Theory and case-studies on Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

1. Introduction to Account Based Marketing
Food for thought from Clipatize
2019

2. Account-Based Marketing. 2
Source: Engagio
Account Based Marketing is a go-to-market strategy that
coordinates personalized marketing and sales efforts
to land and expand target accounts.
GTM strategy
A fundamental business strategy to drive
revenue; not a simple campaign or tactic.
Marketing and Sales
ABM is led by Marketing in close
collaboration with Sales.Land and Expand
Driving business at new accounts and
expanding within existing accounts; opening
doors and deepening engagement.
Target Accounts
Focus more resources on the most
valuable accounts.
Personalized
Built on account-specific insight, content, and
messages for maximum relevance and resonance.

3. Lead Generation vs. ABM. 3
Lead Gen is fishing with a net
You put your campaigns out there and start
catching fish. You don’t care which specific fish
you catch, as long as you pull in enough of
them every month. You then nurture
and score them until opportunities come out
the other end.
ABM is fishing with a spear
You don’t wait for a target account buyer to
wander into your net. You reach out to target
accounts directly — going after the big fish
with highly relevant, personalized outreach. You
don’t get wasteful ‘by-catch’; instead, you focus
all your efforts on the prospects you need to
reach..
vs.
It doesn’t necessarily source the pipeline
In demand generation, marketing sources a significant
fraction of the pipeline. In ABM, marketing influences the
pipeline but directly sources or discovers very little of it.
It’s ‘land and expand’
Demand generation focuses primarily on generating
net-new leads and opportunities. In ABM, Marketing and
Sales work together not only to land the account, but
also to expand it over time. Marketing continues to work
with Sales after the deal is done.

4. Industry benchmarks
The many colors of Account-Based Marketing.

5. Mastering ABM. 5
Account Driven Activations Account Driven Business

6. Account Driven Activations. 6
GumGum is an artificial intelligence company, with deep expertise in computer
vision. Its mission is to unlock the value of images and videos produced everyday
across the web, social media and broadcast television. Since 2008, the company
has applied its patented capabilities to serve a biggest brands from variety of
industries.
Do it like GumGum!
ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING

7. Tactic: Direct Mail. 7
This example from GumGum illustrates the powerful ABM
principle of treating each account as a market of one.
They noticed from perusing T-Mobile CEO John Legere’s twitter
feed that he was a huge comic-book fan. With this information
they didn’t need complex data modeling or protracted research
time to craft a personalized strategy—they simply appealed to
his interests.
They put together a promotional comic featuring T-Mobile and
GumGum. They sent multiple copies to the company and Legere
praised them on Twitter. In the end, that bold tactic eventually led
to GumGum becoming a vendor.
Target Account:

8. Tactic: Direct Mail & Social Media. 8
What B2B sales department doesn’t dream of landing a Fortune
500 giant like McDonald’s? Of course, the rub is that all your
competition has the exact same idea. The question then becomes
how does your operation stand out when developing its
marketing strategy?
A marketing tactic that proved successful was when GumGum
used McDonald’s own brand to catch their attention.
They sent out “burger kits” to 100 executives within the company.
Each one was personalized in a unique way so that the kits
contained a restaurant receipt imprinted with the name of each
executive. Moreover, the food box contained faux burgers
representing the famed Big Mac. Each level of the burger—the
patties, cheese, special sauce, etc.—represented the company’s
strengths, be it vision software or first-and-third-party data.
GumGum rounded out this creative strategy with original short
videos they promoted on their social media channels that tagged
key decision makers within McDonald’s. The gambit paid off in
that it garnered interest from the burger giant.
Target Account:

9. Tactic: Direct Mail. 9
In 2017 Clorox organized their annual iConnect conference on the
latest digital trends filled with over 400 attendees. To generate
attention from a selected group of Clorox brands including Brita,
Burt’s Bees, and Hidden Valley, GumGum created 3D tattoo
kits for the companies that people could use and share during the
event.
By combining both augmented reality and experiential marketing,
they fueled more than 200 app downloads and significant interest
in the company’s booth. Since image recognition software and
computer vision technology is still an emerging space, the project
gave attendees the chance to learn more about the ways they
can use the technology in their own marketing efforts.
Target Account:

