2020 STATE OF

ABM SURVEY

ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 03

The State of ABM Readiness 05

Challenges to Executing ABM at Scale 08

Personalization: The Key to ABM Effectiveness at Scale 10

Automation, Not Sales Teams, for Better Personalization at Scale 14

Putting It Together: What a Better Way Looks Like 17

Conclusion 25

2020 STATE OF

SURVEY ABM

Every modern B2B marketer is familiar with account-based marketing (ABM), and many have been tasked with deploying an ABM program for their organizations.

Earlier this year, Folloze, Terminus, and Campaign Stars enlisted Canam Research, an independent third-party research firm, to conduct the 2020 State of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Survey. This survey gathered information from over 270 of the world’s top businesses, organizations, and marketing leaders about how they manage and value their account-based marketing strategies, the most significant roadblocks and challenges to creating personalized customer experiences at scale, and current industry perceptions around how to successfully execute a full ABM strategy in this difficult market.

This survey gathered information from over 270 of the world’s top businesses, organizations, and marketing leaders about how they manage and value their account-based marketing strategies.

03 | 2020 State of Account-Based Marketing Survey

INTRODUCTION

The roles of those who responded encompasses the entire spectrum of marketing leaders and decision-makers, including presidents, CMOs, marketing directors, analysts and specialists, and department managers.

The results of the survey, from which this eBook has been created, shed light on the current trends, challenges, and greatest opportunities in ABM and experience personalization for the marketing industry. They also reveal some surprising areas in which misunderstandings about how best to leverage ABM technology platforms are preventing them from achieving their goals.

Your business puts enormous time, money, and effort into marketing, demand generation, and business expansion.

This document is intended to help ensure you know how to get the maximum results from them, and are in a position to manage your return on them long after your deals have closed.

The results of the survey, from which this eBook has been created, shed light on the current trends, challenges, and greatest opportunities in ABM and experience personalization for the marketing industry.

04 | 2020 State of Account-Based Marketing Survey

In these uncertain times and with the market already facing a major downturn, growth is far from guaranteed any more.

More and more businesses are buckling down to protect their bottom lines and tightening the purse strings on their B2B buying habits. Building demand will require innovation and future-thinking adaptation. Even your ideal client profile (ICP) may have changed. Everything has changed.

And those organizations with ABM programs already up and running are uniquely positioned to better weather this change.

Account-Based Marketing is a strategic approach that coordinates personalized marketing experiences and sales efforts to open doors and deepen engagement at specific accounts. Unlike traditional inbound marketing and demand generation, which casts as broad a net as possible in an effort to find a large quantity of leads, ABM selects only the best fit, your ideal accounts, so you can target them with laser focus.

Account-Based Marketing is a strategic approach that coordinates personalized marketing experiences and sales efforts to open doors and deepen engagement at specific accounts.

05 | 2020 State of Account-Based Marketing Survey

THE STATE OF ABM READINESS

If traditional demand generation is like fishing with a net, ABM is like spearfishing with GPS assistance. But more than just a marketing campaign, ABM is a holistic business strategy that aligns and integrates a dedicated marketing function that mirrors and supports the approach sales teams have used for years.

And in this uncertain time as the market takes a significant downturn, many leaders are looking to cut costs. But with ABM, you can be hyper-focused on the customers most likely to buy, and dramatically boost your ROI by making sure your sales and marketing teams are working together on only those accounts.

That’s probably why 87% of marketers report that ABM delivers a greater ROI than traditional marketing1, and why companies executing a mature ABM strategy drive 200% more marketing-attributable revenue than those that aren’t2.

Which is exactly what makes the results of the 2020 State of ABM Survey so surprising.

06 | 2020 State of Account-Based Marketing Survey

of marketers report that ABM delivers a greater ROI than traditional marketing.

87%

According to the survey, only one-quarter (25%) of businesses have a mature ABM program up and running today. That means that three out of four companies are currently failing to capture this unique opportunity to stand apart in the market. But that’s not for lack of trying. A large portion of those companies reported either wanting to enact an ABM program but not having been able to begin (14.7%) or are trying to manually execute an ABM program piecemeal using the existing office technology they have available, like Excel and Outlook (16.8%).

But there is one department within the majority of businesses that is hungriest for their companies to get onboard with ABM. And, unsurprisingly, that department is Sales. According to the survey, well over half (56.2%) of sales leaders want their organization to adopt a mature ABM strategy, because it allows them to better target and engage with their accounts in a highly personalized way.

