Chris Golec - Account-Based Marketing and Sales: How to Improve Lead Generation and Sell More by Targeting the Companies That Will Grow Your Business

Chris Golec

Peter Isaacson

Jessica Fewless

Cover image: George Rudy / Shutterstock

Cover design: Wiley

Copyright 2019 by Demandbase, Inc.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-119-57200-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-119-57204-6 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-119-57202-2 (ePub)

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 its 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. Its also impossible to predict other short-term events like who will win the Super Bowl, or be next years pop music sensation.

Even so, accurate crystal balls do existif you know how to look at the right things. For example, demographics are highly predictable: we can confidently forecast the median age of a countrys 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: its 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 well discuss later. Companies that recognize these elements coming together will be positioned to lead their industries in reputation, relationships, and revenue. Their competitors who are late to the party will wonder what happened.

Just as recognizing trends too late can mean that all you get are the crumbs, its also possible to adopt technology too early: the first attempts at applying technology can be buggy, time consuming, and frustrating. It can be enough to put you off the whole idea unless youre willing at first to take one step back for every two steps forward.

This book is also about how right now, were at the sweet spot where mature technology meets B2B marketing: were far enough along that the technology has been tested, refined, and proven. Yet were early enough in the revolution that most industries have not yet been dominated by companies that recognize the sweet spot, act on it, and have become the leaders. Thats the opportunity before you right now.

To be more specific, the opportunity relates to Account-Based Marketing, or ABM. In the pages to come well become intimately familiar with the workings of ABM, but for now lets use this definition:

• Account-Based Marketing enables marketers to identify and target the accounts they value most. Accounts can be segmented in many ways, like prospect or customer. Thats not new. Whats new is this: among other capabilities, ABM allows you to personalize the marketing experience to your target accounts before they ever identify themselves to you. And you can scale it to 30, 300, or 3,000 accounts to support your business objectives.

In your dreams, you say? Pie in the sky, you say? No. ABM is a tested and proven approach that gives you insights into what your prospects are thinking and doing. In a sales environment in which business is won or lost on slim margins, ABM enables you to enjoy a substantial advantage over your competitors who are likely doing business the way their parents and grandparents did it.

At this point, you may be asking yourself a reasonable question: Chris, Peter, and Jessica wrote this book, they work at Demandbase, and they offer ABM-related solutions. Is this book going to be one long sales pitch for their stuff?

Relax. There are a lot of great ABM technologies out there today, with more on the way. Thats what makes ABM such a vibrant category. But this book does not focus on any single vendor or any single technology. We intend to answer the following questions:

• What exactly is ABM, and how is it different from the way marketing was done in the past?
• What companies are right for ABM and what ones are not? (Because nothing is right for everyone.)
• How can I determine if ABM will work in my company? (It needs to be done in such a way that you dont spend a ton of time and money before you know the answer.)
• What are best practices and also pitfalls to avoid so as to maximize the contribution of ABM to our bottom line?

Our guess is that youve been around the block a few times when it comes to witnessing fads that come and go in business. You have a healthy skepticism about something youre told has the potential to make a big difference in your revenues. Its not that youre cynical that nothing will workyou just need proof and details before taking the next step.