10. Other Examples. 10
Recently, account-based Tray.io teams have been experimenting
with “pizza-nars” which as the name implies, is a webinar
accompanied by pizza. The idea was straightforward – pizza is
delivered to target accounts for them to enjoy while they watch the
webinar.
Account lifecycle stage: This approach can be useful across the
account lifecycle from initial engagement to upcoming renewals,
expansion or even re-engage at-risk accounts. You could even go
so far as to build out personalized webinar experiences with
customized landing pages so the prospect or customer feels as if
the webinar is hosted just for them – which can be a great way to
show off product updates or educate people on your platform.
Linking digital with offline:
After narrowing down their target accounts, Rapid7 personalized a
direct-mail campaign to those accounts in the form of a View
Master.
The generation in the target accounts remembers those old reel
viewers fondly from their childhood. By sending out View Masters
loaded with reels promoting their new software products, Rapid7
appealed to their targets’ sense of nostalgia and fun. The result was
that their contacts loved the viewers and even requested more
marketing materials be sent via that medium.
Direct Mail:

11. Account Driven Business. 11
Genesys is a leading provider in both cloud and on-premise customer
experience solutions, powering more than 25 billion of the world’s
customer experiences every year. Over 25 years Genesys has grown to
operate in more than 100 countries, serving over 10,000 customers and
powering some 25 billion contact centre interactions every year.
Although analysts rate Genesys’ customer experience platform as number
one in the world, the company faced three major challenges:
1. Strong competition from its targets’ existing incumbents.
2. No real insight into decision-makers or understanding of who they were.
3. Unsure how to get a “foot in the door” with new prospect organizations.
This is why the company needed to rethink the way they targeted high-
end, high value accounts and decision-makers and decided to pioneers a
precision-targeted, insight-led ABM Program.
Do it like Genesys!

12. Program Planning. 12
The target audience was decision-makers in:
• Customer services IT
• Operations
• Sales and marketing.
Across four verticals:
• Utilities
• Retail
• Telecoms
• FS&I.
Target Account:
Decision-makers were identified, meticulously profiled (using
demographic, firmographic, psychographic and behavioral
profiling) and added to on-the-ground insights from Genesys’
sales teams. The analysis revealed a shortlist of targets for whom
detailed profiling documents were produced.
Top quality, original, and hyper-relevant content was essential in
helping to engage with prospects. Therefor, research was carried
out to find the biggest issues faced by the target audience
Profiling and Insight Collection:

13. Program Orchestration. 13
April - May 2017: Planning, content auditing,
account mapping, social champion on-
boarding.
June - December 2017: Topic research and
content development, sector profiling, launch
of messaging and content.
December 2017: Predictive marketing tool
launched.
January 2018: Prioritizing of accounts via
intent scoping, analysis and deep profiling.
February 2018: Nurture program devised
from above analysis. New and precision
targeted content developed and distributed.
Timescale:
Audience research enabled the creation of an important opinion-
forming hero piece, which was distributed using email, direct mail,
social media and social selling. In many cases, specific content
was created per account. From here, audience respondents would
be mapped, segmented and entered into the ABM program.
In the second phase, Genesys introduced a predictive marketing
tool, meaning that previously manual ABM could be automated
and scaled. The tool combined profile information, keywords,
digital signals and propensity-to-buy modeling to produce intent
data, allowing the identification and immediate targeting of the
prospects currently demonstrating real and active buying signals.
Day-to-day insights from the frontline sales execs were fed into
the data, with the result that targeting could now be one-to-one,
or one-to-cluster, depending on what the intent data revealed.
Tight-knit for tightest targeting:

14. Program Results. 14
Campaign targets have been smashed, pipeline numbers are
three times what they were previously, and new highly efficient
ways of working and budgeting have been established. ABM was
completely unrepresented in the Genesys marketing budget, now
it has a 30% share.
Pipeline:
• 400% increase on the target pipeline, which was in the
millions.
Awareness & engagement:
• 66% of article views delivered connections with influencers
and decision makers.
• 74% engagement with priority contacts.
Use of budget:
• Efficiency & scalability improvements mean ABM now gets
30% share of the UK and Ireland marketing spend
(previously zero).
From zero to hero:

15. ABM - Laying the Groundwork.
Account Based Marketing Process.

16. ABM Operational Objectives. 16
Demand Generation
Generate demand from accounts that are
most likely to turn into customers, creating
more qualified pipeline for Sales.
Pipeline Velocity
Shorten the time spent in each stage of the
sales process and turn accounts into customers
faster.
Account Expansion
Increase revenue, decrease churn, and maintain
lasting relationships with your clients.