1 https://www.itsma.com/abm-beyond-revenue-two-rs/ 2 https://flipmyfunnel.com/flipping-funnels-weekly-account-based-marketing-isnt-the-death-of-anything/

And as sales teams know, that’s exactly what closes deals.

So there is a disconnect in the industry. Companies and sales teams want ABM, yet less than a quarter have it. Why this gap?

As we’ll see in the rest of this book, there are two answers: scale and personalization.

07 | 2020 State of Account-Based Marketing Survey

Only one-quarter (25%) of businesses have a mature ABM program up and running today.

25%

NEXT CHAPTER

Challenges to Executing ABM at Scale

For large enterprises and mid-market businesses in complex industries, scale is both the key to strategic success as well as the greatest challenge.

And as the market takes a significant downturn in response to COVID-19, many leaders are looking to cut costs and improve ROI. With ABM, your demand generation gets the boost in efficiency necessary to make success at scale a real possibility.

For example, many enterprise and mid-market AEs and BDRs are swamped beneath a massive total account volume. This huge crush of accounts - many of which were sourced from in-house mailing lists and/or do not fit the ICP - makes it nearly impossible for sales reps to create personalized outreach for each one. As a result, these sales teams waste tremendous amounts of time, energy, and resources chasing dead leads and failing to capitalize on the most promising accounts.

08 | 2020 State of Account-Based Marketing Survey

CHALLENGES TO EXECUTING ABM AT SCALE

Many leaders are looking to cut costs and improve ROI. With ABM, your demand generation gets the boost in efficiency necessary to make success at scale a real possibility.

Similarly, with large accounts or with prospects in complex industries, the sheer organizational complexity of each account makes creating personalized experiences for each key stakeholder within the organization - each influencer whose buy-in they must secure - extremely unrealistic. Add to that the fact that many businesses have very long buying cycles, and suddenly the need for a more efficient, cost-effective, and accelerated engagement strategy becomes crystal clear.

That is the power and promise of ABM. It solves these problems by enabling companies to focus their sales and marketing outreach in a way that makes real scale possible.

And yet common misconceptions are keeping industry leaders from taking steps to shift their engagement strategy from traditional outreach to ABM, despite its promise.

According to the 2020 State of ABM Survey, barely one- quarter of businesses (26.6%) are confident in their organization’s ability to scale an ABM strategy to more

09 | 2020 State of Account-Based Marketing Survey

than 1,000 accounts. What’s more, nearly another full quarter of businesses (21.8%) are “Not Confident at All” in their ability to rapidly scale up their ABM program.

So, what is the reason for this lack of confidence even among large, mature companies? And how can they overcome it at scale to reap the rewards and benefits of ABM?

The answer, as we will see in the next chapter, is personalization.

of businesses are confident in their organization’s ability to scale an ABM strategy to more than 1,000 accounts.

Only

26.6%

NEXT CHAPTER

Personalization: The Key to ABM Effectiveness at Scale

At the heart of ABM theory is the idea of creating personalized experiences.

Even within a single account, the needs, pain points, and goals of a Marketing Director will be significantly different from those of the CFO, and they will be different from those of the CIO, and so forth for each and every stakeholder, influencer, and decision-maker at each and every account.

That’s exactly why creating personalized experiences that demonstrate that your company understands their needs and goals, and can speak directly to what they care about in order to best serve them, is such a powerful and critical component of an ABM strategy.

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PERSONALIZATION: THE KEY TO ABM EFFECTIVENESS AT SCALE

Hyper- personalization, or full funnel personalization, is the act of incorporating unique visitor, account, predictive, and intent data to deliver extremely customized, interactive, and curated experiences throughout their entire journey that customers value – and now expect.

“ “

- Folloze

Personalization isn’t just good for sales and marketing teams. Your customers want personalized experiences, too. And they’re willing to give their business to companies that can provide them.

The statistics don’t lie; personalization is the key to creating winning customer experiences:

of prospects will only engage with outreach that has been personalized to them.3

of prospects are more likely to buy from companies that personalize their engagement and will give them preference over the competition.4

of prospects are “highly annoyed” with the way businesses continue to rely on the strategy of repeatedly blasting them with generic messages.5

of prospects think more positively of a company if it gives them experiences that are more valuable, interesting, or relevant to their interests.6

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3 https://loyalty360.org/loyalty-today/article/customers-frustrated-with-brands-that-fail-to-pers#sthash.3PDFp438.dpuf 4 https://www.business2community.com/marketing/10-surprising-stats-personalization-01791432#M7UP7gMEHj4QOfXm.97 5 https://www.evergage.com/blog/consumers-want-personalization-stats-roundup/ 6 https://www.evergage.com/blog/consumers-want-personalization-stats-roundup/

78% 75% 63% 63%

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As Campaign Stars says in an article titled “How to Personalize the Buyer’s Journey”:

And Folloze puts an even finer point on the problem in an article titled “The Personalized Marketing Blueprint”:

Indeed, creating personalized ABM experiences is the key to many long-term strategic businesses goals, including customer retention and expansion. But Terminus acknowledges a central difficulty in an article titled “End to End Digital Storytelling”:

Don’t forget to personalize the customer experience! It’s a critical step of the buyer’s journey: a great customer experience creates repeat customers, referrals, and even future opportunities to sell into other departments of the company.

