A Day in the Life of Account Based Marketing — Day 2: Is ABM Bull$#!t ?

Is account based marketing just the latest marketing buzzword, convincing the marketing herd to buy more software and do new kinds of campaigns? Sort of, and also, not really.

After spending a couple of months reading here and here and here, this is what i gleaned account-based marketing actually is:

As inbound marketing / nurturing is flat-lining (more on that in another post) the marketing world has discovered that deep resonance into accounts and good-old-fashioned relationships are the elements that open opportunities into big accounts.

Basically this is a pendulum swing away from “Top of Funnel” and “Feeding the Marketing Machine” (feed the funnel, nurture those leads and SQL will eventually come) back to sales principals — targeting, building deep relationships into accounts, knowing the people and org structure in those accounts and then using content and personalization to reach people in those accounts. Finally, ABM teams build in predictability and use software tools in order to scale.

ABM corrects:

– Over-reliance of the sales team on inbound marketing to drive target account leads

– Unfounded belief of marketing that technology — not strategy — is the solution to good lead-gen

– Too little value placed on relationships and personal interaction with inbound