Why account based marketing isn’t delivering the customer growth you need
This is the second blog in our Account Based Marketing series, the first blog outlines ‘What is ABM and the types of ABM?’
ACCOUNT BASED MARKETING TRIGGER WARNING.
In this blog we will be critiquing Account Based Marketing as a strategy and laying bare the challenges with traditional ABM.
If you or someone you know is struggling with the ABM issues presented here, please feel free to speak to us.
When is ABM a success?
As a theory and strategy Account Based Marketing is sound. It can deliver significantly for the business if the following factors are followed:
- Sales led and marketing supported
- Defined success measures and real impact
- The right targeting and account selection
- Focused with a clear and actionable output
- The proposition taps into a specific need or wider market challenge.
In summary, when account based marketing is sales-first, output-focused and delivers measurable sales results.
What are the issues with ABM?
The key issue with Account Based Marketing is that often most of those crucial factors above don’t happen.
After leading the ABM strategy for many large global enterprises in a previous role, here are the 6 most common challenges I’ve seen with traditional ABM:
1. Lack of practical customer insight
They rely on accounts plans that are outdated as they’ve been completed and left for a year which means crucial recent insight is missing. In rarer cases there may be too much information that isn’t condensed down to what’s important – this is especially true if an external agency has spent 3 months producing lengthy research decks full of insight with little actionable output.
2. Far too slow to market
Too frequently a typical Account Based Marketing programme involves a 3, 4 or 6-month process before even getting to any activation or tangible action in market. The cumulative steps of insight, strategy, creative, content development and the campaign set up not only add time, but also crucially internal resource and budget. Will the original customer insight or market trigger even still be relevant after 6 months?
3. Complex but no clear action or accountability
One of the key outputs of Account Based Marketing is a large integrated strategy but what is often missing is a set of clear actions to accompany this – the actual plan to activating the strategy. Without clear actions sales can’t and aren’t held to account for the subsequent delivery and results, which is worse without alignment (see below).
4. Missing necessary buy in from sales
It is too often a marketing led initiative without the crucial upfront buy-in from sales, or the ongoing support needed from sales to convert any opportunities to close. Plus, getting the sales team onboard with ABM will get increasingly harder if they don’t see the value in it because they aren’t getting actionable plans and the right measurable outcomes.
5. Focuses on the wrong measures
Intricately linked to sales seeing the value in ABM is the fact that it will repeatedly focus on the wrong objectives. With traditional ABM programmes prioritising qualified leads, qualified accounts, or meetings, rather than measurable commercial objectives such as growing pipeline or delivering sales.
6. Only tackles part of customer journey
Last but in no way least, the impact and therefore effectiveness of ABM is limited by the fact it doesn’t cover the entire customer journey, and often focuses on the wrong or limited audience. Most (if not all) ABM programmes fail to identify, influence, and impact the total number of stakeholders needed to close the deal – the key influencers and decision makers.
Summarising the challenges with traditional ABM
In summary, the main reasons a lot of clients we’ve spoken to have been burned by ABM in the past is that the alignment either isn’t there between marketing and sales, the programmes are too slow and complex, or they focus on the wrong measures of success.
The root of many of these issues is that ABM is too marketing led without being useful and actionable to sales – even the term Account Based Marketing is inclusive of marketing and exclusive of sales. Rather than start referring to ABM as ABX (Account Based Experience) or ABS (Account Based Strategy), let’s take a step back to what ABM is trying to achieve, and uncover if there’s a better way of doing that.
What is ABM trying to achieve?
ABM is a targeted way to grow existing customers and convert new customers. It aims to be both effective and efficient by focusing on the highest opportunity (or value) existing accounts, and the best fit new accounts – therefore increasing the likelihood of positive outcomes and therefore ROI in both instances.
If ABM is all about increasing CLTV (see more about Customer Lifetime Value in our paper on how on how to deliver Deep Growth) and delivering revenue – is it the best way of achieving this?
Is ABM in need of a reset?
As we outlined in our first blog in this series, ABM can help address the needs of a typical buying group for a complex B2B solution – consisting of on average 6-10 decision makers and 30 influencers.3 The question is whether it is delivering this in practice. Or, has ABM become too complex and moved too far away from its original purpose?
If you are looking to reach the right people with the right messaging to grow and increase CLTV – we don’t believe the answer is traditional ABM.
If customer growth is the goal – you need a solution that aligns sales and marketing teams behind unified objectives that focus on the leading indicators to pipeline. To guarantee success you need practical customer insight, an actionable plan that spans the entire customer journey, and a solution that is sales led and quick to execute. We’ve shown above where traditional ABM is falling short on all these.
Our answer to increasing revenue and CLTV is the Customer Growth Accelerator
In partnership with Applied Influence Group, we’ve developed the Customer Growth Accelerator which leverages the power of human connections to accelerate growth. It overcomes the issues of traditional ABM by being sales first, customer focused and delivering measurable sales results.
The Customer Growth Accelerator aligns sales and marketing teams together behind unified goals and clear actions to deliver tangible and trackable customer growth. Get in touch below to find out more.
The current climate also means the majority if not all organisations are focusing on efficiency, and teams are having to prove value with proof of concepts or pilots. That’s why we’ve developed the Customer Growth Accelerator to run as a pilot and be able to scale easily – plus it goes from kick off to launch in just 4 weeks. View the solution page below to find out more.
The Customer Growth Accelerator
Find out more about The Customer Growth Accelerator we’ve developed with Applied Influence Group. It gets you to measurable pipeline in under 3 months.
