Chris Bondhus explains how Brightcove's video platform can support B2B ABM initiatives

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Jabmo, the provider of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) solutions to the manufacturing, life sciences, and healthcare industries, and Malachi Threadgill, Forrester Principal Analyst, advise B2B marketers to consider their industry-specific needs when selecting an ABM solution.

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The Demandbase ABM Innovation Summit was granular on execution, far-sighted on the potential for omnichannel ABM

Chris Bondhus explains how Brightcove's video platform can support B2B ABM initiatives

Welcome to this week's patchwork of questions and answers about political advertising, ABM, voice search, blockchain, and loyalty

Ty Heath, global lead of The B2B Institute at LinkedIn, gives a sneak preview of her B2B Marketing Forum session: "How to Combine Account-Based Marketing and Social Selling on LinkedIn."

The Demandbase ABM Innovation Summit was granular on execution, far-sighted on the potential for omnichannel ABM

When people think of account-based marketing (ABM), they tend to think of it as a smaller-scale practice. Since ABM is fundamentally built around focus in the aligned pursuit of high-value accounts, it’s often associated with a significant reduction in target market scope (i.e., “Let’s narrow down to our 20-30 most promising accounts).

This itself is a constraint from which B2B marketers need to break free, which is why Gary Gerber stood out as a fitting guest for the first interview in our second season of Break Free B2B. At B2B Marketing Exchange in February, he sat with TopRank Marketing President Susan Misukanis to unpack what’s needed to bring ABM to the next level.

Gary and his team at Folloze helped Cisco develop a sophisticated and highly effective ABM program that targeted 20,000 customers through one-on-one, personalized content and messaging.

How can other B2B marketers achieve this level of scalability in their ABM efforts, overcoming one of the biggest remaining hurdles holding back this fast-growing approach? In large part it’s about rethinking our tools, Gary suggests, while leaning on a rather literal metaphor.

“You have to focus away from blunt instrument tools,” he says. “I’m not bashing blunt instruments, by the way, because a hammer is one of the most useful tools in your toolkit, but you wouldn’t use it to repair a watch. So you need to migrate to tools that let you [achieve] that kind of precision, because that’s the only way you’re going to build trust with your customers.”

[bctt tweet="“A hammer is one of the most useful tools in your toolkit, but you wouldn’t use it to repair a watch.” @Gary_Gerber of @Folloze on the need for more precision in #ABM. #BreakFreeB2B" username="toprank"]

Solutions like Folloze’s platform, which enables the delivery of personalized experiences at scale, are helping pave the way. But it’s not just about technology. Reaching a state of advanced ABM also requires shifts in organizational mindset, philosophy, and operation.

Gary and Susan cover the gamut in their 18-minute conversation. You can watch, listen, or find key excerpts and takeaways below.

Break Free B2B Interview with Gary Gerber

If you’re interested in checking out a particular portion of the discussion, you can find a quick general outline below, as well as a few excerpts that stood out to us.

• 1:30 - Recognizing that change is inevitable
• 2:30 - Where is ABM in terms of market maturity?
• 4:45 - Helping clients recognize shortcomings and make incremental progress
• 6:30 - Approaching the marketing funnel from an ABM standpoint
• 9:30 - Re-centering on the fundamentals of ABM targeting
• 11:15 - Where are you seeing successes in ABM?
• 13:15 - Optimizing for the future by taking the right steps right now
• 16:00 - Gary's personal hobbies and philosophies
• 17:15 - How can modern digital marketers break free?

Susan: What's your consulting approach? As marketers, we can't just tell our clients, "You're wrong, do it my way." How do you inch them toward making incremental progress?

Gary: It's an interesting question because when we talk to people, the tools that people are using are the same ones that worked well 10 or 15 years ago. People built their careers on tools like marketing automation and things like that. So it is challenging to tell them, "Those tools are blunt instruments by today's standards."

You have to focus the other way, on what's not working, on the pain. Because there is pain there, especially if they're under the gun for an account-based program, and for pushing things through the funnel, right? We like to talk about the three symptoms that marketers today are subject to: funnel starvation, pipeline constipation, and sales frustration. They can't get stuff into the top of the funnel anymore, whatever they get in the funnel doesn't come out, and they're under the gun there because sales and the entire organization is looking to them to move opportunities and it's not happening. So if you can put it in terms along those lines most marketers will eventually have to concede. 'Cause everyone's feeling that pain in B2B.

[bctt tweet="“We like to talk about the three symptoms that marketers today are subject to: funnel starvation, pipeline constipation, and sales frustration.” @Gary_Gerber @Folloze #BreakFreeB2B #ABM" username="toprank"]

Susan: Do you counsel equal focus on the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel to try to get things moving? Or is the first thing, you gotta fix the top of the funnel? What's your methodology?

