Sharing research, insights, trends and advice to help you keep up with the latest in ABM
Hello everyone,
Welcome to the second edition of The ABM-er, which I started last month to share research, insights, trends, and advice to help you keep up with the evolution of ABM best practices. Here’s what to expect each month:
- Excerpts from my new book Account-Based Marketing: The definitive handbook for B2B marketers, due for publication in March 2025
- Actionable tips: ABM how-to guides, frameworks, and checklists
- Real world examples and perspectives from global companies successfully using ABM
- Industry research, insights and trends and my take on their implications for ABM-ers
In this edition…
Last month, I was invited to participate in a couple of events: A B2B Marketing webinar on AI Tips and Tricks, plus the first Frenus GmbH ABM Community meeting, hosted by Thomas Allgeyer. I always learn something at these events and have a few reflections to share with you in this newsletter.
Both community meetings included AI as a topic for discussion, and I’d like to share with you some insights from Inflexion Group’s first AI in ABM Bootcamp, run by my colleague Dorothea Gosling in association with Jaspreet Bindra and Anuj Magazine of AI&Beyond last month. Hearing about the power of AI certainly inspired me, and I’m now delighted to have my own ‘AI team’ working with me day to day.
Finally, having announced my new book Account-Based Marketing: The definitive handbook for B2B marketers, last month, I’m delighted to share more from Philip Kotler’s Foreword, as he puts ABM in the broader context of how marketing has developed since the 1950s.
If you enjoy this newsletter, please subscribe to receive future editions: https://bit.ly/43FJ3Cb
Many thanks,
Bev.
Lessons from two ABM community events
January was a busy month for me. I collaborated with B2B Marketing and Salesforce to take part in an interactive webinar with fellow guests Joanna Moss Marketing Director, Top Accounts & ABM, Salesforce, Rhiannon Blackwell , ABM Leader, Global Marketing Organisation at PwC, and Dorothea Gosling, Executive Consultant, Inflexion Group. I was also one of the speakers at @Frenus’ first ABM community session, hosted by Thomas Allgeyer, alongside Ingrid Archer-van den Berg, Joanna Moss, Christian Weiss and Sascha Steiner.
Top of mind in both events was AI – and not just because Jo Moss was taking part and able to make us all envious with the data and tools available to her at Salesforce, allowing her to integrate and align marketing, sales and customer success teams around the company’s most important customers. Almost everyone else is still trying to work out when and how to use AI to help them in their work, as the excellent Rhiannon Blackwell pointed out. Her advice? ‘By all means, use AI to get you started, to oil the inner workings, to inspire new ideas… but let’s not drown out authentic voices and original thoughts.’ Hear hear!
Some of the other questions raised in the Frenus event were not unusual for a group of ABM-ers when they get together. In fact, they were the same questions that ABM-ers have been asking since around 2003…
Q1: How do I choose the right accounts for ABM?
I always recommend a three-step approach to prioritising accounts for ABM. First, screen your long list with some simple criteria – many people use current revenue and future potential for growth, for example. Next, run a data-led exercise rating accounts based on how attractive they are to you (eg total spend on your category of solutions, digital transformation maturity), and how strong you’re likely to be as a competitor in each account (eg access to senior decision makers, match of geographical footprint). The key here is to agree the criteria and the scoring approach with your business colleagues, rather than running this as a marketing exercise. Finally, do an ABM readiness check, removing any accounts where the Account Director is not willing to embrace ABM, where there is an incomplete account plan, or poor quality data in your CRM systems, for example. You can read more on this in Account-Based Growth (chapter 3) or in my new book, from March.
Q2: How do I scale ABM once I’ve proven the concept?
The answer to this one is closely linked to the previous answer. How far are you trying to scale? How many accounts warrant ABM investment? And how many resources do you have to allocate to ABM?
If you are doing Strategic (1-1) ABM and want to scale it, you will need more resources. If you can’t get more resources (and this is more often than not the case in my experience), you need to consider a blended ABM strategy – one that adopts different types of ABM for different tiers of accounts. The most common blend is the traditional one, adding Segment (1-few) ABM and Programmatic (1-many) ABM flavours into your strategy. A newer approach is to adopt a lighter version of Strategic ABM, which I’m calling Scenario ABM – still 1-1 but focused on driving a specific outcome for the account team in a limited time period and creating a proven ‘playbook’ of tactics that can be leveraged in accounts where teams are looking for the same outcome. Key to scaling ABM is to set your programme up for success in the first place, and to have a programme management office or centre of excellence that provides guidance, training and useful materials such as templates to marketers across the company who are being asked to do ABM for the first time.
Of course, there is another way to increase your creativity and productivity and help you scale ABM across more accounts – leverage AI.
Tips for building your ‘AI Team’
More and more ABM-ers are exploring how AI can help them be more creative and productive. While just six months ago, when I asked if ABM-ers were cautious, curious or confident about using GenAI in particular, most were in the first two camps. Today, it’s increasingly the second two, and our confidence levels as an ABM community are growing.
