Sharing research, insights, trends and advice to help you keep up with the latest in ABM
Hello everyone,
Welcome to the third edition of The ABM-er, which I started in January 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…
My new book Account-Based Marketing: The definitive handbook for B2B marketers was published by Kogan Page on 3 March. The week before, Joanna Moss and the excellent team at Salesforce hosted an invitation-only launch event in London. Designed to bring the new book to life, we were joined by several people featured in the book, and I share my reflections on that event.
As 250,000 people now have ABM in their job title on LinkedIn, it’s never been more important to understand the skills you need to do the job well. We’ll look at the technical marketing competencies and soft skills ABM-ers need – and how they measure up.
Meeting the demand for professional development in ABM, Inflexion Group unveiled its new ABM Academy this week, providing courses designed specifically for ABM practitioners at every stage of their career from beginner to expert via four flexible learning pathways, in the first Academy of its kind for B2B Marketers everywhere. I’ll share the highlights here.
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Many thanks,
Bev.
Launching the definitive ABM handbook for B2B marketers
The culmination of two years’ planning and seven months intense writing arrived with the publication of Account-Based Marketing: The definitive handbook for B2B marketers on 3 March. Salesforce’ UKI ABM leader, Joanna Moss, kindly hosted a launch event for the book, and 150 business, marketing and ABM leaders joined the afternoon event on 36thfloor of the Salesforce Tower in London. This fabulously comfortable Ohana Floor provided the perfect setting for speaker sessions, panel discussions and peer networking.
It was a pleasure to bring my book to life through my presentation – complete with insights into the writing process and my terrible handwriting! Our incredible guest speakers shared first-hand experiences from the real-world case studies in the book.
My presentation explored the key drivers and enablers shaping ABM today, the five types of ABM in the new blended model, and the critical success factors for piloting and scaling ABM successfully. We wrapped up with a look at how ABM is evolving and where leading practitioners are taking it next, how AI is transforming it, how it’s becoming an integral part of customer service and how leading practitioners are using ABM to build purpose-driven collaborations that create wider social impact.
The afternoon was packed with valuable insights. We gained a clear view of what customers expect from their suppliers, thanks to Charles Forte DG CIO at the UK MoD, who shared his perspectives from both the private and public sector. Antonia Wade, Global CMO at PwC, guided us through positioning ABM within a broader marketing strategy and making a compelling business case for it. We explored how to design the right ABM strategy for your business, hearing from Andrew Fitzgerald, VP ABM at Kyndryl about the approach he took when the company spun out from IBM and how that has evolved. Rhiannon Blackwell, ABM Leader Global Marketing at PwC, Nimmi Bhalla, B2B Marketing Director at Virgin Media O2 and Wiebke Macrae, Global Head of Demand Generation & ABM at Thales brought the five types of ABM to life, helping us to understand when and how to use each one effectively. And, finally, we had a great discussion with Rachael Bell, VP ABM at NTT DATA Inc and Lorraine Legros, Senior Director, Global Vertical & Account-Based Marketing at Red Hat, on how to build a strong ABM capability within your organisation – covering structure, processes, and team set up to drive real impact.
And the buzz didn’t stop there! LinkedIn was alive with post event reflections and takeaways, proving just how much these discussions resonated. One guest commented, “a key takeaway was the introduction of a new approach called Scenario ABM. This innovative method focuses on achieving a single business outcome through a series of diverse, strategic steps—whether that involves penetrating a new decision-making unit within an account or accelerating a strategic deal.”
Joel Harrison of B2B Marketing captured his highlights in a great article, which you can read here: https://bit.ly/4kL4h83.
A huge thank you to everyone who joined and contributed—including Joanna Moss, who closed the event with a powerful observation on the impact of AI on all of our lives, saying, “we will be the last set of leaders to lead a human-only workforce. Before long, every organisation will have entire teams of digital agents working alongside human employees, augmenting their work.”
This is another skill that ABM-ers will need to master, keeping them at the forefront of this constantly evolving discipline.