17. ABM Challenges. 17
“The prospect-to-customer journey is not a
linear series of events, so it’s difficult to predict
and measure every engagement. Talk to any
B2B marketer about attribution and they’ll either
roll their eyes or rant about how it’s important
but hard to get right—long lead cycles, multiple
contacts from a single organization, etc.”
Success Attribution Barriers
Many
Touches
Many
Channels
Many
People
System
Limitations
Attribution
Models

18. 1. Ideal Customer Profile. 18
An ideal customer profile is a description of the company — not the individual buyer or end user,
that’s a perfect fit for your services. Your ICP should focus on relevant characteristics of your
target accounts. The questions that guide the process include:
• Where have we sold most effectively in the past?
• Which kinds of accounts have proven to be most profitable over time?
• What characteristics are most predictive of sales success?
• What traits should rule out an account?
• What accounts deliver the most value(which can include revenue as well as strategic
value)?
Industries/Verticals
Firmographics Annual Turnover
Technographics Corporate Culture
How to establish:
Potential Lifetime Value

19. 2. Accounts Evaluation & Selection. 19
Fundamentally, you want to look at two key factors when picking accounts: Fit and Interest.
Combining these two dimensions brings together gut feel, historical performance and sometimes
predictive data science.
Accounts Evaluation:
Criterion Core question Key Dimensions Data Source Score
Fit
Are we interested in them? How closely do they match
the Ideal Customer Profile?
Firmographics, Technographics Desk research, CRM, Executive input
Engagement
How engaged is our company with this account right
now?
Past sales into the account, rep activity levels, account engagement by
persona, data coverage, existing interactions
Marketing Analytics, CRM, Executive Input
Accounts Selection:
The simplest way to select accounts for ABM is to let the sales reps draw up their own lists and
combine them into a master list. Marketing can support the process by ranking accounts to
ensure more rigorous process. You can additionally manually build a weighted scoring model or
deploy predictive software for data driven automation.

20. 20
3. Segmenting, Budgeting & Entitlements.
~15 ACCOUNTS
~50 ACCOUNTS
~725 ACCOUNTS
Highly personalized content, experiences,
and offers specific to the accounts and
even individuals within the account.
Strategic personalization, including
adapting content, experiences, and
offers to fit target accounts’ needs
Automated personalization early in the
sales cycle and highly personalized sales
conversations in later stages
Expanding Existing Accounts
Developing
New
Expanding Existing Accounts Developing New
Expanding
Existing
Accounts
Developing New
Content personalization spectrum
TIER 1 TIER 3

21. 4. Tech Stack. 21
Foundational:
• CRM
• Marketing automation
• ABM orchestration software
Value added:
• Lead to account matching
• Social media tracking pixels
• ABM data aggregators
• Predictive analytics
• Insight Intelligence
• Social listening
• Reverse IP tracking
• Website personalization

22. 5. Account Insights & Contact Collection. 22
In Account Based Marketing, you’ll be targeting messages and content to specific members of
the buying team by role, seniority, buyer journey stage (and other dimensions). The entire ABM
strategy depends on learning about target accounts (and key buyers at those accounts) so you
can maximize your relevance and resonance within each. This is why you need to break down
the account into several layers and develop insights into each:
• Market
• Account
• Buying Committee (decision makers, influencers, end-users, etc)
• Demand unit
• Persona
Lead to Account matching:
The Market
Industry dynamics
Key trends
Competitors
Growth drivers and inhibitors
The Company
Financial health
Growth areas vs ‘cash cows’
Renewal risk SWOT
Initiatives and organizational priorities
Triggers (funding, acquisitions, personnel moves, etc.)
Key contact profiles
Relationships to each other
Relationships to your company (relationship map)
Attitudes, preferences, biases
The Buying Centers
Org chart
Key buying centers
Whitespace within buying centers
Relationships and Connections
The most basic ABM metric, Coverage, measures data quality and completeness. Does your
database have the right people or not? Do you have accurate contact information? Do you
have permission to email them? Imagine being able to say Marketing built initial engagement
and opt-in permission with 42% of key names at target accounts, when the company had
only 18% coverage to begin with.

