Account Based Marketing - Why, oh why?

I attended SiriusDecision’s London forum this week. I like their research, their updated waterfall, and a lot of their analysts' writing. But this post isn’t about that. Most of the session was devoted to research-backed best practice for rolling out Account Based Marketing (ABM) – with an audience of senior marketers from large enterprises. As part of that discussion, we were asked for our input, and the challenges we saw with the model.

For our business, Idio, and for most of our clients, ABM is the only form of marketing that makes sense: defining the companies that will really benefit from our solution, exploring their context and developing deep insight, and spending all our resource engaging them and showing them why we can help them win. Every other marketing dollar is wasted.

But the biggest challenge to ABM, especially in larger organisations, is that it has an “M” in it. I know several enterprise-scale businesses that are having huge challenges persuading their sales team that this isn’t yet another buzzy marketing thing that will have no impact on closed deals. A fundamental tenet of ABM is that it involves everyone across department working together to serve clients. Yet we, as marketers, decided to call it Account Based Marketing.

If the aim is company-wide ABM adoption, which it is by many CMOs this year, surely it needs to be rebranded Account Based Selling. Or hey, if we put on our marketing hats and really tune the message to those we want to partner with (for CMO's its the sales department), it should be called Mammoth Deal Acceleration or Commission Payment Optimisation. Just joking…