Nicky has spent more than 15 years in B2B technology marketing, working across a range of marketing disciplines including strategy and planning, branding, content creation, digital, customer and industry marketing, demand generation, events, and PR and analyst relations.
Account-based marketing is rooted in the premise that not all accounts are equal, which means that accounts need to be prioritized. Account-based marketers should start with a list of accounts that are high priority for the sales leader and augment this list based on their own due diligence. Accounts should be scored against three indexes — opportunity, achievability, and cooperation — to ensure the best chance of success. In this report, we describe a methodology for selecting accounts for a one-to-one ABM program and outline the insights that an account-based marketer should gather and apply to prioritize and score accounts.
Forrester’s most recent global audit of Account-based marketing (ABM) reveals that the discipline is becoming increasingly pervasive, featuring larger numbers of accounts, increased budgets, and larger team sizes. However, lines are becoming increasingly blurred between ABM deployment types and more traditional demand marketing. Advanced practitioners make greater efforts to gather the insights needed to successfully execute ABM and align with sales, and they achieve stronger results. In this report, we share data on the state of ABM around the world, including where there is evidence of organizations being forced to make tradeoffs between ABM deployment types to support more accounts.
Account-based marketing (ABM) success requires several key ingredients to be in place before getting started, including strong organizational commitment, appropriate resourcing and discipline around some of the foundational elements of B2B marketing. Organizations should assess their readiness for ABM by examining key attributes within marketing, sales, technology, and insights; organizational fit; and resource adequacy. By assessing ABM readiness early, organizations can tailor their ABM scope and prepare to address identified gaps to achieve long-term success. In this report, we introduce the Account-Based Marketing Readiness Assessment Model, which defines five readiness categories that organizations must consider before launching an ABM program.
As account-based marketing (ABM) programs mature and expand globally, organizations are inevitably faced with questions about the role that field marketers play in delivering these programs. Field marketers can add significant value to ABM programs thanks to their proximity to local accounts and reps, as well as their deep knowledge of local markets. Relying heavily on field marketing rather than a centralized office makes more sense in some ABM scenarios than in others. In this report, we outline important considerations that determine what ABM activities field marketers should conduct and describe four approaches to designing an ABM center of excellence (COE).
The first 90 days in a new account-based marketing leader’s tenure are critical for building the credibility and trust that will carry them through the first year and beyond. To accelerate the pathway to success, organizations must balance the need to understand the business with the need to demonstrate value quickly. Relationships among marketing and sales leadership and operations are the most critical to develop in the early days. In this report, we outline some of the key tasks that a head of ABM should accomplish during the early months of starting a new role.
Account-based marketing (ABM) and agile methodology are popular options that can be combined in some circumstances. Before moving to an agile approach, consider the readiness of the organization and the suitability of specific processes. Although they may be keen to apply agile to ABM because of the potential benefits (e.g., accelerating time to market, reducing risk, increasing productivity), it is important to apply agile in the right way to the right processes and with the right resources. ABM leaders should identify what they are hoping to achieve by adopting agile, and how they will evaluate success. In this report, we identify key points to consider before moving to an agile ABM approach.
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