23. 6. Strategic Planning. 23
Buyer’s Journey Customer’s Journey
Suspect Prospect Opportunity Customer Adoption Expand Retain
Reach, Coverage,
Engagement
Suspect to MQA MQA to Opportunity
Opportunity to
customer
Customer to advocate Winning more business Keeping top-of-mind
Demand Generation Pipeline Velocity Account Expansion
Account
Contact
Contact
Contact
Contact
Contact
Contact
Contact
Contact
Contact
TIER 1

24. 6. Strategic Planning. 24
MODERN
WORKPLACE
DEMAND GEN
Teamwork
Security
PIPELINE VELOCITY
ACCOUNT EXPANSION
Company
CEO CMO CFO CTO Dir A Dir B
CONTENT & EXECUTION
CONTENT & EXECUTION
Account
Contact Contact Contact Contact Contact Contact
CONTENT & EXECUTION
CONTENT & EXECUTION
CONTENT & EXECUTION
CONTENT & EXECUTION
SALES PLAY
PROGRAM
CAMPAIGN
CAMPAIGN
PROGRAM
CAMPAIGN
CAMPAIGN
PROGRAM
CAMPAIGN
CAMPAIGN
CONTENT & EXECUTION
CONTENT & EXECUTION
CONTENT & EXECUTION
CONTENT & EXECUTION
CONTENT & EXECUTION
CONTENT & EXECUTION
Teamwork
Security
Teamwork
Security
TIER 2

25. Flagship Tactics. 25
TIER 1
One to One
Direct Mail
Dedicated Events
Physical experiences
Custom thought leadership
Fully personalized content
Executive Engagement
One-on-one meetings, face-to-face meetings
Fully personalized content
Innovation Days
Executive engagement
TIER 2
One to Few
Social Selling
InMails
Phygital experiences
Account-adaptable thought leadership
Personalized email marketing
Executive Engagement
…
TIER 3
One to Many
Digital Advertising (Reverse IP, Email targeting, Profile targeting,
Retargeting, Lookalike Audiences)
Mass-personalized email marketing
Industry relevant content
Web personalization
Mass-personalized videos …
Demand Generation Pipeline Velocity Account Expansion
• Reach & Coverage
• Executive Awareness
• Marketing Engagement
• Timeline of Stage Progression
• Sales Cycle Length
• Engaged Contacts within Accounts
• Win Rates

26. 7. Orchestration. 26
Manual
Manual plays are launched when a marketing or sales
user selects one or more accounts and then chooses an
account to run against them. This can be as simple as
taking a single action or as complex as a multi-step
play spanning channels, targeted personas, and players
from your company.
If this... ...then that
Accounts with engagement from key personas but no sales touch in the last 7 days Alert Sales to follow-up
Accounts that are good fits for personal invites to an upcoming roadshow Launch the event invitation play
Target accounts that had someone come by the booth at a recent tradeshow High-value follow-up
Accounts with open opportunities that have a new key persona in the database Executive reach-out play
Accounts with lost opportunities that are now re-engaging Alert Sales
Account reaches a minimum threshold of engagement Change Account Status to ‘marketing qualified’
Target accounts with no activity in 30 days Awareness campaign
Target accounts that are ‘surging’ Coordinated reach-out (see next page)
Batch
Using complex filters that span people, accounts,
activities, and opportunities first select the exact group
of accounts that you want to target, then launch the
action or play to the entire list.
Triggered / Automated
You can also use complex filters to set up triggers that
launch plays automatically when certain conditions are
met, for example when key personas at the account
exhibit key activities (or inactivity). This is similar to
running a triggered campaign in marketing automation
(except that the latter only focuses on people while
plays can focus on accounts).

27. 8. Measurements. 27
Buyer’s Journey Customer’s Journey
Suspect Prospect Opportunity Customer Adoption Expand Retain
Reach, Coverage,
Engagement
Suspect to MQA MQA to Opportunity
Opportunity to
customer
Customer to advocate Winning more business Keeping top-of-mind
Demand Generation Pipeline Velocity Account Expansion
Action Point: Define qualification criteria
Marketing Qualified Account:
Demand units showing sufficient
engagement to justify sales contact
• Reach & Coverage
• Executive Awareness
• Marketing Engagement
• Timeline of Stage Progression
• Sales Cycle Length
• Engaged Contacts within Accounts
• Win Rates

28. Thank you!
Weronika Narozniak
Chief Strategy Officer & Partner
weronika@clipatize.com
Jakub Lebuda, PhD
CEO & Partner
jakub@clipatize.com