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Companies are investing a significant percentage of their revenues in activities directed at lead acquisition, but most do not optimize those investments by developing formal processes for qualifying, certifying and validating new business opportunities. Companies surveyed by the CMO Council say they are wasting time, money and valuable business leads – leaving big money on the table every quarter. 

Our recent report, “Fire Up Your B2B Revenue Engine”, produced in collaboration with WM America, shows what it takes to get ahead. We look at models and metrics for success, gaps between highly evolved and lesser evolved marketing organizations, strategic demand gen initiatives, and more. The findings of this report are based on a survey of over 170 heads of B2B marketing, sales, revenue, growth, demand gen and campaign execution, including executives at T-Mobile and Momentum ITSMA. Here’s what they had to say…

Great Expectations

ABM comes with great expectations to build reputation and deepen relationships and lift revenue. MarTech vendors and marketing agencies have jumped on the bandwagon putting an ABM sticker on existing tech and services.

About a third of marketing budgets at B2B enterprises are now allocated to Account-Based programs, and 66% are set to increase investment in ABM says CEO Alisha Lyndon at Momentum ITSMA. Yet our study shows only 3% of lesser evolved marketers are very satisfied with their ABM programs, compared to half of highly evolved marketers.

“There’s a big disconnect,” Lyndon says. “ABM is a top priority but it’s in need of tough love. Very few programs drive significant improvement in revenue metrics.” Misleading metrics and a maniacal focus on filling the top of the lead funnel are some of the telltale signs that a marketing organization is on the wrong path with ABM. Too many marketers measure ABM using standard marketing metrics for demand gen.

Just because marketing covers a thousand accounts who may see an ad doesn’t mean it’s actively making a difference in the buying process.

READ MORE: Bad Report Card for B2B Marketers

We're at a point where ABM is pervasive, and most business leaders now have a sense of what it is and why it's valuable. But there's a huge difference between a general blessing and actually behaving in a customer focused way across your go to market. You have to create a value exchange at every interaction and not just show up. A crucial sign of ineffective ABM strategies are a surface level customer culture, often made worse when marketing leaders want to expand an ABM program without alignment or common understanding with the rest of the business.

“We have seen organizations get ABM right without strategic alignment by just doing brilliant work on a set of accounts, but the effort lives on an island from the rest of the marketing data and reaches a point of friction on how to scale,” Lyndon says. “Most organizations fall into a demand-gen chasm as they move from experimenting with ABM and expanding.”

Momentum ITSMA has come up with a framework for right sizing your ABM strategies, aligning with the business growth strategy, and orienting marketing around the account. Momentum ITSMA’s Account Growth Matrix factors in a company’s growth goals (i.e., new accounts vs. existing accounts) and the complexity of its products (i.e., off-the-shelf vs. bespoke).

If you’re targeting new accounts, for instance, ABM will be more about building trust and displacing competitors. If you’re selling a bespoke product, ABM will be more about showing innovation, inspiring and making the business case. “The levers that marketers need to pull will be different,” Lyndon says. “Serving up the wrong content can undermine the buying experience.”

Depending on the levers, a marketing organization might need to acquire new capabilities and skill sets, or at least new ways of thinking. For instance, the events team might have to transition away from getting thousands of people to a conference and toward getting a couple of thousand from the company’s top 80 accounts, which drives most of the revenue. Getting sales and marketing to more closely collaborate is one of ABM’s great benefits. There’s no question the buyer’s journey has become increasingly complex and chaotic.

It’s harder to open up a new pipeline and get on the vendor shortlist. Sales and marketing need to be working in concert on the accounts that the business relies on from the start. “If you’re not at the table from the beginning, the chances of you winning the opportunity diminish rapidly,” Lyndon says. “In my view, all marketing processes should be built to help facilitate how customers buy.”

DOWNLOAD REPORT: Fire Up Your B2B Revenue Generation Engine

Scaling Ability

With ABM, far too many marketers spend too much time scaling messages rather than customer data insights. They don’t acquire an intimate understanding of the account with granular real time sales intelligence across all facets, dynamics, and developments in the business.

 “What is their business like? What are their growth goals? Where do we align?” says Kim Chau, Vice President of Business Marketing at T-Mobile. “It’s the difference between positioning and messaging. If marketers don’t know the answers to these questions, then they can’t use ABM to the best of its abilities.”

Chau takes full advantage of the many technology options and channel avenues to explore, research, test and measure her marketing efforts against target audiences. The goal is to drive higher quality lead generation.

That’s not to say there aren’t challenges. ABM, for instance, tends to be too rigid in terms of understanding the data and deriving actionable insights. Too much ABM activity comes down to variations on a theme distributed through content syndication or email.

“The ambition of ABM is to go after key accounts and really understand if they’re biting,” Chau says. “It’s about understanding and refining the message to what they care about. This is something that ABM platforms can’t really do in B2B. ABM tools don’t provide the thought leadership that marketers need to create resonance.”

Chau is quick to point out that it’s not the fault of ABM tools. Rather, marketers tend to rely too heavily on the technology rather than their marketing expertise and ability to understand an audience’s values and where alignment needs to take place to create trust and credibility. “It’s classic marketing,” Chau says.

READ MORE: Boosting Yield in the Account Marketing Field