Gary: Well, if you think about what ABM is, especially if you're doing it right, it's almost not a funnel mentality at all anymore, right? We refer to it as full cycle personalization, or some people are saying bow tie. If you're approaching it with that funnel mentality, you've almost doomed yourself to failure right from the start in 2020.

[bctt tweet="“If you're approaching #ABM with that funnel mentality, you've almost doomed yourself to failure right from the start in 2020.” @Gary_Gerber @Folloze #BreakFreeB2B" username="toprank"]

There’s an analogy others are using and I agree with it: it’s like a football team or a soccer team running down the field together. So the focus isn't on top of funnel or middle of funnel, it's on -- by definition -- the accounts themselves. And as sales and marketing are running down the field, they're bringing the account and the individuals together along with them. It's a journey.

And so how do you do that? You can't do that by sending them mass emails because everybody's getting that. Ultimately what it's about, and I've said this to other people, it's about building that relationship with them. More importantly, it's about building a relationship that's built on trust, not on hype. Because if you've built that trust and you're adding that value to them that they trust you're interested in their success, and you're providing information and content and messaging and whatever it is, that will help them be successful. They'll happily march down the field with you because you're adding to their success.

Susan: So let's talk about what's working in ABM these days. Where are smart modern marketers really experiencing some great progress from your perspective?

Gary: Most people think of ABM, as you mentioned before, as, "Well, I'm going to pick my top 20 accounts and I'm going to focus everything I got on them, and the rest of the 88,000 or whatever, oh well too bad, them we'll just spray and pray with a nurture campaign or something like that." And it's interesting because when you stop and think about it logically, limiting it to your 20 or 25 or whatever, that's a technical limitation, right? It's because I can't do what I want to do -- create a deeply personalized, individualized, valuable, trust building experience -- with more than those 20 people because there's me and this person, that's all that we can do.

But there is no procedural reason for that. If you could do [personalization] for everybody, then you would, but you can't. And so, Cisco is a really awesome example. What they've been able to do is actually automate a lot of what's manual to create these very individualized experiences where they’re getting content, and imagery, and messaging, and information, and everything that is very salient to them, that they used to have to build by hand, so it took hours for each … it’s automated, so they kind of wind it up once and this goes out. So Cisco is actually doing one of the largest ABM programs in the country.

Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few interviews to whet your appetite:

• Break Free B2B Series: Jon Miller on How ABM Can Help Marketers Keep Their ‘Ship’ Together
• Break Free B2B Series: Hal Werner on the Intersection of Marketing Creativity and Analytics
• Break Free B2B Series: Adi Bachar-Reske on Taking the Lead in the Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

The post Break Free B2B Marketing: Gary Gerber on Scaling ABM without Losing Focus appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Everyone in B2B is talking about account-based marketing. And almost everyone is practicing it in some form — around 93% of organizations, according to SiriusDecisions.

“Not many are killing it though,” says Kelvin Gee. “That's the problem. They start pilots ... then they re-launch and learn from the mistakes. That's just a natural maturation.”

This is a fundamental process in digital marketing, of course: test, assess, optimize. But in the Break Free B2B series, our goal is to help you fast-forward it by learning from the mistakes, successes, and revelations of your innovating peers in the field. And as the Senior Director of Modern Marketing Business Transformation at Oracle*, Kelvin draws from a deep well of experience at one of the powerhouse brands in enterprise technology.

Walking the walk is different from talking to talk, but it’s easy to see why companies across the spectrum are seeking to do both.

“Companies do need to be more customer-centric, deliver a better customer experience, personalize the content, align with sales, and measure themselves differently,” he observes. “I call account-based a strategic glue that pulls all that stuff together.”

In his conversation with TopRank Marketing’s Josh Nite, filmed in Arizona during B2B Marketing Exchange in February, Kelvin shares his perspectives on what it takes to actually make ABM work, and how Oracle empowers its people to thrive within this framework.

It comes down to a fairly simple and repeatable model: standardize, evangelize, train, enable.

[bctt tweet="“Standardize, Evangelize, Train, Enable,” @kgee’s model for implementing #ABM at scale in large organizations like @oracle. #BreakFreeB2B. — Kelvin Gee" username="toprank"]

During an expansive 25-minute interview, Kelvin unpacks the inner workings of enterprise ABM, from getting buy-in to rethinking attribution to developing meaningful metrics and beyond.

Break Free B2B Interview with Kelvin Gee

If you’re interested in checking out a particular portion of the discussion, you can find a quick general outline below, as well as a few excerpts that stood out to us.

