New ABM Essentials Helps B2B Marketers Further Customer Experience Management (CXM)

Account-based marketing (ABM) works. It’s a proven revenue strategy for B2B marketers: 91% of practitioners report that ABM accounts have higher ROI than their control group. So, if it isn’t yet, ABM should be one of your cornerstone B2B marketing strategies to improve win rates and increase deal size.

Yet, ABM can be difficult to master and scale for several reasons. First, it requires deeper collaboration between marketing and sales teams to plan and execute, compared to other strategies. Second, more and better account data is needed, beyond what’s typically found in the CRM system. The right ABM strategy will be powered by more robust account selection, targeting, personalization, and measurement. Lastly, to really get ABM going, often a new set of point solutions are required and must be integrated to support ABM activities.

These challenges prevent many teams from reaching the full potential of ABM. The result is channel-based or point-in-time campaigns aimed at very specific parts of the funnel, that leave gaps in the customer experience. Connecting each customer interaction has long been the domain of Customer Experience Management (CXM). But now, customers can bring together the power of ABM and CXM to put people and experiences at the center of their B2B marketing strategies to create these new account-based experiences (ABX). With ABX, you have an entirely new way of thinking about how to identify, reach and deliver engaging experiences to account-based buying teams. When experience is at the center of your ABM strategy, it forces sales and marketing teams to come together, break down notions of buyer stage ownership and focus on a holistic and longer-term customer relationship.

Introducing ABM essentials in Marketo Engage

To help B2B marketers address these challenges, we are launching ABM Essentials for Marketo Engage, which will help marketers deliver ABX across every touchpoint in the journey. ABM Essentials uniquely enables sales and marketing teams of all sizes and maturity levels to accelerate growth by simplifying the processes, technology, data and services needed for ABX. ABM Essentials is available today, so your marketing and sales teams can collaborate on the right strategic accounts, coordinate account-based experiences across all channels and measure the impact of the combined efforts on pipeline and revenue.

“ABM has evolved from being a super cool buzzword that marketers were intrigued about into a more thoughtful approach to marketing,” said Kate Federhar, senior manager of Marketing Operations at CenturyLink. “ABM Essentials is a huge milestone when it comes to capitalizing on the value of ABM. We’re looking forward to further accelerating our strategy and delivering the personalized and relevant experiences our customers expect – all while increasing the bottom line.”

ABM Essentials is the industry’s most complete ABM solution, helping customers generate more qualified account opportunities and maximize revenue faster. By bringing the best practices of CXM and ABM together in a single solution, marketing and sales teams can deliver standout ABX. Additionally, ABM Essentials combines Marketo Engage’s industry-leading marketing automation, lead management, attribution and natively built ABM capabilities, giving marketers the unique advantage of supporting ABM, inbound, broad-based, or hybrid marketing strategies all from the same solution.

ABM Essentials offers five key capabilities that help marketers and sales teams to unlock the full potential of ABM and maximize revenue potential:

• Account insights & profiling: Marketing and sales can partner on a shared strategy and identify the right target accounts using big data and the power of artificial intelligence. Using Account Profiling, marketing and sales teams can develop target accou­nts to engage within a matter of seconds.
• Contact discovery: Attract new contacts across paid media and identify key personas within target accounts. For example, a tech company can reach new target customers on their favorite websites with personalized ads based on Marketo Engage data.
• Cross-channel engagement: Automate account-based experiences with personalized campaigns and intelligent nurturing. A regional business with multiple locations can, for instance, use AI to deliver a customer in Florida a discount code specific to their local store.
• Sales & marketing partnership: Pursue accounts together with sales, with full visibility into sales & marketing activity. For example, sales can be notified directly in the CRM system when a potential customer has downloaded a certain asset, attended a webinar, or reaches a specific score based on their activities.
• Measurement & attribution: Measure account engagement and the combined impact of sales and marketing activity. For instance, marketers will be able to see how much pipeline or revenue a web page or ebook drove across their target accounts, through AI-powered attribution.

All of these account-based planning, engagement, and measurement capabilities are available in a single, easy-to-use solution as part of Marketo Engage.

Pre-built integrations with partners

To simplify the challenge of researching thousands of marketing tools and managing a growing technology stack, at launch, we’ve hand-selected 32 strategic partners with pre-built integrations. These partners complement each of the five ABM Essentials capabilities and include newer part­­­­­ners, like Drift, Bombora, Demandbase, and LiveRamp as well as long-time partners, such as LinkedIn and Vidyard.

These integrations empower marketers to kick-start their ABM strategy, with Marketo Engage as the orchestration hub, and deliver the account-based experiences that build relationships and fuel growth.

Learn more about how ABM Essentials can generate more qualified account opportunities and maximize revenue faster for your organization here.