Marketing to B2B customers is seeing a paradigm shift. As a B2B marketer, it is important to move away from broad, generic marketing strategies to a more focused, targeted approach, where all the marketing content is created to address specific types of clients, or where relevant, a single large client. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) allows you to do just that. This targeted strategy-based marketing technique is seen to be more effective than the traditional marketing approach. Yashdeep Vaishnav, Director- Marketing Cloud, Salesforce, spoke to Digital CMO Digest, about why ABM is disrupting the marketing game; and how it is the best strategy to adopt to transform a lead into revenue.

Interviewed by Priyanka Bhattacharya

/ / How has ABM disrupted B2B marketing?

ABM has disrupted the marketing game by raising the stakes for both marketing and sales. Marketing can no longer stay only at the top of the sales funnel for generating qualified leads. To drive growth, marketing and sales need to work together all through the buyer’s journey. At Salesforce, we believe an ABM strategy is an effective, proven strategy to engage with customers throughout the sales lifecycle, and manage complex sales opportunities.

ABM takes time, but the results are substantial. Companies who got on board early are reaping the rewards: faster business acquisitions, successful expansion into existing accounts, smarter marketing spends, and customers who feel understood. The bottom line is, if you’re in B2B doing large, complex deals but haven’t yet invested in ABM, you could be missing out on considerable business growth.

/ / How beneficial has this approach been since ABM is a highly personalized marketing approach for the B2B segment?

One of the things that stands out for me, now that ABM is at the forefront of B2B marketing, is the way that marketing itself has changed in the last few years. With more decision-makers involved at each stage of the buying cycle, and with more channels of communication, marketers are working harder to connect with prospects. That’s what makes account-based marketing something special. With the right tools and technologies in place, it can address many of the touchstone issues that B2B marketers face when trying to connect with prospects – from how to personalize your sales pitch to how to align your sales and marketing efforts.   

Our Einstein account-based marketing tool helps customers identify the right accounts, improve customer engagement, align sales and marketing and measure and optimize campaign performance. Businesses can focus on high-value targets by evaluating customer data, leveraging predictive lead scoring to get intelligent insights built on machine learning that helps you discover which accounts are most likely to close, and mapping leads to the right accounts. After identifying customers, businesses can start an interaction at the correct moment by personalizing messages to acquire new prospects from identified accounts, and nurturing those contacts. Personalized campaigns with relevant content will put customers through account-based journeys with a dynamic web experience.  84% of marketers see higher ROI with ABM than other marketing programs.

/ / What are the critical aspects of ABM that B2B marketers should keep in mind when delivering personalized solutions?

Delivering a personalized customer experience has emerged as the central metric in the quest for better B2B marketing.  To market to a single specific company, you've got to build in a distinct message. What that message will be should depend on the pain-points that your solution addresses. In ABM, personalization isn't an afterthought – it is part of the strategy from the beginning, and greater personalization leads to a better experience for your customers.

Secondly, I believe ABM breaks the silos and unites the sales and marketing teams. Both teams become responsible for metrics like Revenue and ROI, and transferring leads becomes a cyclical process instead of a linear one. With the help of tools like marketing automation, your sales team can send leads back to marketing that need to be nurtured to a more sales-ready state, and for ABM, that’s awesome.

Lastly, ABM relies heavily on data – it’s how you navigate through the process of marketing within an entire account, and it’s what keeps your sales and marketing teams on the same page. It makes you a data-driven marketer; data will help you make informed marketing decisions and ultimately, meet and pre-empt the needs of your clients and prospects. Engagement, brand awareness, and lead quality make up a huge part of how you guide your ABM strategy.

/ / How do you see NLP and Machine Learning helping organizations in their ABM efforts? 

Marketers have to understand their customers better than ever so they can deliver personalized campaigns. Every customer is unique. Analyzing past customer behavior helps marketers predict future behavior, anticipate customer needs, and guide experiences across every touch point. Einstein Recommendations (Predictive Content and Recommendations) recommends the best product, content, or offer for each individual on the web, on email, and in mobile sites and apps.

Our engagement-scoring analytics builder uses machine learning to score each individual’s likelihood of opening, clicking, or unsubscribing from an email, and converting on your website. You automatically get recommended segments to target, like your loyalists or dormant customers, to win back. Most importantly, you can take immediate action based on this predictive behavior. Einstein social insights automatically analyzes the tone and sentiment of conversations in over ten languages and helps you truly understand the voice of your customer. Einstein language insights gives marketers the ability to harness all conversations about a particular topic. It ensures that actionable social posts are routed to the right teams and brands to increase response rates. Einstein vision for social discovers new insights from images on social media using trained image classifiers that recognize food, logos, objects or even scenes that relate to or are relevant to your brand—even when your brand or name isn’t mentioned.

/ / How does AI impact account-based marketing?

According to Salesforce’s 2017 State of Marketing report, more than half of marketers that use AI say it’s essential for companies to create 1-to-1 marketing journeys across every touch point, and top teams are more likely to use marketing analytics and predictive intelligence extensively, among other tools.

In the B2B space, aspects of AI impact ABM by providing the ability to deliver smarter, more personalized and predictive customer solutions. The power of AI helps in content creation and commerce. We can connect with prospects faster, understand marketing ROI, and maximize efforts with advanced analytics.

/ / In your view, what is going to be the state of ABM for B2B going forward?

As businesses focus on more meaningful digital interactions and automated business processes, there is a need for them to be at the hub of customer data and automation. ABM for B2B will see growth as AI and machine learning are fast developing processes. The requirement for businesses to optimize experiences will increase. That means the next five years should be less about making existing processes work better inside the platform, and more about re-designing the business to serve customers better, faster, and more profitably. ABM will see new solutions in the areas of Internet of Things (IoT), mobility and analytics.