What the Hell Happened to ABM

What the Hell Happened to ABM

Estimated read time: 5 Minutes

Once upon a time, Account Based Marketing (ABM) was a strategy – a very smart strategy, aimed at the biggest, most valuable accounts. 

Gartner defined it as “a go-to-market strategy targeting certain accounts with a synchronized, continuous set of marketing and sales activities. ABM activities engage those accounts and individuals through all stages of the buyer journey.”

Given the complexity of decision making, number of buyers involved, and the size of the opportunities in large accounts, it was the smart thing to do. But somewhere down the line, ABM became a technology platform. As Peter Drucker once said, “all good strategy becomes software”, and that is exactly what happened. 

Where did it go wrong? 

You could point to one of the leaders in the space, DemandBase. They started in the enterprise segment with “One to One Account ABM”  intending to create and execute highly personalized programs against the largest and most strategically important accounts. 

But that quickly expanded down the account pyramid to include “One-to-Few ABM” and “One-to-Many ABM”, which “leveraged technology to tailor or personalize marketing campaigns for specific accounts.” 

It didn’t stop there, to enable the “continuous set of marketing and sales activities” at “all stages of the buyer journey” as defined by Gartner, we got even more technologies. 

Cisco’s martech stack has no less than 13 tools being used at the “Aware” stage of the buyer’s journey. Another 7 tools at the “Shop/Buy” phase, 3 more at “Install” and finally, an additional 4 at the “Renew”, for a total of 27 different tools used for enterprise ABM alone. 

Now, for the great irony of it all… because many of the tools are being used for specific purposes and/or at defined stages, the performance analytics are optimized for that specific task and/or to measure the performance of a channel. They are siloed. 

It is very difficult to integrate them to view the entire progression of a buyer from one phase to the next, even if you are using Salesforce across stages. More challenging, it is impossible to see the movement of a purchase decision across a buying group.  

The focus on measuring activity or engagement against an individual at a certain stage, has caused us to lose sight of the objective, which is to sell something, and in B2B, it usually requires a group decision. The fundamental issue is marketing targets individuals, selling involves a buying group. 

Finally, because the machine requires fuel to run “continuously”, we produce an overabundance of  content that typically lacks relevance and/or actionable insight. Caught in the cycle of what can we produce versus what do buyers need. We work for the machines rather than have them work for us and it will get worse with generative AI. 

And the momentum is such that it is nearly impossible to course correct. What was once a strategic approach has now been sacrificed to the lords of scale. 

ABM’s inability to provide real insight into the progress of account level buyers within the journey, has left us with what we believe to be “signals” of intent. An assumption that a potential buyer has reached a certain stage in the journey because of an action. 

Instead of marketing filtering those responses to find real intent they are routed to sales to sort through. I once thought sales was responsible for the proliferation of the sales development role only to realize now that it’s actually marketing’s fault.

Case in point, we worked with a client on a new product launch. The big launch event was a webinar. It was the highest subscribed and attended event of the year. 

A couple hundred people attended the live event and another hundred viewed it on demand. We sorted through the list to find qualified leads to route to sales. Our analysis determined that there were 2 viable prospects. Marketing entered over 70 “leads” into Salesforce for sales to follow up on. 

The strategic value of ABM has been marginalized, if not lost completely. It is now better defined as Activity Based Marketing and/or Acquisition Based Marketing. And unfortunately, there isn’t a tool that can fix it.

AI Enabled Creative Inspiration Engines for B2B

AI Enabled Creative Inspiration Engines for B2B

By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes

Imagine adding one of the world’s greatest artists to your creative team. Or, how about saving time and money on creative brainstorming by starting with a first draft to inspire the team. How about creating dozens of creative concepts in the same time it currently takes to develop a handful. 

Intrigued?  This is the promise of AI creative engines for B2B marketing. And with that possibility, could it also help make B2B marketing as sexy and exciting as B2C advertising?

The big story of this year will be the widespread adoption of AI creative tools. Chat GPT is just the beginning. Expect to see agencies widely embrace AI for all types of creative – not just content. Open AI’s CEO, Sam Atlman, sees the “greatest application of AI for creative use,” not in replacing blue collar jobs as many had predicted.

After experimenting with AI tools for the last couple of months, you may be interested to know that I totally agree with Sam’s statement. In fact, the image used for this blog was created using Jasper’s AI image generator.

