What are the Real Challenges of Account Based Marketing

While most organizations understand the benefits of an account-based approach, operationalizing a repeatable account-based approach remains a struggle. This is because organizations have a limited number of accounts to demonstrate success and rely on non-scalable approaches to align execution, customization, and measurement.

This is because successfully scaling an account-based strategy requires scalable, repeatable, and engineered approaches that can be planned, customized, and executed seamlessly.

With ABM scaling as a major challenge, companies are expected to develop a consistent and repeatable approach as account-based marketing matures. Two key factors that will help are:

Account Selection and Rotation Process - Companies can group accounts that can be treated similarly to gain more insight into the content, news, and resources needed to run in the months and quarters to come.

Levels of your target account list and associating resources with those levels - Organizations can purposely determine how resources are applied. Those who do not level resources based on expected account value and instead use a unified approach lose the advantage of purposely deploying resources where they will generate the highest returns.

One of the ABM benchmark metrics for 2019 found that spending is expected to increase 41% as businesses of all shapes and sizes achieve positive results. Companies selling B2B solutions are expected to grow their account-based investments exponentially.

With investments rapidly shifting to account-based, companies' B2B marketing is expected to end up being account-based by definition. As a result, traditional investments in volume marketing activities are expected to fall into this area as well. TOPO's research shows mixed investment plans for companies with Average Annual Account Contract Values ​​(ACV) of the target account below $ 25,000. Account-based investments in these organizations are also expected to decline.

According to one of the ABM benchmark surveys, more small and medium-sized businesses are expected to spend 40% on account-based marketing. This increase is believed to be due to the growing importance of account-based marketing benchmarks that occur when transitioning from a strategic or corporate sales segment to medium-sized and commercial sales segments at B2B corporate companies.

"As the go-to-market mix evolves, many of the best practices for account-based strategy and execution are being adopted as general business B2B marketing best practices."

Customer acquisition remains a top priority rather than expanding existing customers. The larger companies ($ 1 billion + sales) split their account-based focus in half between customers and prospects, while the smaller companies (less than $ 25 million sales) invest 18% of account-based efforts in existing customers.

A company's account-based strategy is based on a strong ideal customer profile. Without this, companies cannot focus their efforts on a common list of target accounts. TOPO's data shows how effective ICP is when it is developed from both qualitative and quantitative inputs. Leading companies with strong ICP saw a 68% higher profit rate on accounts, while 81% of top performing companies believed in their ICP.

Additionally, ABM benchmark metrics from organizations that combined qualitative stakeholder inputs with prospect and customer data were 61% more certain that their ICP represented the attributes of the best accounts for the organization.