What does your product marketing team do differently when executing on an account based marketing strategy compared to traditional marketing?

ABM is near and dear to my heart as I was in the middle of the tornado that spun up the term ABM during my time at Demandbase. As the PMM there at the time, we not only defined what ABM was, but also had to execute on it as well. Based on what we preached, when building out an ABM based strategy, I started by aligning with our sales team to identify the key accounts we are trying to target. From there, start building specific feature related messages to fit that ABM campaign, and also change the ...Read More

With traditional marketing we have a wider audience and are doing a marketing volume play and casting a wider net. With an ABM strategy we know exactly who we want to go after and it’s a targeted, smaller audience. More time is spent sizing the accounts, looking at the data and deciding which to go after. It’s also a larger cross-functional lift. I have to include more cross-functional stakeholders to understand the account and map out our touch points so they are personalized or targeted for th ...Read More

ABM is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, as we just announced 7 new ABM integrations and hosted a webinar about ABM strategies. Data-driven marketing has extended beyond analytics, social, SEO/SEM, and A/B testing into insights and 3rd party data on customers’ wants and needs to tailor and target more relevant messaging and content to the recipients. How does this impact what product marketing focuses on? It has made targeting and segmentation a greater focus for the team. In the past, ...Read More

Start with account reality, not broad personas. Let me explain: In traditional marketing, PMM spends a lot of time defining personas and segments that work at scale. In ABM, those personas are still useful, but they’re not enough. We go one level deeper and ground everything in specific accounts. That means understanding the account’s industry, business model, maturity, and known initiatives. We work with Sales and RevOps to identify priority accounts, buying committee roles, and existing relati ...Read More

Traditional B2B marketing is often done through broad-reaching campaigns. Most marketers try to get their word out—as far and as wide as possible—by leveraging different marketing channels: owned, earned, and paid. The objective is to cast a wide net and put out as much content as possible, in order to act as a marketing magnet and draw a large number of leads into your funnel. On the other hand, account-based marketing (ABM) is in many ways the exact opposite. It’s about getting all your resour ...Read More

ABM is targeted and in support of the Sales team. Obviously there's more nuance to it, but I think of it as much more mid-funnel exercise. You already know the 20-100 or whatever accounts you want to target. You can tier those up if you want and dedicate more time/resources/etc to the top accounts, but ultimately everything for them is going to be more bespoke. Whether that's high touch events, product demos, lunch and learns, etc. or even bespoke digital ad targeting. You want to measure the en ...Read More

Account-based marketing started because, for decades, sales did account-based selling. Instead of a salesperson just opening up a list of, say, every financial services company in the world (thousands) with no focus, they work with their sales leadership to identify a target account list to focus on (perhaps it's the top 10 financial services companies, or a certain size financial services company they could be successful with). Then, often times, that salesperson could only reach out to those t ...Read More

There is 1 foundational action PMMs must complete before touching ABM: Define a clear ICP (ideal customer profile). That ICP (which should comprise of target persona at companies of a certain segment / vertical / geo / compelling event) can then be expanded upon by demand gen, sales, and ops into a target account list. The target account list should be realistically manageable based on the size of your marketing & sales teams. A list more than 100 means you're not choosy or specific enough. ...Read More

We have a dedicated ABM team, but they partner with the Product Marketing team when they need specific proof-points related to a persona, vertical, or pain-point within an account. They create personalized landing pages, host curated events like roundtables, and go on-site for larger customers. They have much more niche segmentation for their digital campaigns. In contrast, traditional marketing is more scalable and created for a bigger target audience. Our Product Marketing and Customer Lifecyc ...Read More

Building on Jennifer's reply above, we have 4 tiers. We aim to do proactive work (meaning working with BDRs, sales, account managers, success team) to identify a way to engage, grow, or expand an account within the top 10 accounts. This hits all points in the funnel and often involved multiple teams and units. This could include sponsoring a company event and creating custom content to get in front of a big portion of their employee base. In the second tier (100 accounts), we have a request fiel ...Read More

  To put it simply, ABM is a more targeted approach to storytelling and demand generation. Instead of telling 1 or 2 broad stories to large groups of prospects and/or leads, ABM forces the PMM team to narrow in on our top target accounts (both customers and prospects) and identify what story will resonate with that account… and sometimes more specifically, that department, or that person. While sales and marketing alignment is always important, ABM requires even stronger ties with sales or accou ...Read More