Poor technology fit and integration is one of the top risks to ABM programme success, and leaders are mitigating this by developing workarounds using their existing technology, striving for continual improvement in the way they leverage existing tools, and building business cases to invest further in their martech stacks.
In our benchmarking study earlier this year, we found that large, complex organisations have a similar blend of technologies in their stacks.
The top ABM tools in use today
While practically all ABM-ers are leveraging their email systems, the next most popular tool they rely on most to build and activate their ABM campaign is their CRM system. These are core tools used by many other functions in the business, as are the team collaboration, project management and workflow systems that allow ABM-ers to connect with and leverage colleagues across the business for the benefit of their clients.
The most popular marketing tools enabling ABM-ers to activate their campaigns include digital advertising, websites, webinar platforms and marketing automation systems. Two thirds are using digital content creation and publishing tools, including social amplification. Data analytics and visualisation tools help to monitor and their campaigns on track. Interestingly, customer engagement platforms and ABM platforms are used by just under half of ABM-ers today.
To build the insight that is at the heart of all good ABM, most teams rely on account and executive insight tools plus social listening tools, and roughly a third are leveraging predictive analytics and modelling tools.
The main challenge cited by ABM-ers is how best to integrate the tools to reduce manual work arounds, with one programme leader explaining, “We have just mapped out our tech. It’s not integrated but we’re looking to integrate in the next twelve months.” Another gave a practical example of how tools are being refocused and aligned, saying, “We’ve introduced a tech steering board for all GTM functions. Sales and marketing operations have been combined to create an aligned view, and we’ve mapped out all the tech platforms we’re using to narrow them down.”
Top areas for ABM infrastructure investment
Looking at the next priorities for investment, just under a third are planning to invest in predictive analytics and modelling and marketing automation systems. Next most popular for future development are data analytics and visualisation tools, account and executive insight tools, and both social listening tools and webinar platforms.
Of course, generative AI is also an enormous area of interest, which we’ll discuss in part two of this article on ABM infrastructure.
Data — still the new oil!
Core to any investment in ABM technology is your data strategy, with one ABM leader admitting, “We built a platform five years ago rather than bought one. We built a data lake, but the data strategy wasn’t there. We’re now transitioning and defining our data vision and looking to address our data structure to enable an ABM platform.”
Most ABM programme leaders today are confident in their approach to combining different sources of data on accounts and individual stakeholders, and are using data to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns. They are broadly using intent data to identify early interest in key themes or solutions and can measure engagement. However, one third don’t have the right governance model in place to ensure only the most relevant content reaches ABM accounts, and over half can’t provide a single view of engagement to client facing teams.
Data quality and management is only becoming more important as ABM-ers consider how to leverage AI tools in their programmes. Clearly, there is still work to be done here.
