Once a month I join the Jen Up on B2B online session where Jenna Chambers curates a listen-in to a current B2B marketing podcast or webinar, and afterwards we have a brief Zoom discussion about what was relevant, or useful (or indeed plain old BS).
This month we listened to a podcast where Kristina Jaramillo chatted with Jeff Pedowitz about some of the shortcomings in how firms implement their ABM strategy, and what they can do about it.
Some key takeouts:
- A key grit point is the nature of the handover from Marketing to Sales: in the words of Jeff Pedowitz it should be “a handshake, not a handoff”.
- The key to success in ABM is to see its purpose as “a relationship to be built, not a bell to be rung”
- Jeff put forward an interesting analogy: imagine courting a potential life partner, persuading them to marry you, and then once the wedding’s over saying “bye – I now need to find other partners to seduce”. Yet this is how a lot of ABM works: the team doing the seduction are rarely the team the client ends up finding they are “married” to.
- If profitable business relationships drive value, it therefore seems mad to break the personal relationship exactly at the point that the client agrees to “commit”
- This is why the ABM process needs to be embedded in the concept that “revenue is a team sport” – not the responsibility of just one person
I don’t normally go for inventing new names for old processes, but Jeff’s proposal that ABM should be renamed “Customer Portfolio Management” struck a number of chords:
- Seeing your key account targets as “Customers” rather than “accounts” helps to personalise the nature of the potential relationship, and perhaps a business’s approach.
- The word “Portfolio” suggests that – as with an investment portfolio – different targets require different weightings of attention and investment at different times.
- The word “Management” is vital because the word “Marketing” in ABM immediately puts the responsibility for its success with the Marketing (and by definition not the Sales) team - and so becomes siloed.
The idea that ABM is in fact a management process, not a marketing responsibility, means that the wider team can take responsibility for making it work (and therefore take the credit when it goes well).
One further point: B2B sales tend to be driven by (two-way) conversations, not (one-way) sales spiels.
This is why ABM-distributed marketing content needs to be tailored and edited to fit the worldview of each intended recipient. The point of ABM-distributed content is to enable conversation, not for it to be read and discarded. The more tailored the content is to the individual recipient, the more likely it is to enable conversations, and as we have seen: conversations drive sales.
Thanks again to Jenna Chambers for setting up Jen Up on B2B. Jenna runs it in her own time, it costs nothing to join & is always interesting.
#ABM #b2b #sales
