Account-Based Marketing Inspires New Software, Strategies

InsideView last week released InsideView Target with ABM, a tool for business-to-business companies that have implemented account-based marketing.

It is a fully redesigned version of InsideView Target, with the addition of ABM workflows and other enhancements, including the following capabilities:

• Suppressing lists to created highly customized campaigns focused on increasing net new customers;
• Finding contacts from an uploaded list of companies; and
• Leveraging technologies used, along with compelling business events data, as targeting criteria for a list of specific companies.

“Previously, InsideView IDs were required to build a list of companies you wanted to select contacts for,” said Joe Andrews, VP of product and solution marketing at the company.

Users now can “type in any company name or upload a list of companies to search for people, technologies used, and compelling news or events within the companies uploaded,” he told CRM Buyer.

Users can exclude customers, competitors or people from new lists. They can access saved lists any time to see all the companies and people they’re targeting.

“Companies who want to [succeed] with ABM need to start with the right set of target accounts and people,” Andrews noted. “Otherwise, the best campaign tactics in the world won’t be effective.”

InsideView Target with ABM is integrated with Marketo, Eloqua and Salesforce.

InsideView “is a bit late to the game with this one, as many others offer ABM capabilities,” noted Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research.

However, its core strength, “pulling together contextual information on contacts and providing that view to sales, provides it a leg up on ABM products that are still relying on outside aggregators or information sources,” she told CRM Buyer.

ABM in Brief

ABM “is becoming an important strategy for companies seeking to build relationships and extend their reach within existing and new accounts,” Wettemann remarked.

Further, ABM mitigates costs associated with targeting at the account level, and it “improves business outcomes like conversion rates, close rates, opportunity size and average sale price,” she said.

A recent survey of professionals engaged in marketing and related activities at 134 B2B technology and business service companies uncovered the following information:

• 35 percent of ABM marketers implemented more than one type of ABM;
• 63 percent of the high performers implemented at least two types;
• 71 percent of all ABM marketers planned to scale their programs in the next 12 months;
• 67 percent planned to adopt a blended approach to do so;
• 87 percent of ABM implementers said it provided higher ROI than any other type of marketing; and
• Strong majorities among the respondents said ABM drove improvements in reputation, relationships and revenue — the “Three Rs” of strategic marketing.

Those are some of the conclusions of the 2017 ABM Benchmark study released by the Information Technology Services Marketing Association and the ABM Leadership Alliance, based on a survey conducted earlier this year.

ABM Is Hot, Hot, Hot

ABM is the hottest topic in B2B marketing, but there’s “a lot of confusion” on how to get started, observed Cindy Zhou, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

There are five steps B2B marketers should focus on when developing an ABM program, she told CRM Buyer, based on her recent research:

• Setting joint objectives with sales and service;
• Identifying target accounts and contacts;
• Determining how best to organize the accounts;
• Launching cross-channel campaigns; and
• Discovering actionable insights from analytics.

Companies should find solutions that augment or work well with their existing CRM and marketing automation solutions, Zhou recommended.

The key factors to consider are resource limitations “and the process of training marketers to operate these technologies. Start small with a pilot program,” she advised.

“Marketing can’t run ABM alone,” Zhou noted. “Companies need to look at aligning marketing, sales and service for a holistic account-based strategy for the best results.”