• 1:00 - Kelvin's definition of modern marketing
• 1:45 - Scaling account-based marketing
• 2:15 - Strategic adaptations in the evolution of ABM
• 3:30 - How does an organization adopt a new marketing philosophy?
• 5:00 - Who should lead the charge for transformation?
• 7:15 - Metrics Oracle looks at to measure ABM success
• 8:45 - Overcoming traditional friction between sales and marketing
• 10:30 - Is there a need to redefine success and "credit" in order to achieve alignment?
• 12:15 - Operational structure: should sales and marketing converge?
• 13:30 - Challenges and opportunities in the industry
• 15:45 - Oracle's tech stack
• 17:45 - How to filter out data that matters and makes a difference
• 18:45 - What will marketing look like in five years?
• 21:15 - Humans versus robots, and their roles in marketing going forward
• 23:00 - What can marketers do to break free?

Josh: What kind of metrics does Oracle look at when measuring ABM?

Kelvin: We actually look at account engagement as an early indicator on whether your program is performing or not, because if you're not seeing an increase in engagement from a snapshot that you might have taken before the campaign started, that probably means it's not working. Either the personalization isn't there, the tactics aren't working, you're not at the right watering holes, or the orchestration might not be right.

[bctt tweet="“If you're not seeing an increase in engagement from a snapshot of before the campaign started, that probably means it's not working.” — @kgee of @oracle on measuring #ABM success. #BreakFreeB2B" username="toprank"]

So that's the early indicator whether it's working or not. Once you're past engagement, what truly matters to sales, of course, is conversations. They want conversations with these target accounts, so that's what we really looked at and that's really measured by a target account pipeline, or "TAP," as we call it. But when you look at growth in that pipeline, regardless of crediting who sources that pipeline, whether it's marketing or sales, we don't care because it's a team sport. And you can see that growth. Again, you compare this with a snapshot you've taken of those target accounts before the campaign begins, you will see success, and that's how you measure some of those programs.

Josh: I know that Oracle is a data corporation, and you live and die by data. Can you give me a little peek into what your tech stack looks like?

Kelvin: Yeah, I'll give you some broad strokes but obviously we drink our own champagne, right? So Eloqua is our marketing automation platform and our analytics engine is all on Oracle analytics, but the important thing to understand is: We believe that data is the future of B2B marketing. Because we're not gonna have less data, we'll probably have more data in the future, so if you believe that and you also believe that most organizations — especially enterprise organizations — have data silos, and if the goal is to deliver a better customer experience, you’ve got to break down those data silos.

[bctt tweet="“We believe that data is the future of B2B marketing. If the goal is to deliver a better customer experience, you’ve got to break down those data silos.” — @kgee of @oracle on #BreakFreeB2B" username="toprank"]

So I always used the Marie Kondo analogy, right? Where she goes into your house and then she tells you to, you know, pile all your clothes from all your different closets onto your bed. And she tells you that for a reason, because only when you see all the piles of clothes on your bed does the light bulb go off and you say, "Oh my God I’ve got a lot of clothes." It's the same thing with your data. Once you consolidate all your data silos onto one bed, so to speak, in this case a customer intelligence platform or customer data platform or whatever you want to use, once you combine all that data, that's when you start to see all the insights of your customers. And for us, we think the future of B2B resides in a data lake of some sort. And that data lake is your single source of truth and when an account surges or rises, it'll rise simultaneously in your marketing automation platform and/or your CRM, and so that's really the important construct that we think is going to be more representative of a better customer experience in the future.

Josh: What can marketers do to break free?

Kelvin: I’ve always believed that all marketers should have empathy. I think empathy is a super important value that we all need to possess, because we all talk about customer-centricity, how we need to be more customer-centric blah, blah, blah. But what drives customer-centricity is empathy so, I always try to train all of my marketers, especially the young ones who are just coming out of college and learning that they have to develop the empathy muscle. And actually, I do this little "E" test in my workshops, and that is, I ask them to draw a capital-E on their forehead and then I watch them, and they struggle for a few seconds, because they realize there are two ways to control that "E" — they could draw it where it's facing the right way for them, but backward to the person facing them, or it's the other way, where it's backward for them but rightward-facing for the partner. And I asked how many people in the room draw one way or the other and it's usually a 50/50 mix, sometimes I'm surprised by 80/20 drawing it the right way, the right way being that it's rightward-facing for your partner. So I call this "E" test for a reason, because the E stands for 'empathy' because you've taken the time to think about the other person and make sure they see it the right way. So that's just a quick little parlor trick to show the importance of empathy in the world of marketing.

Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few interviews to whet your appetite:

• Break Free B2B Marketing: Gary Gerber on Scaling ABM without Losing Focus
• Break Free B2B Series: Jon Miller on How ABM Can Help Marketers Keep Their ‘Ship’ Together
• Break Free B2B Series: Adi Bachar-Reske on Taking the Lead in the Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

* Disclosure: Oracle is a TopRank Marketing client.

The post Break Free B2B Marketing: Oracle’s Kelvin Gee on Winning with Enterprise ABM appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Harriott, Melphine, author