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The transition from one decade to the next always allows for a period of reflection as well as a look forward at what is to come next.
When I founded Momentum not long after the start of the last decade, traditional marketing techniques were no longer delivering revenue growth in the enterprise sector and a new approach for sales and marketing was required to fuel growth.
To provide a real perspective on where account-based marketing (ABM) will head in 2020, we’ve taken a look at those clients who have either been doing it for the longest or have been leading the charge over the last decade.
All About Accounts: Account-Based Strategies Will Engage Key Lines Of Business
Technology has always played a major role in determining an enterprise’s ability to differentiate itself from the competition, particularly in areas like cost structure, efficiency and customer experience.
However, as technology purchases become more strategic, a larger pool of stakeholders are weighing in on decisions and managing technology-related budgets.
Gartner has estimated that nearly 40% of IT spend comes from departments other than IT, and with more software being delivered via the cloud and as-a-service, stakeholders can more easily adopt new solutions and bypass their own IT team completely.
That means this trend looks to only be going one way in 2020, and tech vendors need to adapt their growth strategies accordingly if they are going to sell into different lines of business than they are used to.
The most obvious change they must adopt is to develop relationships with stakeholders outside of the IT department.
But to more effectively speak to a broader audience, they will need to hone their industry expertise and develop a deeper understanding of the different challenges facing the various business teams that make up their clients’ organizations.
Insight is key here. Having a full, multifaceted understanding of a customer account means that vendors will not be reliant on inbound marketing leads and can instead focus on those accounts with the highest buying propensity.
To do so will necessitate the rollout of tactics to other parts of the vendor’s frontline business, not just marketing. The product teams, sales enablement and key account sales teams will all adopt ABM in their own way, and they will all need to be aligned around the same goals.
With this approach, vendors can adopt a far more nuanced and consultative approach during 2020, which, above all else, facilitates discussions that focus on solutions and outcomes for each of the various lines of business within a key account.
The Era Of Co-Creation: Suppliers Need To Work With Customers To Co-Create Bespoke Offerings
As companies have deepened their industry and customer focus, they have naturally come to better understand customer agendas.
All businesses understand the need to change, of course, but most are held back in bringing together all the capabilities required to overcome legacy systems, processes and operating models.
A change in culture is often required, and that means vendors must be so much more than just IT suppliers.
Increasingly, they must also be strategic technology partners who understand the customer’s unique set of business challenges, see the end goal of transformation and know how to map out the best way to get there.
This year, we’ll see vendors and customers working together to co-develop propositions through account-based marketing methodologies.
The most successful vendors will have the ability and expertise to work with stakeholders across different business functions to sell in ideas and work with the customer to co-create solutions that meet their unique set of needs.
In an effort to get closer to their customers and shift perceptions, many of our global clients have already started basing members of their sales teams in the countries of their key accounts, for example.
As companies seek to grow revenues, vendors need to cultivate deeper relationships with customers. This simply cannot be done from a central hub that does not understand or appreciate regional or cultural variations in business practices.
A local base and in-country executives means more relevant in-person meetings, of course, but there is more to this than just parachuting existing sales staff into new territories and hoping for the best.
Vendors that will get the most cut-through are those that hire local staff or partner with existing local specialists and make local thought leaders available to the customer.
In 2020 we’ll see service providers invest in regional technology centers and innovation hubs around the globe to showcase solutions.
Time For Co-Opetition: Competitors Will Work Together To Bring Value To Customers
We have been espousing the benefits of embedding partners more closely into the go-to-market proposition for some time, but the developments in the sector over the last few years have shown that the need for it is greater than ever.
Embracing the move to the cloud was the first step, and building services on top of multi-cloud environments is the next, with ever-more complex propositions developed with platform-based services.
However, doing that is incredibly difficult and demands the need for multiple specialized vendors.
Historically, these vendors will have been competing with each other. But we predict that will change this year.
Global hyper-scale vendors will continue to dominate the public cloud services market segments, of course, but enterprise organizations are keen to adopt hybrid- or multi-cloud strategies to extend the life of existing IT assets and to avoid platform vendor lock-in.
As a result, they will prefer to work with more than one supplier, and those vendors willing to work with each other on this will stand to benefit most. During 2020, we expect to see new offerings to come from these partnerships.
And those that help businesses migrate, integrate and manage applications and workloads seamlessly across any public or private cloud and on-premises IT environment will be the ones to lead the charge.
