Account-Based Marketers’ 5 Biggest Challenges (And How To Fix Them)
Account-based marketers are the ultimate customizers. With “markets of one” in their sights, they are tasked with creating personalized, targeted marketing throughout the buyer journey of individual key accounts.
Unlike more traditional marketing, where advertising, events, and content are created for a wide segment, account-based marketing (ABM) tailors each touchpoint for that specific account, which requires more pinpointed analysis, more detailed insight, and more personalized communication.
Putting a good ABM strategy together can be hard – a survey from last year found that only 17% of companies had an embedded strategy that was driving growth, with everyone else either in the process of expanding or implementing ABM. Before getting too entrenched, now is a good time for marketers to understand the requirements of good ABM such as orchestration between data, resources, and execution that moves individuals through the buyer journey. But there are also challenges. One false move and the company misses an opportunity or sounds tone-deaf to a top prospect.
Keep reading to learn about the most common challenges account-based marketers face, and how to avoid them.
Challenge 1 – Sales and Marketing Are Misaligned
Sales and marketing misalignment on the customer journey is all too common. Either due to mismatched goals, poor communication, or different tools and processes, an organization can easily see their teams treat one another like competitors instead of teammates. A study by Marketo shows that sales ignores up to 80% of marketing leads. That’s a waste of time and money and represents many lost opportunities.
It’s important in any ABM strategy to clearly define the roles of sales and marketing:
- Marketing has two key roles—to generate new qualified leads and to nurture leads in the funnel.
- Sales has two key roles—to qualify marketing leads for sales and to close leads in the funnel.
When these different jobs are mapped out across the customer journey, the role of marketing and sales can be clarified and goals can be aligned. Marketers can learn about what makes for a good lead, and sales can be more aware of the content that their leads are reading, for example.
MeritB2B can help by giving a 360-degree understanding of your customers and prospects through intent data. With these predictive insights, you can detect early buyer interest, prevent current customers from churning, and prioritize accounts based on intent and engagement. This results in growth through higher qualified leads and an overall shorter sales cycle.
Challenge 2 – Lack of Personalization in a Crowded Market
McKinsey calls 2020 the “inflection point” in B2B selling, where digital becomes 2-3x more important than in-person interaction. Since the onset of COVID, when events and sales meetings were canceled, 90% of sales interactions have been migrated to virtual meetings or phone calls. And we have seen that this trend is here to stay. The convenience of digital channels has proved itself to be just too great.
As you have seen, B2B marketing activity has made a massive shift to online marketing. With more money being spent on advertising, search, social, and thought leadership content, this creates competition and clutter in a crowded landscape. To cut through, ABM needs to be highly personalized and highly targeted. Rather than follow the same old plans just at a higher volume, use newly freed up resources to learn more about your audience and create more effective campaigns. Think about creating more custom content rather than just higher volumes of generic content. All of these tweaks will help you speak directly to your key accounts.
Challenge 3 – Scoring and Targeting Ideal Accounts
Many companies still care more about volume overvalue. Marketing is tasked with more leads, rather than getting good leads. While this seems like a good idea, in theory, it generally means that sales loses faith in marketing because they find so many of the leads are no good. Marketing ends up frustrated because their work is ignored by sales.
Lead scoring is a way to stop focusing on volume, and start focusing on value—value that is aligned between marketing and sales. This requires a feedback loop between sales and marketing so that everyone agrees on the definition of a qualified lead. With a common understanding of what makes a good lead, marketing can then target their strategies to the channels that generate more qualified leads, not just more leads. And with good communication in place between the teams, there is also the opportunity for continuous improvement.
But not all lead scoring is created equal. A study by Aberdeen found that a good lead scoring process finds 192% more qualified leads than other companies. Here’s where MeritB2B can be a huge help in the ABM process. As the leading provider for B2B audience data, we collect everything from company data, transaction information, firmographic, online behavior, and—crucially—location data. This audience data is used to accurately score leads and create powerful and effective marketing campaigns.
Challenge 4 – Trouble Developing The Right Message
With so much content competing for your buyer’s attention online, creating the right message is crucial. Thankfully, technologies exist that can help. Personalization technology uses data collected from past behavior to deliver individualized content, which delivers far more relevance than generic content. In a survey, 80% of marketers said that personalization was more effective than not using the tactic.
In B2B marketing, where ABM is common, personalization is at various stages of maturity. And some markers may think they are personalizing when they are in fact customizing, tailoring content based on broad strokes insights like IP address, rather than individualized insights from site behaviors, searches, and other deeply relevant data points.
With data-driven individualized personalization, content can be related to what stage of the customer journey someone might be in, what recent content they downloaded from the site, and even what issues they discussed in a past sales call. ABM-based personalization delivers the best possible content experience, timing, and all.
Challenge 5 – Not Making the Most of Available Data
Most marketers have plenty of data, but it’s a matter of what you do with it that makes the difference. First, make sure to keep data fresh, and prioritize new insights when making decisions about personalization and outreach. If a contact leaves an organization, make it imperative to update information wherever it’s relevant, not just in CRM, but across email, and other channels.
Second, make sure that everyone involved in the marketing and sales process is sharing a single view. Too often, data is stuck in different databases or platforms across sales and marketing channels which creates an inconsistent picture of the target account. This could lead to conflicting messaging and conflicting internal priorities.
And finally, locate new data that can add new facets of insight to your target accounts. Get creative. Social media and search can offer important clues about the company’s org structure or where they are in the buyer journey, which can add important nuances to be used in a nurturing campaign and also help sales with upcoming calls.
The power behind your marketing success is your marketing data. MeritB2B creates a powerhouse marketing database that gives your organization a 360-degree view of the customers and prospects. Our data is pulled from over 2,500 B2B sources and 600 million gross records—collecting company size, intent data, online behavioral insights, and even down to job title and the company’s tech stack. As a result, you get actionable and data ready to be activated across all different channels for maximum performance and growth.
