Account-Based Marketing

1The Sweet Spot:

Why Now Is a Better Time to Try ABM Instead of Five Years Ago or Five Years from Now

Crystal balls are silly, right? We all know that it’s impossible to predict the future. Take the stock market for example: if someone could predict its movements, that person could retire in a day and be a billionaire in a month. It’s also impossible to predict other short-term events like who will win the Super Bowl, or be next year’s pop music sensation.

Even so, accurate crystal balls do exist—if you know how to look at the right things. For example, demographics are highly predictable: we can confidently forecast the median age of a country’s population even 10 or 20 years from now.

Another clear trend: one by one, industries are being transformed by technology. Some industries benefit sooner than others. Technology has allowed the 140-year-old telephone to become infinitely more useful as a smartphone. Farming has gone from the iron plow to GPS-mapped fields that get precise amounts of fertilizers every few feet in order to maximize crop yields.

This book is about another trend we can confidently predict: it’s the turn of business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales to benefit from the technology revolution. We are at the early stages of an astonishing transformation in B2B marketing, made possible by data science, and aided by cheaper computing power and storage, as we’ll discuss later. Companies that recognize these elements coming together will be positioned to lead ...