Chapter 14 Conversational Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Selling (ABS)

I won’t try to sugarcoat it: Anytime you’re adopting a new technology, or an entirely new approach to marketing and sales, it can be nerve-racking. And for many companies, even if their marketing and sales results are lackluster, they often think it’s better to stay the course and double down on what they already know rather than dabble in what’s up-and-coming. But, as you’ve already seen, when you adopt a conversational approach to marketing and selling, you don’t need to do a complete overhaul of your setup. Instead, you can keep your same routing and lead ownership rules, your same lead segments, and your same sales territories, and simply plug real-time conversations into what you’ve already been doing.

For the more than 70% of B2B companies using some form of account-based marketing (ABM) or account-based selling (ABS) as part of their strategy (source: SiriusDecisions), that means adopting conversational marketing and sales won’t require putting an end to those efforts. Instead, by incorporating real-time conversations into your ABM/ABS strategy, you’ll be able to give the experience you’re providing to your target accounts a serious upgrade while simultaneously shortening your team’s sales cycle.

For those of you who are not familiar with ABM and ABS, don’t worry: I’m going to provide an overview below. For those of you who have already been doing ABM and ABS for years, feel free to skip ahead ...

Get Conversational Marketing now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.