As marketers set their sights on the entire customer life cycle, personalization and contextual experiences have now emerged as the new table stakes for any B2B marketing program.

As consumers, we engage with experiences and content that interest us. But with B2B buyers today...it can be challenging to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.

Unfortunately, most marketers struggle to extend their skill sets beyond the top-of-the- funnel. In the same way, many of the tools and technologies that served us well for a demand generation model of yesteryear have diminished utility across the entire customer life cycle.

http://campaignstars.com/blog/what-does-personalization-mean/ http://campaignstars.com/blog/what-does-personalization-mean/ https://www.folloze.com/post/b2b-marketing-has-changed-are-you-ready https://terminus.com/blog/product-overview-end-to-end-digital-storytelling/ https://terminus.com/blog/product-overview-end-to-end-digital-storytelling/ http://campaignstars.com/blog/what-does-personalization-mean/ https://www.folloze.com/post/b2b-marketing-has-changed-are-you-ready https://terminus.com/blog/product-overview-end-to-end-digital-storytelling/

Creating personalized experiences at scale is the key to unlocking the power of ABM. Yet most business leaders admit it is still their single biggest challenge. According to the 2020 State of ABM Survey, the majority of companies (51%) say that creating personalized experiences at the vertical and account levels is the biggest challenge/ limitation they face in executing an ABM strategy at scale.

Why?

Because most businesses lack the purpose-built tools to make this personalization possible at scale, and the employees being tasked with executing that personalization are neither capable, equipped, nor effective enough to do so.

And the solution to both of these personalization issues at scale? Automation.

- Folloze

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of companies say that creating personalized experiences at the vertical and account levels is the biggest challenge/limitation they face in executing an ABM strategy at scale.

51%

NEXT CHAPTER

Automation, Not Sales Teams, for Better Personalization at Scale

When it comes to unlocking true experience personalization at scale, the staggering majority of business leaders are looking in the wrong place.

For years and years, sales teams were where the rubber of Messaging met the road of Personalization. Sure, your CMO may not know exactly what objections the CFO of Account X needs to overcome, but your AEs and BDRs should, right? Just have the AE “tweak” the messaging to create a more “personalized experience,” right?

Wrong.

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AUTOMATION, NOT SALES TEAMS, FOR BETTER PERSONALIZATION AT SCALE

For years and years, sales teams were where the rubber of Messaging met the road of Personalization.

You would never ask your design team to manage your Salesforce data. You would never ask your COO to decide your marketing themes. So why are you asking your sales teams to create custom, personalized content experiences for customers?

And why are you surprised when the results don’t perform?

This is exactly the organizational disconnect that is limiting businesses’ ABM success at scale.

As the 2020 State of ABM Survey discovered, the majority of companies (51%) say that creating personalized experiences at the vertical and account levels is the biggest challenge/ limitation they face in executing an ABM strategy at scale.

Yet when you ask them what dedicated teams they have working to make it a reality, most simply shrug and gesture to their sales reps. There is an implicit assumption that these reps have the know-how, expertise, and skill to execute that personalization themselves. Even as those same leaders admit that they don’t think their sales teams can handle it.

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10% of leaders believe that the majority of their sales teams can effectively personalize sales content experiences.

Only

In fact, according to the survey, barely one in ten (10%) leaders believe that the majority of their sales teams can effectively personalize sales content experiences. What’s more, a full 90% of leaders report that their sales teams either cannot perform this personalization effectively or have not tested them for it.

And when those sales teams do perform some token personalization, less than one- quarter (23.8%) of businesses are confident in their sales reps’ ability to even accurately and consistently share their brand’s approved messaging.

16 | 2020 State of Account-Based Marketing Survey

That means that while most businesses are trusting their sales reps to execute the mission-critical process of personalizing customer experiences at scale, nine out of ten recognize that they’re doing it wrong.

