It is highly likely that 80% of your addressable market is represented by 20% of the companies that operate in it. Inflexion Group Chair, Tim Shercliff, discussed this 80/20 principle in a recent ‘fireside chat’ with Robert Norum, B2B Marketing Propolis expert.
The 80/20 rule is significant because it is fractal, meaning it repeats itself, so it could be that more than 50% of your revenue will be driven by less than 5% of your customer base. This principle is also beneficial in establishing where to focus efforts — not only marketing energy and resources — but also account management, customer success and with the executives in your business.
In my conversation with Robert we also dispelled the myth that ABM is only about winning new prospects. In fact, recent research by Inflexion Group suggests that ABM is more likely to be used for retaining and growing existing customers. Despite lots of new acronyms like ABE and ABX and Account-based Management, there is an important letter to remember in ABM — the ‘M’ is for ‘Marketing’; meaning the end-to-end marketing process, applied in this case to an individual account. Keeping this in mind ensures the full range of strategic marketing techniques and tools are employed to achieve sustainable profitable growth.
We also talked about the need for the ABM team to engage throughout the whole customer lifecycle, not just at the start of the buying process. An experienced ABM-er, playing a key role in your account team, should bring the full range of marketing activities to bear at an account level. This will complement sales activity, customer success and driving value for top customers and growth for your company. Finally we discussed how AI can boost productivity, making it easier to scale ABM and bring more accounts into the ABM programme.
Rounding up the chat, here are my three top tips for marketers:
- Understand the source of your profitable revenue. If you don’t have that information, make friends with someone in your finance department to find out.
- Challenge the status quo. If you have the evidence to suggest your marketing is not focused in the right place, don’t be afraid to suggest radical change.
- Focus on growth from your existing customers. Stop filling the top of the funnel with leads that don’t get followed up, instead focus on growth from your existing customers and target a few prospects, agreed with Sales.
For more information about Propolis and B2B Marketing visit https://www.b2bmarketing.net/propolis.
Learn more about how Inflexion Group helps global companies develop account-based growth strategies at www.inflexiongroup.com.
