

It’s about attitude, enabled by a culture we created, where everyone knows the goal. The play was: Stop what we’re doing and speak to the customer ourselves. A partnership is formed, and trust is built.

What Did You Need to Put in Place Before You Got to This Stage?

Two things: We needed to understand our customers, and we needed to align their buying journey with our selling journey.

We worked with Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute, who has a highly refined formula for developing customer insight. We decided to conduct the research ourselves, so the team could have direct exposure to customers, and to infuse the buyer perspective into our DNA. As we understand their questions, their reservations and their challenges, our messages can be better crafted. This is how we mapped the buyer journey.

On the alignment side, I am fortunate to work with a sales leader with whom I share a high degree of trust. Together, we merged the marketing and sales funnels. Part of the problem was economic. When we were handing off MQLs (marketing qualified leads) to sales, the receiving sales rep would consistently value it lower than we had in marketing. Now, we have sales involvement earlier, and set estimates that are more accurate.

Also, marketing is now involved lower in the funnel. Both teams participate across a continuous flow through marketing, selling and the customer community — the three stages of our joint funnel.

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The Keys to Optimizing Smart Business Relationships

Top-tier sales professionals understand that relationships drive success and that relationships are based on trust. When you engage with a customer at any stage of the sales process, your purpose first and foremost is building and maintaining trust with you, your company and your brand. I realized this a few years ago when I coined the phrase “Business Relationship Optimization.” It coincidentally has the best acronym of all time, BRO. In fact, I wrote a whole chapter on this topic in my book with Wiley, “Digital Sense.” And we all need to optimize our business relationships, right?

The problem with trust is that it’s fragile. One misstep or miscalculation can mean the difference between making a sale or hearing “I’m not interested.” That’s why you need a global commercial database that equips you with the most context-specific, relevant, and up-to-date customer information available. This way, you can reach the right person with the right message at the right time that shows why you’re offering the best solution to fit their needs.

Beyond Demographics and Industry Data

The last thing you want to do is come face-to-face with a customer without a specific understanding of how you can help them. Merely knowing who a decision-maker is and how to contact them isn’t enough to capture their attention so they understand the benefits of your offering. It may be that you have the perfect solution, but if they don’t understand why they should care, then they’ll never buy in.

This means you need a database that allows you to gain a more holistic understanding of the customer’s role and the challenges they face. Knowing the context of a customer’s unique situation allows you to ask the right questions and provide the right answers to help you move closer to a sale.

It’s true that you can easily find basic company information online with just a few clicks and keystrokes, but real insights that connect you to your most valuable customers and prospects can be difficult to discover. In addition, the fact that the marketplace is always changing means sales prospect data needs to be constantly updated, preferably in real-time.

Context Determines the Appropriate Account-Based Sales Approach

You’ll need to devote your sales efforts to where they’ll have the most impact. This means that a focused list of highly-targeted, highly-interested prospects is more valuable than a bigger one that consists of people you don’t know anything about.

To this end, when selecting a prospect database solution for your sales team, you should search for features that go beyond basic company and contact information. In my years in marketing, I’ve been pitched tons of databases. There are certainly many to choose from. My old go-to was Jigsaw.com back in the day. Today, with the acquisitions that Dun & Bradstreet has made with NetProspex and Avention, in my estimation, D&B is clearly the top global commercial database. Their tool (D&B Hoovers) will give you context about the issues your prospects face and how you can help them. These include:

Concept-driven list-building – The ability to search for companies based on concepts will help you home in on businesses that can be hard to aggregate. For example, companies and industries such as drone delivery, corporate daycare, and driverless cars might not have their own SIC codes yet, but they already play a significant role in the marketplace and might be able to benefit from your products and services.
Business-activity search – You can search for companies based on recent events and activities pertaining to growth, media, technology, and several other dynamic aspects of business development. Understanding what’s happening internally at a prospect’s office will give you a wealth of context that would otherwise be unattainable and help you know what questions to ask.
Dynamic ideal profile matching and scoring – You can input information about your ideal client then match it with companies that fit those criteria. The degree of the match is then scored so you can prioritize where to dedicate your resources.
Ongoing real-time monitoring and reporting – Business landscapes are always shifting and evolving, so you have to keep your eye on the ball so as not to be taken by surprise. This tool enables you to keep an eye on companies as they change so you always know where you stand and how you can help.
Decision-making hierarchy maps – Sometimes you need to know where a prospect fits into an organization’s overall decision-making hierarchy. This tool tells you who the key players are that make purchasing decisions related to your products and services. This helps you see where they fit into the bigger picture to give you a better understanding of how to navigate the sales process with each account.

Relationships drive sales success in any organization, and all relationships are based on trust. You’ll be able to build trust more effectively by using these database features to give you context-specific information about your customers, which will help you optimize your business relationships, by always knowing how you can help your new BROs.