But when asked what strategies they’re taking or tools they’re using to automate this crucial process, the response is deafening silence. Only 7.2% of businesses report having their experience-personalization process automated. Nearly a quarter (21.1%) are not even trying to automate it at all.

This is all to say that the majority of business leaders are trying to shoehorn old-fashioned methodologies into an ABM strategy, when what they need are modern ABM-focused tools designed to make this automated personalization at scale a reality.

So, we’ve seen what trying to use ABM to personalize customer experiences the wrong way looks like. Let’s see how it looks when you put it all together and do it the right way.

7% of businesses report having their experience-personalization process automated.

Barely

NEXT CHAPTER

Putting It Together: What a Better

Way Looks Like

When you combine powerful, modern ABM tools for automating experience personalization with the other Pillars of ABM, you can create buyer experiences that are truly engaging.

That’s because a mature ABM strategy involves both your marketing and sales departments operating in sync to achieve a common goal: closing more ideal accounts and building more revenue.

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PUTTING IT TOGETHER: WHAT A BETTER WAY LOOKS LIKE

ACCOUNT SELECTION

A mature ABM strategy involves both your marketing and sales departments operating in sync to achieve a common goal: closing more ideal accounts and building more revenue.

The first of those pillars is Account Selection. As Campaign Stars puts it in an article titled “Data and the Future-Proof Marketing Machine”:

Data is the first key component of a future-proof marketing machine. Market intelligence and contact data – including emails, direct dial phone numbers, job titles, org charts and technologies owned – is critical to defining and executing an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy.

http://campaignstars.com/blog/data-and-the-future-proof-marketing-machine/ http://campaignstars.com/blog/data-and-the-future-proof-marketing-machine/

Curate. Your platform should constantly gather data on the online activities of millions of customers at thousands of companies.

Analyze. Then, it should determine organizations that are consuming an uncharacteristic amount of content in a target market or related topic of interest, indicating possible purchase intent.

Identify. At the same time, your data platform should filter those results by geography, industry, company size, ownership type, and more to further refine your tailored list of target prospects.

Reach. Finally, it should deliver accurate, reliable organization charts and contact information for each of the key decision- makers within that account.

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As we discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, ABM is not about casting a wide net. It is about focusing your efforts to precisely target only your ideal accounts that are most likely to convert. And, once you have identified those accounts, a mature ABM program then engages each unique and specific stakeholder and influencer within those accounts with highly personalized messaging and experiences to win their buy-in.

This two-pronged approach is called Account Selection. It is the absolutely indispensable first step in an ABM strategy, and it is only made possible by a modern data and market intelligence platform that empowers you to do each of the following:

Think of data this way: if you don’t have the right person to talk to and a way to talk to them, it doesn’t matter what you have to say.

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The next key Pillar of ABM is Tracking and Analytics. As Terminus explains in an article titled “Analyze Like a Pro”:

[The right ABM tool] can also help you make decisions on where to focus your energy, and figure out if you are going to hit, miss, or exceed the goals that matter the most to your company. This makes it clearer than ever to understand what is happening across your organization.

TRACKING AND ANALYTICS

And while 74% of business leaders claim they are already doing Account Selection according to the 2020 State of ABM Survey, nearly as many (73.6%) admit that establishing accurate contact data and developing messaging for those accounts remain huge roadblocks to their success.

The reason for this disparity? Most are attempting to perform Account Selection with outmoded traditional methods and without modern ABM data tools that make it simple.

Marketers need to show that all the engagement they’re driving actually results in more pipeline and higher close rates. However, there simply isn’t a great way to gather that information. Unless you ask that poor person in Marketing Ops to spend hours stringing together reports to link marketing programs to their outcomes.

https://terminus.com/blog/product-overview-analyze-like-a-pro/ https://terminus.com/blog/product-overview-analyze-like-a-pro/

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Modern ABM platforms that feature this native, granular tracking make it possible to measure and establish real Customer Lifetime Value - and, in so doing, identify your best customers. Armed with this information, you can turn around and confidently build a full-funnel approach to the market to attract more customers like them, using the channels and personas that you know drive responses and meetings.

And especially in today’s environment, with COVID-19 causing global market downturns, it’s more important than ever to know exactly where you stand with each customer and where to focus your efforts and attention to maximize your return.

Yet despite all this, business leaders are still ignoring the benefits of modern tracking and analytics and are choosing to fly blind. According to the 2020 State of ABM Survey, less than half of all businesses are currently leveraging Analytics (49%) and Account Insights (44%) to fine-tune their outreach. That’s probably because without a modern ABM solution to make it possible, well over one-third (38.3%) of leaders say tracking and analyzing campaign performance is their biggest challenge to executing ABM at scale.

