One of the current hot business marketing fads is “account-based marketing,” or ABM.
On the surface, ABM sounds really cool and very, very smart. And some of the new jargon used by ABM providers is just techno-babble. It seems to almost as popular today as “pivot.”
I’m not saying ABM is bad. The guts of it are great. I just want to protect my BFFs from being oversold on something that’s actually not new at all.
Why do I say this? Watch this week’s UNCOPYABLE Business.
My smokin’ hot wife, Kay, put together a FREE gift for you titled, “5 UNCOPYABLE Strategies.” Do you have it yet? CLICK HERE!
You are so right.
The ABM hype train is merely trying to take a technical solution and present it as if the underlying reason it exists is new. It’s not. I did ABM 25 years ago with no technology. How? I sold to accounts. What these folks are selling is “orchestration” at scale of an ABM strategy, not really ABM. You really need an ABM strategy already to buy an ABM orchestration product. But this of course isn’t how it’s sold.
ABM is a valuable tool in the toolkit but only in certain circumstances. It only works if you have a well considered ABM strategy already, or are willing to develop one BEFORE you buy a product. It only works if Marketing & Sales are tightly integrated. It only works if marketing & sales can AGREE on who the target customer is: not just the moose, but which specific “mooses” among all the mooses, because some are (theoretically) more interesting than others.
ABM is mainly applicable to B2B but it’s much harder if your channels to market are indirect. (distribution, for example) It’s also somewhat pointless if your market is extremely narrow.
With consideration of all of the above, the advantage of using ABM as a complement to inbound is the technology allows you to expose people at your target companies to your inbound strategy who weren’t paying any attention in the first place, but are (theoretically) influential to a sale.
HAHAHA, Bill! You should have done this video! Great analysis!
Well, I know the people at one of the ABM platforms pretty well, I was a reviewer on one of the top ABM books published recently. They got the same feedback.