Increased Demand of Account Based Marketing (ABM) for B2B businesses

• According to MarTechtoday, at least 62% of B2B companies surveyed in 2019 have a full Account-Based Marketing (ABM) program compared with 41% in 2016
• The need for ABM in larger companies is growing because they want to increase customer retention for increasing sales revenue

ABM has become very crucial in the B2B marketing space because the pressure on revenue is increasing yearly or quarterly in these companies. Similarly, competition is rising and customer expectations for products and services continue to heighten. Market is being really dynamic in this global world where the acquisition, retention and sales revenue goals are very difficult to catch up over a long period of time.

Organizations believe that sales and marketing still have rooms to improve so as to generate high-stakes revenue. Sales have been traditionally more directly related with the growth of companies while marketing deals with an indirect approach on increasing sustainability in businesses. ABM is thought of as one-to-one approach instead of one-to-many approach. According to Forbes, ABM is typically used in enterprise-level brands with more than 1,000 employees to help teams through collaboration.

Here are some of the reasons why businesses need to use ABM:

• Personalized communications: Personalized marketing is more preferred by customers because everyone prefers to be addressed by name rather than generic terms. Account-based marketing develops those contents which are used by decision makers to move them through the buyer’s journey. It is also required for marketing and sales to effectively and efficiently collaborate so that targeted customers are identified.

• Efficient use of marketing resources: ABM helps to pull down your marketing efforts and resources on your key accounts to drive the most revenue. This optimizes the staff time and business money. Similarly, by integrating sales and marketing, marketing teams can directly focus to target and develop contents for those key accounts. This not only maximizes the efficiency of marketing resources, but it will also help build the communication channel with sales to have an aligned sales and marketing organization.

• Increased return on investment: As mentioned in Forbes, according to Information Technology Services Marketing Association, 84% of businesses surveyed said that ABM delivers higher Return on Investment (ROI). ABM provides both the return on investment for an ABM initiative and immediate areas for improvement based on how contacts are responding to contents.

• Enhanced tracking: Businesses must review the effectiveness of each tactic (email campaign, special event or webinar). This helps to build up more effective campaigns forward. As noted in the ABM adoption Report, “ABM’s ability to drive revenue creates benefits for the marketing organization.” The available software platforms have made easier for tracking real-time information so that companies can make changes on ongoing campaigns. Tracking will actually save time and budget of companies.

• Closer alignment of sales and marketing: True ABM strategy doesn’t allow sales and marketing teams to function in individual silos. They need to work closely together to identify target accounts, develop a communication strategy and monitor the campaign’s progress. According to survey from Bizible, Marketers doing ABM are about 40% more likely to report alignment with their sales team compared to marketers not doing ABM. Hence, ABM keeps these teams working together instead of working independently. According to business insider, more than 90% of marketers believe that account based marketing is crucial to marketing and sales alignment.