38% of leaders say tracking and analyzing campaign performance is their biggest challenge to executing ABM at scale.

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WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN IT COMES TOGETHER: AN EXAMPLE ABM CAMPAIGN

RingCentral, a Belmont, California-based cloud communications and collaboration company, is the world’s #1 cloud-based communications provider, delivering all-in-one cloud phone systems with team messaging and video conferencing as well as complete contact center solutions for every business.

They also recently won Best ABM Program of the Year at the 2020 B2BMX Awards in Scottsdale, Arizona. And they did it by incorporating everything we’ve discussed so far in this eBook: Account Selection, Tracking and Analysis, automated experience personalization at scale, and leveraging modern ABM technology to make it possible.

First, RingCentral identified their existing accounts most primed for upselling and expansion opportunities using Account Selection, powered by partners like Campaign Stars and ZoomInfo. Using Buyer Intent Data, org charts, and technology stack intelligence, they then identified the net-new logos that were a best-fit for their ABM engagement. Armed with certainty about their account selection and their ability to maximize their ROI, RingCentral began creating personalized experiences for key decision-makers.

Personalized Content

Targeted Outreach

Personalized Experiences

https://www.ringcentral.com https://www.campaignstars.com/resource-center/#/prism/96785/item/336053 https://www.zoominfo.com

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With hundreds of personalized experiences to create at the account level, buyer persona level, and industry vertical level, RingCentral leveraged technology like the Folloze platform to programmatically create highly-personalized curated content experiences at scale. With a tool like Folloze, RingCentral could quickly and easily apply rules that controlled everything from the imagery and design of the experience, to the industry and account-specific copy displayed, to the curated content made available for prospects to explore.

And by leveraging an omnichannel advertising and analytics platform like Terminus, RingCentral was quickly able to programmatically create web ads with highly-personalized design and copy to serve to each account, buyer persona, and industry vertical based on engagement data, CRM status, and custom criteria like where they are in their buying process.

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With the powerful and granular analytics of ABM platforms like Folloze and Terminus, account-based reporting showed RingCentral a full picture of how their online and offline marketing programs — including advertising metrics like impressions, engagements and spend — were influencing pipeline at the account and opportunity level, and what content, copy, and outreach were actually driving results.

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And the results were nothing short of award-winning. In just 120 days, RingCentral’s ABM campaign went from zero to:

RingCentral was so successful in overcoming the challenges of scale and personalization, thanks to their modern ABM technology stack, that they are now

working on replicating the campaign in Europe and Asia.

40%

97%

Booked meetings with 40% of targeted existing customers.

Got 97% of targeted new accounts actively engaging.

Personalization Delivered ultra-personalized high-quality outreach that created engaging customer experiences.

In these uncertain times, the market is facing a major downturn and growth is far from guaranteed. This is the new normal. This is the new reality for B2B businesses.

And as more and more businesses are buckling down to protect their bottom lines and tightening the purse strings on their B2B buying habits, building demand will require innovation and future- thinking adaptation.

Organizations with modern ABM programs already up and running are uniquely positioned to weather this change and emerge stable and successful.

If you’re ready to see what your company’s ABM strategy could look like with help from trusted, experienced partners and the industry- leading technology platforms to execute it at scale, talk to Campaign Stars, Terminus, and Folloze today.

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CONCLUSION

Organizations with modern ABM programs already up and running are uniquely positioned to weather this change and emerge stable and successful.

Campaign Stars helps B2B brands build a future-proof customer acquisition machine designed to help overstretched sales and marketing teams close more deals. We help sales and marketing professionals from the world’s most successful companies - from Fortune 500 brands to rapidly growing mid-markets - find, engage, and sell to more prospects to accelerate revenue growth.

Terminus believes that ABM doesn’t have to be complicated.

Deliver on more of your pipeline and revenue goals. The Terminus Account-Based Platform is your end-to-end command center for targeting the right accounts with dynamic data, engaging them with unified multi-channel campaigns, activating sales by separating the signal from the noise, and reporting on the revenue outcomes that matter.

Folloze is the world’s first and only personalized B2B Marketing Platform, delivering real hyper-personalization at scale so companies can quickly and easily create a richly personalized journey for every customer by combining external data, internal data, and precise sales and marketing orchestration that inspires your target accounts to engage.

Talk to Terminus Today

Talk to Campaign Stars Today

Talk to Folloze Today

https://terminus.com/ https://www.campaignstars.com/ https://www.folloze.com/