The CMO Guide: Account-Based Marketing – Aligning Sales and Marketing
Summary
B2B businesses are currently experiencing a churn because of challenges related to marketing, innovation and customer retention. Increased competition, longer sales cycles, changes in the B2B buyer profile and solution complexity form some of the major challenges.
Against this backdrop, ABM has gained increasing traction over the past few years as a solution to some of these challenges. ITSMA and ABM Leadership Alliance, in their report, define ABM as “a strategic approach to designing and executing highly targeted, personalized marketing programs and initiatives to drive business growth and impact with specific, named accounts.”
Look at it this way: Traditional marketing is akin to spreading a net to catch as many fish as possible, while ABM is akin to choosing the fish you want to target by using a spear. In this guide, we focus our attention on one of the key factors that determine the success of an ABM program – the alignment between sales and marketing.