I selected Salvador Dali as my inspiration, acrylic paint as the style, the context of creating an exciting and bold prediction for the future, out pops the image you see. There were almost endless options of possible combinations that could be used from  style to mood, and everything in between. 

Rather than these tools being  utilized to replace people, they have the potential to be incredibly useful tool sets that in a sense,  may serve as an “inspiration engine” for creatives. The potential for increase in productivity is huge!

In fact, think of the possibility of having a famous artist inspire the creative team. Instead of replacing people, you’re gaining access to an incredible talent pool that would otherwise be impossible. Talk about shaking up the world of B2B that has a tendency to lean on technical language and images of products.

The creative process is nothing if not iterative. Imagine how fast the team can play around with concepts by using AI content generators to create first, second, and third drafts that are then edited and approved by a human as final copy. 

Consider the time saved by having a designer build the exact image they want, rather than scanning Getty Images for hours on end. Oftentimes, just getting started creates a delay. Working off an AI generated first draft could accelerate the process – at least, that’s the hope. 

Now the warning. It is very easy to write long form and short form copy using AI tools, especially for digital ads, blog posts and emails. For B2B marketers, this could mean that there is an easily accessible cornucopia of content to blast out to prospects. Please use these tools judiciously. 

The assumption that more content equals more engagement is incorrect. Relevant content is closer, but it still requires insight and strategic thinking, which you will not find in AI tools. The new generation of AI generators  is very powerful, in particular, with the coming release of GPT-4 and the advancements made in language modeling. 

 The tools still require time to learn and understand how to best utilize their power and get the output you  desire. There is, however, a learning curve – it is not as simple as input and output. There are numerous variables that need to be refined or manipulated by humans in order to achieve  a quality output. The expression of “crap in, crap out” still holds true. 

Agencies and companies  who carefully consider experimenting with these new tools  will now be better off in the long run as technology continues to advance. And here’s another warning based on our learning in young marketing using technologies, they are not the goal. 

It’s not enough to only know how to use the tool, you still need to think creatively. AI generators can be great tools to aid the creative process, don’t let them become the process. 

They don’t become a threat for replacing humans if you understand how to use them properly. And no, I didn’t use an AI content engine to write this blog…or did I?

 

What Does the Future Hold?

What Does the Future Hold?

By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes

Off we go into 2023!

For us, 2022 was an odd year. The first half was on fire. The second half…it was hard to even get a spark ignited.

One thing was clear, at least for our clients, the recession mentally hit during the late summer. It began with budgets being clawed back, and then the ax came down hard for 2023!

Heading into the new year, I believe we are going to see a similar situation. The first half will be slow, then improve during summer, and momentum significantly gaining into 2024. As a result, I’m going to segment my predictions for the year into two parts.

For the first half of the year, I envision the following:

  • Hiring freezes and staff cuts. This is probably not shocking, but where it occurs might surprise you. Covid hit event and travel budgets in 2020, but during this downturn, I see
    it hitting digital spending. And when it does, companies will freeze their digital staff hiring (once viewed as a never-ending need).
  • CMO exhaustion. It’s already happening. CMO’s are exhausted from the internal battles over budgets, staffing, strategy, etc. The last three years have been a rollercoaster of highs and lows.
  • Message confusion. Never have I seen the wild swings hitting the B2B market in such a short amount of time. From supply chain disruptions to overstock warehouses, and endless job openings to layoffs, it’s gone from one extreme to the next. It’s virtually impossible to stay current with your value proposition with so many swings between effectiveness and efficiency.
The second half of the year, as I mentioned, should show some improvement in the economy.  As a result, I think we’ll see:
  • CMO turnover. The burn out mentioned above will fuel CMO’s desire for a clean start. As soon as the economy and hiring outlook improves, I suspect you will see a lot of
    movement.
  • Big time AI adoption. Chat GPT is just the beginning. Expect to see agencies widely embrace AI for all types of creative – not just content. Open AI’s CEO Sam Atlman sees the greatest application of AI for creative use, not in replacing blue collar jobs as many had predicted. (more on this topic to come soon in an article of The Drum).
  • Better tools for improving ROI. Better tools will come online to improve; 1) the quality of intent data, 2) the cost of content syndication, and 3) the effectiveness of ABM programs.

And of course, as with any prediction, I could be entirely wrong. I am genuinely optimistic, though, that we will be in a much better position kicking off 2024 than we are today.

Good luck and much success this year. I hope your year burns brightly!