From the course: Account-Based Marketing Foundations

Defining account-based marketing

From the course: Account-Based Marketing Foundations

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Defining account-based marketing

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- Remember the early days of the internet? The sights, the sounds. All the cool kids were in the chatroom, and you couldn't wait to join them. Best of all, email. You opened so much of it. Didn't matter who it was from. It was an exciting time for marketing too. In the year 2000, marketers could expect 80 to 90% open rate on emails. Specialized email marketers sprouted up almost overnight, and they were having a blast, literally. By 2005, B2B marketers and sales technology had picked up the pace with newcomers like Pardot, Marketo, and Eloqua creating automation software to enable more sophisticated email nurture and eventually coordinate across channels. Fast forward five more years, and new targeting methods such as predictive data, lookalikes, and advanced web tracking unlocked a ton of marketing capabilities. Teams could generate more leads than ever, hooray! But while marketers rejoiced, sales slowly drowned in the sheer volume of leads. What's worse, they gradually realized the vast majority were unqualified or underqualified. And it wasn't just sales teams being dramatic. According to Forrester Research, less than 1% of all B2B leads actually turn into customers. Tensions mounted, marketing and sales team drifted further and further apart, and marketing budgets bloated with tools that brought new capabilities but also more complexity. Strategy, we realized, had taken a backseat. It was into this environment that account-based marketing or ABM was born. It was in reaction to the high volume, low quality lead generation that had come to dominate B2B marketing. Analyst firm TOPO provides a simple definition of account-based marketing. ABM is the coordination of personalized marketing and sales efforts to drive engagement within a target set of accounts. I would add that account-based marketing is defined by holistic thinking, engaging every relevant persona within your target account across the full life cycle of that account instead of targeting each individual lead separately. To do this, you need a new strategy and maybe even new tools. At the very least, ABM forces marketers to put strategy first once again. It's simply a more efficient way to grow rapidly. Once you adopt an account-based strategy, you can look forward to four key benefits: tighter alignment between sales and marketing, shorter sales cycles, more efficient use of your marketing budget, and better customer experience. Here's the bottom line. If you want to grow revenue efficiently and at scale, you have to adapt your strategy to focus on quality growth not quantity metrics. That's where ABM can help.

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