Account-Based Marketing

2Building Blocks:

Foundational Concepts in ABM

Let’s assume that the concept of ABM sounds intriguing to you, and you want to understand more about what it involves and how it might fit into your organization.

In Chapter 1, we touched upon a few of the technology-based benefits of an ABM strategy. Let’s now look more deeply into the organizational benefits that some of the largest companies on the planet—and many smaller ones too—are finding as they apply ABM to their B2B goals.

Organizational Benefits of ABM

There’s been an explosion in recent years in the number of tools relating to ABM. Some of those tools are what is known as “point solutions” because they attempt to deliver one single benefit. Although there may be a place for such tools, our experience is that companies get the very most out of ABM when a strategy—not a tool—is at the heart of the effort. It’s otherwise not uncommon for someone to say, “We tried that ABM thing once. It didn’t do much for us. ABM doesn’t work.”

We will discuss later the specific steps you can take to create an effective strategy. When you in fact have a strong foundation for ABM, you can look forward to four benefits:

1. You at last can focus on the best opportunities at scale. As we said earlier, companies have always been able to focus on a relative handful of named accounts, but not more than that. Historically, if you didn’t have detailed information on accounts beyond that handful, then you were destined to play the numbers game. ...