ABM: It’s More Than a Feeling

As B2B marketers, we all know how easy it is to get excited about the latest trends in our space. From predictive to advocate and pipeline marketing, there’s always something new to try. But since you can’t try them all, you’ll need to make educated decisions and separate the trends from the viable strategies. Naturally, we all have our gut instinct about what we should try next, but when it comes to making strategic changes or big technology purchases, you can’t just go with how you feel. You need some cold, hard facts. Or as we call it in the industry: data.

Data is the best way to get everyone in your organization on the same page. That’s why we’re so excited to release the ABM Leadership Alliance’s latest research report. It captures insights, results and critical data points from real marketers who are using ABM. As research (and ABM) nerds, we found it all pretty fascinating. But we were also able to narrow the research down to four key findings that show your hunch about ABM might just be something more.

Finding 1: ABM Marketing outperforms traditional marketing

We asked B2B marketers to compare the benefits delivered by traditional marketing methods and ABM, and the results were overwhelmingly in favor of ABM. What’s more, B2B marketers can expect a lift in ACV when selecting target accounts, defining budgets and team structures.

Finding 2: ABM focuses on customers and prospects

These days it seems like everybody is talking about delivering the optimal customer experience. But what does that look like? We’re noticing that B2B marketers leveraging ABM to spend more time focused on their customers, deepening and expanding their relationships.

Finding 3: ABM is driving positive organizational change

B2B marketers are finally moving away from vanity metrics (that do little to improve performance), things like impressions, CPMs, click-through rates, web traffic and conversion rates, to metrics that are tied closely to revenue:

Everybody knows how difficult it is to prove ROI, but focusing on bottom-of-the-funnel metrics makes it easier to close the loop and prove your worth to the rest of the organization.

Finding 4: Time to value is shorter 

ABM has a lot of moving parts, from the strategy, data, technology, process to the people and execution. Despite this, we’re seeing that a lot of B2B marketers are driving results in a remarkably short amount of time:

You can download the full report here. If you’d like to dive deeper into this research, the ABMLA is hosting a webinar to discuss these key points.