Account-Based Marketing And Sales In Tech: Five Trends That Will Matter This Year

Mike co-founded ABM agency ALIAS Partners, recently acquired by global B2B agency MOI, where he oversees account-based marketing & sales.

The upheaval from 2020 has forced many companies to accelerate their digital transformation and collaboration initiatives. The scramble is on to find the right technologies that enable survival and growth, as companies now have to operate in a largely digital-only world. 

This is good news for enterprise tech vendors. Gartner forecasts IT spending will rebound in 2021, with the enterprise software market expected to grow by 7.2%.

However, as technology companies compete for their share of the growth, there’s significant pressure on their marketing departments to ensure they’re investing their resources most effectively. Undoubtedly, this means investing in some form of account-based marketing.

So, as you consider your ABM strategy for 2021, here are five shifts that will make a tangible difference:

1. Embrace first-party data.

As the competition in the digital-only world heats up, data will continue to be the absolute differentiator. 

Buying data, such as third-party intent data, seems like an easy (if expensive) fix. Yet it can’t offer you visibility into what “intent” markers look like for your prospects as they traverse your digital estate. Third-party data is also aggregated data compiled as a weekly snapshot—and in the digital world, that’s an eon. A lot can change in that time.

Focus instead on leveraging first-party data. It is live, always-on and unique to your business. Using website visitor identification solutions and ensuring attribution tracking across the entire martech stack is critical to mapping out what a successful buyer journey looks like, who is showing high engagement, and where those interests lie.

2. Develop intelligent sales enablement.

Marketing can deliver a real impact by proactively providing valuable and actionable target account insights to the sales team. It then needs to follow up with content recommendations that reflect those insights.

Consider creating an automated workflow between marketing and sales to deliver these insights and recommendations. Specify the triggers and behaviors on their target accounts, such as how they interact with your ads, how often they visit your website, and what content they consume. Ideally, your delivery system can quantify this with an account engagement score. Follow up regularly with personalized content recommendations which sales can use to nurture the account.

If you haven’t built one already, develop an account-based dashboard, accessible to everyone in your organization. The dashboard must unify all your data in one place, including your ad platform, marketing automation, CRM, and sales engagement platforms. It should be able to filter this data by target account. Marketing and sales should huddle around this regularly to identify behavioral trends and key account engagement.

3. Get creative with your ABM.

As account-based marketing becomes the table stakes for most enterprise technology companies, creativity in all the phases of ABM activation and orchestration becomes vital.

This creativity isn’t limited to copy or design. Creativity is needed in your research, data and insights, intelligence gathering and brainstorming to create a unique relevance, which will turn the heads of decision makers.

One way to unlock this creative thinking is to run a “problem-solving” discovery workshop for each of your ABM programs. Make sure the invites are not limited to marketing and sales. Some of the best, leftfield ideas come from people typically outside these departments. Invite your solution developers, operations and even finance. Set a challenge, such as an opportunity to present your solution to the CIO of your most valued prospect. Then brainstorm what they think should be presented. Ideate backwards from there to define what you need to be successful, always addressing why and how for each step or initiative.

4. Align your content strategy and digital media.

The pandemic forced most marketing activity online, which has increased audience cannibalization within organizations. Now the demand generation team is going after exactly the same people as are the ABM programs. Without alignment, organizations are duplicating efforts and raising the costs per lead. 

To avoid this cannibalization, align your content strategy and digital media across all marketing disciplines.

Develop a central content strategy based on your core accounts and share it across all marketing disciplines. It will be the foundation on which you can then develop tailored and personalized content for ABM, as well as general content for awareness to attract lookalike prospects. This will ensure a connected and consistent experience for the customer, and greater efficiency in content development.

Orchestrate all digital media centrally, with data and insight sharing across the various disciplines. Your dashboard will provide 20/20 vision. This alignment not only provides massive cost savings, but also connects you with higher-quality leads.

5. Choose your technology carefully.

A commonly held misconception is that technology is the foundation of successful ABM. This is simply not true. Technology can never replace good strategy. That being said, the right technology will prove invaluable in creating—and then enhancing—your account-based marketing strategy.

With thousands of solutions and a lot of consolidation in the ABM market, it is difficult to choose the “ideal” martech stack. The “right” technology differs for every organization, depending on in-house skills, the nature and size of your target audience, and even the average deal size or total client value. 

Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses in the four key areas of the ABM process: account selection, engagement and orchestration, sales enablement, and measurement (see diagram). Use technology to fill in some of the gaps. Give preference to solutions that are modular or scalable across several of the key areas.

It starts and ends with your data.

Data underpins every one of these trends. You must know how to identify your high-impact data, how to access it—and how to make full use of it. Organizations that get these data questions right will have a successful ABM program in 2021.

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Author: Mike Boogaard, Forbes Councils Member