Marketo ABM: A Quick Review
By Flora Felisberto
Earlier this week, Marketo launched its highly anticipated ABM solution. The product, which has been in the works for the past year, goes beyond just web personalization and reporting. As Marketo’s VP of Product Marketing, Mike Telem described, the company took “the long route and really built an ABM product that required changes to the platform and data model.”
The product, simply called Marketo ABM, has 3 main components: Target, Engage and Measure.
Target: This functionality allows marketers to target and manage named account lists with the sales team, automatically match leads and accounts, manage account score, open opportunities, etc.
Engage: With Marketo ABM, you get cross channel (web, email, social, Google ads, etc) engagement of accounts and specific roles within those accounts. To accomplish this, Marketo is integrating with the likes of Adroll, Bluewolf, D&B, InsideView and others.
Measurement: This includes measuring the current status of your accounts, identifying the hot leads within those target accounts and the impact of your marketing efforts within key accounts.
Why this is significant for Marketo
Marketers have been overwhelmed with technology and Marketo is trying to take a lead role in simplifying and eliminating the need to add yet another vendor.
If you’re already a customer, Marketo ABM is a no-brainer. No additional integration is required and you’ll save a lot of time by not having to learn a new platform and user interface. This creates efficiency.
This puts Marketo in a better competitive situation not only with similar platforms like Eloqua and Pardot, but most importantly HubSpot, as ABM has been taking a lot of attention away from Inbound recently.
CMO Panel
Perhaps the most interesting part of the launch event was the impressive CMO panel, moderated by Megan Heuer, VP of research at SiriusDecisions. Believe it or not, SiriusDecisions has been covering ABM for the last 10 years, and Megan has been covering it for the last 8. It’s interesting to see the market and the technologies finally catching up.
Here are some ABM best practices and takeaways from the panel:
You should be talking to sales! Work with your sales people to pick the accounts you want to target.
But also get product marketing and product management involved because they know how the product maps to the market. Sales will help you with targeting, but product will help you with the messaging, which is essential for engagement.
Open the communication door with sales and have the conversation with them in a new way. Sales talks about accounts, marketing talks about leads. ABM allows sales and marketers to speak the same language.
Don’t bang your head against that same account over and over again. No sometimes means no. Use the data to know when it’s time to move on to another account.
Measurement is about your organization and how you measure attribution within your company.
ABM is going to have different success rates in different geographies. For example, ABM programs in Europe may not be as successful as ABM programs you’re running in the US and that needs to be kept in mind.
Your ABM program is only as good as how well you know your audience. Engage with your existing customers to learn whether or not your message is resonating.
It’s not ABM unless you do anything different based on the account.
Hone in on where your sales people live. Typically, it’s the CRM, so provide them a holistic view of what’s going on with their accounts where they live.
To learn more about Marketo's new ABM solution, click here.
