How do you transition to account-based marketing? What are the pitfalls, what are the success factors?
There are no generic answers to these questions because… well, you know: “it depends”.
Transitioning and building out an ABM machine is hugely impacted by the degree of marketing that’s already happening in your organization. In other words, many things depend on how mature your marketing operations are.
We wanted to make this distinction very clear to help you advance in building out ABM in your company. Helping us are the best of the best ninjas when it comes to no-nonsense, low-tech and high-impact account-based marketing: the Fullfunnel.io guys: Andrei Zinkevich and Vlad Blagojevic.
Here are the major points they make in the conversation:
- It’s super important to get the mindset right: what can you expect from ABM and what you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t expect revenue-results very soon. B2B marketing is a long-term game and ABM ain’t no different. B2B marketing programs at low-maturity organizations often fail because people are expecting too much too soon and end up quitting too early.
- You need to get everybody on board. More specifically: CEO, sales and customer success have to work in tandem with marketing
- You’ve gotta nail the marketing-fumdamentals: Buyer persona, ICP, brand-narrative and messaging. If these are off, the entire ABM program will be off.
- Medium marketing-maturity companies (with small teams of 3-8 and already defined operations) will benefit from brushing up on the fundamentals. It’s low-hanging fruit: do better segmentation and targeting, better-fitting messaging, creating a compelling brand narrative. Using better messaging with a more appealing story (or even having a story) in ABM campaigns amplifies results.
- In mature marketing organizations with larger teams, success is all about management. Getting people aligned around the same goals is key. Setting up a core team inside marketing that will run experiments is a great organizational move.
