What are the challenges of account-based marketing?

When travelling along your ABM journey, as with any business strategy, there may be some bumps in the road. Let’s take a look at five of the most common:

1. Too many tech tools

There are many technological solutions to automating the once manual and time-consuming elements of Account Based Marketing. However, when there are many different platforms involved that don’t necessarily ‘talk’ to each other, data can become siloed and complex, especially when each platform is handling an individual ABM step. Compatibility and integration can be a major headache as teams revert to manual processes in exporting and moving data across platforms.

What’s needed: Connected data to measure and optimise results, tailored to the unique needs of your B2B organisation.

2. Misalignment of sales and marketing

The goals of marketing and sales can be vastly different, despite best efforts for collaboration. Marketing is traditionally concerned with lead generation and quantitative metrics, whereas sales generally cares about lead conversion and qualitative data.

What’s needed: In order to build a successful ABM campaign sales and marketing goals should be aligned. Both teams should be headed in the same direction and focused on sales insight, target account fit or dovetailing MQLs and SQLs.

3. Excess data & vanity data

Today, sales is operating with an abundance of prospect data – with everything from in-market intent to content engagement easily available. All this data can quickly be overwhelming. In addition, while marketing KPIs may have been previously focused on traffic, downloads, leads etc, these vanity metrics must be overhauled in an ABM campaign.

What’s needed: Marketing should deliver actionable, relevant insights that are genuinely useful for your sales team. Instead of driving vanity metrics, focus should go on driving the bottom line with engagement, progression and velocity really the only KPIs that matter.

4. Decision-makers can be hard to reach

Audience fatigue and competition makes reaching your segmented audience through the usual channels more and more difficult. The answer is increased personalization, which in turn can quickly burn through resources with the time it takes to strategize, create and launch.

What’s needed: Allow your company enough time to implement ABM. Start with a few accounts and make decisions for your campaign based on their success or failure. Once patterns of engagement behavior eventually emerge, you’ll be able to define the metrics for your success.

5. Is ABM the right fit for your business?

If your business sells high-value products or services and your targeting prospects reveal the potential for selling across divisions, larger than usual deals, long buying procedures and / or the possibility of establishing niche credibility, account-based marketing may be a good fit for you. ABM at scale can be complex and time-consuming but the right automation technology can help to develop relationships and create digital personalization for every account by managing these processes for you, creating better customers and a better bottom line.

Are you considering trying Account Based Marketing for the first time, or maybe you’re encountering some of the challenges listed above? Why not contact us for a no obligation discussion on how MarketOne’s tried and tested frameworks have helped businesses scale at speed and drive measurable impact.