We Need to Talk About ABM
Good intentions. Bad intent.
We need to talk about ABM1.
First, I’m a believer. There is such a thing as a buyer’s journey. In B2B sales, buying decisions are made collectively—the customer is the account. Build your target account list and then proactively engage across marketing and sales based on your best guess as to where the account is in its journey. This is right and correct.
I believe in it so much, that we bring these principles out of enterprise sales and into mid-market and SMB sales with dynamic books.
Bad intent
But we’ve got a problem. ABM has been hijacked to mean “intent”—some sort of extra sense of the market that you’re supposed to base your demand on. Much blood, treasure and brand marketing have been spilled to make this happen.
To misquote Keyser Söze from the Usual Suspects (who’s probably misquoting Baudelaire): “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that third party intent data means something.”
We’re telling reps to chase accounts based on an unfalsifiable metric derived from some unholy combination of IP lookups, DSPs and panels. When it doesn’t work, reps get understandably frustrated and discount the entire value of ABM. Shockingly, rebranding this same approach as “AI” hasn’t changed the outcome.
Back to basics
We need to get back to basics. We need to do the work to clearly define our ICP and identify the accounts that fit. Then we need to both communicate that ICP to reps and operationalize it properly so they can focus their work on *fit first*.
I’ve never been more bullish on fixing this. What we call “Generative AI” is also “Understanding AI” which can find, synthesize and structure information from the sea of unstructured data that lives on the web. And it can explain itself. Operationalizing this information has never been easier with dynamic books. These are real unlocks.
Combine these capabilities with continuous monitoring, and extracting and acting on meaningful signals becomes possible. This one’s more complex. We’ll veer towards information overload, leading to scoring methodologies that aggregate signals. If we’re not careful, we get Lead Scoring 2.0 (shoutout to Kaylee Edmondson2 for this!) or the same black box intent scores we have today. I believe we’ll figure it out, though, because these signals are stronger and more unique than the extremely weak ones that underpin Intent 1.0.
This is all happening fast. Frankly, I don’t see how sales processes and sales tech don’t undergo massive change in the next couple years. Gonna be a fun ride.
Account Based Marketing. When I talk about it here, I’m really referring to an all-encompassing ABM motion that includes sales as well. This is sometimes known as ABX because X used to sound cool.
Thanks to Kaylee and some of her colleagues for the thought provoking conversation that inspired this post.