Introduction

Account-based marketing (ABM) continues to be a strategy many marketers are utilising with incredible results.

In fact, Terminus’ 2020 State of ABM Report shows that 94.2% of respondents have an ABM programme running. A jump of more than 30% on the previous year.

Amit Bivas joins Matt Dodgson on the Market Mentors podcast to discuss how they’ve gone ‘all-in’ on ABM. 

Who is our Podcast Guest?

Name: Amit Bivas

What do they do? Amit is VP of Marketing at Optimove 

Where can you find Amit? LinkedIn | Twitter

Prefer video? Watch a full video of the podcast here…

Episode Takeaways

Some of the best advice from the podcast that you can easily digest and learn from.

What is account-based marketing?

For those who aren’t aware of what account-based marketing is, it’s important to cover this off.

And Amit explains what it means to him and Optimove.

He goes on to explain that ABM involves using all of your sales and marketing resources to focus on the same target, whether that be one to one, or one to many.

And having a clearly defined ‘ideal customer profile’, or ideally, a list of accounts to focus on, is a critical first step.

How Optimove adapted their marketing team to focus on the new account-based marketing approach

Optmimove’s marketing team is structured around disciplines. They have people, and teams, that cover areas such as product marketing, growth marketing, content, marketing operations, etc. 

Once they moved to an account-based marketing approach, rather than restructure the entire team, Amit changed their focus.

He explains, ‘So content is traditionally SEO-focused and kind of creating value for your market. So the definition of the market changes, the definition of the funnel changes, but you still need to generate content.

So kind of understanding what are the main challenges of our total addressable market, one-to-few, one-to-many, and even sometimes one-to-one, we could create a specific blog post that is dedicated to grab the attention of an account, because we weren’t able to grab their attention, I don’t know, using other tactics. So we can write a blog post that’s kind of like reviewing Acme’s CRM strategy, right?

And then on social media, we tag them or write an article. So also one of our initiatives, which I also speak about a lot, is that one of our content marketing drivers is a standalone publication that we started. And so think about the editor-in-chief, which is the content director on my team, reaching out to the CMO of this Acme company and offering an interview. So, it’s the same marketing discipline. Just again, all of your artillery is aimed towards the same target.’

Hiring? We help B2B tech companies hire great ABM talent.

What results are Optimove seeing from their shift to an ‘all in’ account-based marketing approach?

Ignoring your total addressable market (TAM) in favour of focussing your company’s sales and marketing efforts entirely on a set of accounts may seem like too big a shift for most to make.

But what about the results? Because if the result of this refocus is better conversion rates of leads and ultimately more sales, then it’s an extremely powerful strategic play to make. 

However, there are some results that you need to be prepared for. Amit explains:- 

‘So the first thing you’re going to see, and you’re going to start panicking, is less pipeline. Less pipeline for sales.’

Which makes sense, because you’re reducing the amount of businesses you’re targeting. So depending on how you define an MQL or SQL, the pipeline of leads is bound to fall.

But what about the positives? Amit goes on to explain:

‘But then the other thing you’re going to see is a crazy uptick in win rates… because the idea is that it’s a game of quality and not quantity…you’re working very deep on a subset of the market, but your ability to win in that subset grows. So you’re going to see your average selling point, your ASP, going up, right? Because you’re selling to the right accounts and you’re focusing on the accounts that are the best fit and are willing to pay, since they are such a good fit, and since you can create such good value to them.’