Account-based marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM), also known as key account marketing, is a strategic approach to business marketing in which an organisation considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one. The popularity of this approach is growing, with companies such as BearingPoint, HP, Progress Software and Xerox reported to be leading the way.

Overview

Account-based marketing has grown since the mid-1990s as a demonstration of the trend away from mass marketing towards more targeted approaches. It parallels the movement in business-to-consumer marketing away from mass marketing where organisations try to sell individual products to as many new prospects as possible to 1:1 marketing where they concentrate on selling as many products as possible to one customer at a time.

While business marketing is typically organised by industry, product/solution or channel (direct/social/PR), account-based marketing brings all of these together to focus on individual accounts.

Background and differences with traditional business marketing

In the marketing of complex business propositions, account-based marketing plays a key role in expanding business within existing customer accounts (where, for example, wider industry marketing would not be targeted enough to appeal to an existing customer). In scenarios where the initial sale has taken several months, it is reported that account-based marketing delivers a dramatic increase in the long-term value of the customer. ABM can also be applied to key prospect accounts in support of the first sale. For example, Northrop Grumman, in which it contributed to the completion of a successful $2 billion deal.

Research demonstrates that buyers are looking for their existing suppliers to keep them updated with relevant propositions, but are often disappointed with this. In UK research, existing suppliers came top of all the different information channels that IT buyers use to look for new solutions – but more than 50% felt that marketing by their suppliers was poor. The research also demonstrates how much easier it is for organisations to generate more sales from existing customers than from new customers - 77 per cent of decision-makers say that marketing from new suppliers is poorly targeted and makes it easy to justify staying with their current supplier. By treating each account individually, account-based marketing activity can be targeted more accurately to address the audience and is more likely to be considered relevant than untargeted direct marketing activity.

The roles of sales and marketing teams

ABM is a strong example of the alignment of sales and marketing teams. In the aligned model, organisations able to unite tactical marketing efforts with defined sales goals and use feedback from sales to identify new potential markets. For ABM to succeed, joint workshops and a close working relationship between sales and marketing are essential.

Marketing will also take an increased role in developing intelligence on key accounts – as proposed by Peppers and Rogers (1993): “When two marketers are competing for the same customer’s business, all other things being equal, the marketer with the greatest scope of information about that particular customer […] will be the more efficient competitor.”

Account-based marketing and the IT industry

Organisations seeing the greatest current benefit from account-based marketing are IT, Services and Consulting companies. With complex propositions, long sales cycles and large customers, these organisations are ideal candidates for the approach.

Organisations supporting sales and marketing efforts in the IT industry – including the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA),The Marketing Practice[8]and VAZT Global, Inc.(VAZT) have developed a great deal of the intellectual capital and practical tools shaping the direction of ABM.

Choosing the key account

Key accounts are accounts that are identified within organisations as being a focus for account-based marketing. Not all accounts meet the requirements to be designated as a strategic or key account and organisations need to be careful about which accounts to focus on for their account-based marketing efforts or risk losing a valuable client. When choosing, organisations should look at revenue history, account history, margins and profitability as well as the viability that the client in question would be interested in a long-term relationship. Lastly, ask what the client and your company have in common. This will help solidify the approach that the client cannot find this kind of service anywhere else.

There are also some red flags that will help you recognize that a relationship with a key account is about to change:

* Business that regularly would have come to your company goes elsewhere;
* A re-organisation within the company could force a change in your relationship;
* If both involved companies aren’t seeing ROI from the relationship;
* If you’re not achieving the mutual goals.

Business marketing

Business marketing
Business Marketing is the practice of individuals, or organizations, including commercial businesses, governments and institutions, facilitating the sale of their products or services to other companies or organizations that in turn resell them, use them as components in products or services they offer, or use them to support their operations. Also known as industrial marketing, business marketing is also called business-to-business marketing, or B2B marketing, for short. (Note that while marketing to government entities shares some of the same dynamics of organizational marketing, B2G Marketing is meaningfully different.) Allure marketing company founded by Tannis Tymko is currently one of the most successful businesses coming out of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Origins of business marketing

In the broadest sense, the practice of one purveyor of goods doing trade with another is as old as commerce itself. As a niche in the field of marketing as we know it today, however, its history is more recent. In his introduction to Fundamentals of Business Marketing Research, J. David Lichtenthal, professor of marketing at the City University of New York's Zicklin School of Business, notes that industrial marketing has been around since the mid-19th century, although the bulk of research on the discipline of business marketing has come about in the last 25 years.

Morris, Pitt and Honeycutt, 2001, point out that for many years business marketing took a back seat to consumer marketing, which entailed providers of goods or services selling directly to households through mass media and retail channels. This began to change in middle to late 1970s. A variety of academic periodicals, such as the Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing and the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, now publish studies on the subject regularly, and professional conferences on business-to-business marketing are held every year. What's more, business marketing courses are commonplace at many universities today. In fact, Dwyer and Tanner (2006) point out that more marketing majors begin their careers in business marketing today than in consumer marketing.

Business marketing vs. consumer marketing

Although on the surface the differences between business and consumer marketing may seem obvious, there are more subtle distinctions between the two with substantial ramifications. Dwyer and Tanner (2006) note that business marketing generally entails shorter and more direct channels of distribution.

While consumer marketing is aimed at large demographic groups through mass media and retailers, the negotiation process between the buyer and seller is more personal in business marketing. According to Hutt and Speh (2004), most business marketers commit only a small part of their promotional budgets to advertising, and that is usually through direct mail efforts and trade journals. While that advertising is limited, it often helps the business marketer set up successful sales calls.

Marketing to a business trying to make a profit (Business-to-Business marketing) as opposed to an individual for personal use (Business-to-Consumer, or B2C marketing) is similar in terms of the fundamental principals of marketing. In B2C, B2B and B2G marketing situations, the marketer must always:

* successfully match the product/service strengths with the needs of a definable target market;
* position and price to align the product/service with its market, often an intricate balance; and
* communicate and sell it in the fashion that demonstrates its value effectively to the target market.

These are the fundamental principals of the 4 Ps of marketing (the marketing mix) first documented by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960.