Industry Leaders Define Account Based Marketing (ABM)

Jill Rowley is a queen of the social selling universe. Forbes magazine named her in the top 30 salespeople of the world. According to her, Account-Based Marketing means to engage with the right contacts in social media. ‘Right’ implies such contacts that drive high ROI and yield good conversion rates.

According to Matt Heinz, President - Heinz Marketing Inc, there are 3 reminders to those who those already doing account-based marketing (or even just getting started):
• Perfect is the enemy of good. This is true for all campaigns, and especially worth remembering for something that’s new or foreign (in which case we tend to try and perfect before launch, which ironically doesn’t ever impact the likelihood of success and just lengthens the time to get there).
• Sales is already doing this. Even if you disagree with how they’re choosing their Named Accounts, this is going to feel new to them no matter how you describe it. Keep that in mind to preserve your credibility and to ensure their cooperation.
• Start with the account selection. You’ll hear 10 ABM experts give you 10 answers to how & where to get started with an account-based program, and the simplest answer is right in the name. Even if you can’t successfully coordinate integrated campaigns between sales and marketing, even if you can’t control the consistency of the messaging to different members of the buying committee, make sure you’re at least talking to the same (and right) organizations to begin with.

David Raab is a graduate in Harvard business school and he has immense experience of spending about 30 years in B2B marketing. David Raab has another unique perspective of defining Account Based Marketing. He defines ABM as the integration of marketing with advertising technology that potentially gives salespeople another route to generate their own prospects.

Craig Rosenburg is a legendary B2B marketer for his effective practices for demand generation. According to Craig, sales and marketing should be constantly in touch and aim to build relationships with the target accounts. He says that one meeting with the accounts is not the beginning and not the end in an ABM program. In his opinion, ABM requires a truly coordinated effort between sales, sales development, marketing, and executive staff. He said that his analyst team of TOPO (Craig is co-founder of TOPO) takes more time to talk with their customers about ABM. He predicted that ABM becomes critical for marketing and sales of B2B companies. He said that ABM starts with good knowledge about your existing top accounts and your most wanted new accounts.

Megan Heuer is former vice president of Sirius decisions, Research. She has more than 20 years of professional experience in the world of B2B marketing. With such a huge experience, she saw the shifts in technology which allow marketing and sales professionals to become laser-focused on the best-fit accounts. Megan said that salespeople always talk about accounts and customers. They won’t talk about leads. They think about winning and growing the accounts.

Scott Brinker is the Program Chair of MarTech at Hubspot. Scott is a mastermind when comes to Account Based Marketing. He believes that the interaction of marketing and technology is key for ABM success.