We’ve hit peak Account Based Marketing.
I’ve received 5 emails this week from vendors extolling the virtues of ABM. I’ve been invited to one dinner, two lunches, received a $50 Amazon gift card, and was told by Marketo that “According to 97% of marketers, account-based marketing (ABM) achieved a higher ROI than other marketing initiatives.”
Everyone is “flipping their funnel” using Account Based Marketing and I’m missing out. Or am I?
Ok. Let’s say I buy that number from Marketo (or something close to it). That still doesn’t mean that Account Based Marketing is right for me. Maybe I’m a proud member of the 3% who think ABM is probably great for lots of organizations, but not for mine? Note that none of those BDRs who invited me to dinner tried to make the case why my company (RapidMiner) would benefit from ABM in the first place.You know you are at the top of a hype cycle when its acceptable to market “the thing” — and not what the thing delivers, or why you should care.
The truth is that really great companies almost never follow someone else’s playbook, at least not verbatim. Salesforce, Slack, Atlassian, and HubSpot, didn’t follow trends, they created them. They went right when everyone else was going left. They were the 3%.
The ABM phenomenon got me thinking about what makes marketers so susceptible to trends? Maybe it’s that we like being marketed to? We appreciate masterfully executed campaigns like Flip my Funnel and Account Based Everything. We certainly like belonging to a tribe — being part of a movement. Ever been to the Dreamforce or Inbound? There’s clearly comfort in numbers. There’s nothing inherently wrong with following a trend, but it’s almost never as easy to pull it off as the trend-makers make it seem.
For example, how many “Appropriate person?” emails have you received+deleted this week? I wouldn’t know, because I created a rule to delete them a long time ago.
The book Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross taught this approach to outbound sales teams and it absolutely worked for many of the most successful tech companies on the planet — until it didn’t. By then, the trend makers had already moved. on while the trend followers continue to blast templated emails to tuned-out audiences like me to this day.
Vendors know the power of trends and the momentum they create. It’s not a coincidence that ABM vendors are teaming up to support the movement. ABM vendor Terminus founded the “Flip My Funnel” community alongside a number of competitors. Even traditionally laggard analysts like Gartner are jumping on board the ABM hype train.
But trends come and go. Ask anyone over 40 how tech marketing worked before AdWords and marketing automation, and it will sound a lot like ABM. Tech marketers in the 90s and early 2000s didn’t have the luxury of the low cost distrubution channels that we have today, so focusing on accounts was the only way to go.
I liked ABM better when it used to be called marketing.
— Tom Wentworth (@twentworth12) March 13, 2017
Sure, it was much harder to do ABM then, and the advent of all the new ABM companies make it much easier to do ABM at scale today. Still ABM isn’t new, and it worked then for the same reasons it works now.
Look, I’m not against ABM or any particular marketing tactic. Brandon Redlinger of Engagio lays out some great advice for organizations considering ABM. I’m just against flocking to a trend because everyone else is. There aren’t any growth shortcuts or get rich quick schemes. As I’ve said before, study these trends. Learn from them. Be inspired by them. Implement some of them. But don’t blindly follow them just because you think everyone else is.
And don’t be afraid to be a part of the 3%.