The competencies ABM-ers need (and have) today
In an excellent WARC newsletter posted last November, the authors stated that ‘B2B marketers need to hone their people skills’. They explained that B2B marketers ‘experiencing an unprecedented period of change driven by developments in AI are going to have to build human connections to succeed, both internally and externally.’
This conclusion in a report from LinkedIn, Global Marketing Jobs Outlook, Fall 2024, suggests that collaboration is rapidly becoming a key skill. The good news is that it’s a skill that 92% of ABM-ers already excel in, according to Inflexion Group’s 2024 ABM Benchmarking Study.
Collaboration is one of the core soft skills an ABM-er needs, the others being commercial acumen, personal influence and facilitation skills. These are, of course, in addition to the technical marketing competencies ABM-ers require, such as insight development, messaging development, campaign planning and activation, and marketing performance management.
In the Inflexion Group benchmarking study, one survey respondent explained their approach to hiring for ABM and the importance of soft skills, saying ‘Seniority varies, but we look for autonomy, the ability to interface with sales teams, experience at the company and an insatiable curiosity.”
Another looks for more senior, experienced people who bring a connection to sales with them, explaining ‘Our ABM-ers are at the more senior end of the scale, and many have been doing field marketing so have a deep connection to the sales team.’
The ability to engage at a senior level is key, as another programme leader confirmed, saying an ABM-er ‘needs to be someone who understands CXO clients and how accounts work; who can zoom in and out, know what to do, and hold a senior conversation.’
So, what levels of expertise exist in ABM teams today? Starting with the strongest levels of competence, almost all ABM-ers are experts in collaboration and three quarters excel in campaign planning and activation. Almost two thirds are expert in commercial acumen.
Most teams have at least an intermediate level of competence in the ability to influence others, develop messaging, and build insight.
Competency levels in the ABM team
Source: © Inflexion Group ABM Benchmarking Study 2024.
The areas for most development appear to be in marketing performance management and facilitation skills – both critical for maintaining your position as an ABM-er with wider account teams and business stakeholders.
Back to collaboration for a moment. The ability to collaborate with AI tools will be a core skill for teams to build. In an interview for my new book, my colleague Jaspreet Bindra of AI&Beyond has the following advice for ABM-ers. ‘ABM-ers should be in the frontline of experimenting with generative AI. There are multiple tools to help you draw insight, build copy, summarise meetings, brainstorm new ideas, create new content at scale, help visualise new content, create beautiful videos using just text as prompts, or help target content to specific individuals.’
He adds, ‘I think it’s so important for an ABM-er to be curious. If you’re not curious about the new tools and trends, you’ll never succeed in this new age of AI.’ His final piece of advice is that, ‘We all need to learn the art and science of writing great prompts using natural language as a tool, whether it be English, French or any other language, to make these generative AI programs and tools give us the kind of output that we want.’
If you would like to build your skills for ABM, the new ABM Academy may be able to help…
Introducing the ABM Academy
This week, Inflexion Group unveiled its new ABM Academy, the first comprehensive professional development programme designed specifically for ABM practitioners at every stage of their career. Training ABM-ers has long been a passion of mine – and of my colleagues at Inflexion group – so this week’s launch is a career highlight for all of us.
The ABM Academy offers four levels of development across the technical marketing competencies and soft skills ABM-ers need, which we’ve just explored. Courses start with introductions to ABM for beginners, then move through more intermediate courses for those who need to understand how to do the job. Next come advanced courses for those who have already been doing ABM for a while and finally expert courses aimed at experienced ABM-ers and ABM programme leaders.
Recognising that everyone needs to develop skills in different ways, depending on the time and resources you have available, you can choose:
- On-demand modules for self-paced learning
- Live virtual and face-to-face courses
- Custom team training programmes
- Individual mentoring from experienced practitioners
All courses are designed, developed and delivered by practitioners, for practitioners. They draw on the frameworks, concepts, case studies and interviews included in my new book, and on earlier books such as Account-Based Growth (Kogan Page, 2022).
All courses lead to professional certification through Credly digital credentials, giving ABM-ers the recognition they need to continually develop their careers.
For more information about the ABM Academy and the courses on offer, visit: www.inflexiongroup.com/abmacademy