I would say my own journey mirrors this shift. From early skirmishes with ChatGPT, I have now built out my core ‘AI Team’, as recommended by the wonderful Anuj Magazine at AI&Beyond during our January AI in ABM Bootcamp. My team continues to include ChatGPT, plus newer members such as Perplexity and Claude.
I find Perplexity invaluable as I’m preparing to meet a new prospect or client for the first time, to bring myself up to date with their company’s priorities and performance and arrive at the meeting with some understanding and empathy for their situation. This feeds into any proposals I need to write, and continues as I support them in their own ABM process, profiling the accounts that matter most to them and identifying shared drivers and priorities across clusters where appropriate. Perplexity cuts down my profiling work from hours to just minutes, and I’m already at the point where I don’t want to work without it.
I use both ChatGPT and Perplexity to help me prepare for meetings, to get me started on briefing or Board papers, and even to coach me on how to best approach important workshops and interviews. I’ve also used ChatGPT to help me summarise internal meetings. Again, they both cut down the time I spend on these tasks from hours to just minutes.
Finally, I’ve started using Claude to help me create content for training slides or presentations, condensing down case studies or interviews from my previous books into summaries that easily communicate the key learning points for my audience. Again, each one takes seconds rather than hours to create now.
My next foray will be into Notebook LM, which I plan to use to help me analyse a range of data sources to identify key points and generate insights. I’ll keep you posted on this newest member of my AI team as we go through the year.
Despite my new found confidence in using these tools, my caution hasn’t gone away. I want to make sure I am using them both ethically and safely. For example, I always apply settings that keep my data and intellectual property protected, and not made available to others or used to train the large language models these tools are built on.
I wouldn’t have known where to start without my colleagues at AI&Beyond, who are on a mission to build AI Literacy across the world as the field evolves at pace. Wherever you are on your own AI journey, if you’d like to get some practical advice, Inflexion Group is running another AI in ABM Bootcamp with AI&Beyond on 9 April 2025. You can find out more here.
ABM in the context of wider marketing evolution
One of the tasks that I did not ask AI to help me complete is the writing of my new book, Account-Based Marketing: The definitive handbook for B2B marketers. I can confirm that it was written the old-fashioned way, at weekends and on holidays over seven months during 2024 around my main jobs of running a business and a home. And as I said in January’s newsletter, one of my personal career highlights is that the Foreword to this new book is written by the father of modern marketing, Philip Kotler. Here’s an extract from that Foreword.
When I was invited to write the Foreword for a book on account-based marketing (ABM) I saw it as an opportunity to reflect on how marketing has evolved over the years: how it has changed but at the same time how the fundamental principles I first identified remain the same.
I published the inaugural edition of Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning and Control in 1967. I wrote the book because when I examined marketing textbooks in the 1960s, I was appalled by their descriptiveness and lack of theory. Coming to the subject with a solid training in economics, organisational theory and social sciences, I decided that I wanted to offer a different view of marketing by applying economic, behavioural, organisational and mathematical theory to show how markets work and how marketing mix tools work. I called this the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion.
The strategic marketing process must identify, anticipate and satisfy customer requirements, whether through goods, services, experiences, information, places, ideas or causes. It offers a powerful perspective on how to sense, serve and satisfy the needs of others. As time went on, and with my deep and abiding interest in the improvement of human welfare, I broadened my work into the field of social marketing, because I could see how marketing had the ability to create, communicate and deliver value whether in commercial markets, nonprofit markets or even government markets.
This book highlights the pivotal role these principles should and can play in the business-to-business (B2B) arena through the prism of ABM. For many years, B2B was a relatively stable marketplace in which to operate, with marketing often seen as tactical sales support and where there was little meaningful client segmentation or branding. This model, however, has now been under pressure for several decades, driven by powerful economic, technological and social trends and accelerated by the pandemic. Moreover, many global organisations now have revenues equivalent to the GDP of many countries. Any supplier keen to establish new business relationships or cement existing ones when dealing with organisations of this breadth and depth has to reach beyond traditional B2B approaches and treat these incredibly complex clients as markets in their own right.
This demands the marketing end-to-end process be applied to one account at a time, and is why ABM has become increasingly dominant in B2B since it was codified in the early 2000s.
My main message continues to be that we must choose carefully the markets and market segments we want to serve in whatever sector we are in, and to create, communicate and deliver superior value. Our job in marketing is to build customer loyalty and trust by delivering on the promise made by our brand. In B2B, ABM has the potential to help sales not only sell more today, but to identify new opportunities and create new solutions and strategies to deliver mutual value over the longer term.
People still confuse marketing with selling. I have to remind audiences that marketing is more than selling ‘stuff’. Marketing starts long before there is a product and continues long after it is sold. Marketing is the tool for segmenting markets, discovering unmet needs and creating new solutions. Marketing, when done well, creates the company’s future.
