Last month, about 150 account-based marketers gathered at LinkedIn’s San Francisco office for the second annual I Heart ABM Event. At the half-day event, marketers, experts, and the LinkedIn team discussed what the future holds for ABM.
The conversation included Jann Schwarz of LinkedIn taking a deep dive into trends impacting ABM; a fireside chat with Nash Haywood about Genesys’ ABM program; a session led by Tim Bollish, who shared insights from LinkedIn’s ABM research; and panelists from Adobe, Madison Logic, and Salesforce discussing the future of ABM.
Here are 17 quotes that captured the critical takeaways from the I Heart ABM sessions:
Even though we’ve been talking about it for a few years now, ABM as a strategy is older than the Internet. — Grant Grigorian, Director of Product Management, Engagio
If you don’t have marketing and sales aligned and using the same set of data, then you’re not really doing ABM. — Liam Doyle, SVP of Product Management, Salesforce
We wanted to have more control of the entire (marketing and sales) process, and an ABM approach allowed us to do that. — Nash Haywood, Global Director-Digital Conversion & Paid Media, Genesys
Did you know that ABM is currently more than a third (36%) of digital marketing budgets? — Tim Bollish, Market Research Manager, LinkedIn
Account-based marketing is no longer just a digital marketing tactic, digital advertising tactic. It is an all encompassing marketing strategy. … LinkedIn is at the center of this conversation because ABM resonates with everything that we do best. It’s about driving authentic engagement. It’s about nurturing trust. It is about realizing value, building relationships. — Liz Demers, Partner Manager, Channel Sales, LinkedIn
Who has the shortest tenure amongst all the C-Suite executives in Fortune 500 companies? CMO, that’s right. Why is that? Why is the CMO always the person that gets canned first? They can’t explain performance to other executives. — Jann Schwarz, Global Director, Market Development, LinkedIn
We heard about how CMOs are replaced every 18 months. It’s because they’re still stuck in legacy metrics. — Sonjoy Ganguly, Chief Product Officer, Madison Logic.
We sell in all markets globally and what is really important for us is being able to reach those accounts internationally, and we’ve leaned heavily on LinkedIn to be able to do that because of the amount of data [LinkedIn has] across all regions. — Haywood
So, for the [prospects] that we do target with ads, late stage opportunities, we see 60% higher close rate. For those that are at the middle of the funnel, the ones that were focused on converting, they moved 30% faster. So, there’s no doubt in my mind that [ABM] is effective. — Haywood
Unreliable data about who to target at accounts is the top challenge for ABM marketers. — Bollish
ABM is actually used by a majority of B2B marketers, and ABM budgets are growing at an average of about 9% over the next 12 months. Most ABM marketers still don’t have a ton of experience and a lot of people are still learning and that’s also coupled with the fact that about a third are building their own programs within their organizations from scratch. — Bollish
We start with displaying LinkedIn ads to get people in. Once they show an engagement spike, we start heavy personalization, which consists of a personalized webinar, personalized content hubs, mailer gift, which is cupcakes, and heavy BDR outreach. — Janet Polyakov, VP-Product Marketing, Terminus
A/B testing is dead and multivariate testing is the new king. — Gil Allouche, CEO, Metadata.
Over the last decade, I think, marketers have really started to control a much greater portion of the lead to revenue cycle and with that has come the need to kind of understand the lead in the context of the accounts that they represent. And then from a technology point of view, there have been three things: big data, machine learning, AI. All of these technologies have come together to kind of now build out that account profile, ideal customer profile. — Vivek Sinha, Principal Product Manager, Adobe
I feel like as B2B marketers, we don’t put enough emphasis on social and the way you can make these human connections but add scale. — Cassandra Clark, Senior Marketing Manager-Demand Generation, LinkedIn
And if we use ABM to basically repeat all of the kind of spammy tactics of the past, but now magnified with this tool that’s directed at our customers, I think is where it would go wrong and I see go both ways, unfortunately. — Grigorian
From 2018 to 2020, we have over 150 new features and products coming your way, and we’re just getting started. So, over the next year and beyond, we’re making investments into our product roadmap in three key areas. We spend a lot of time talking to marketers like you via one-on-one interviews, via surveys, via research sessions. What we’ve heard are three core things. The first is we need to continue to invest in our world class audience targeting. The second we need to provide you ways to help your content stand out in the news feeds so that you can be visible with the key buyers that you need. And third, we need to provide ways to help you automate your processes so that you’re able to gain more efficiencies with our platform. — Johanna Kimura, Product Marketing Manager, LinkedIn
To keep pace with the latest thinking in ABM and other marketing approaches, subscribe to the LinkedIn Marketing Blog today.
Related articles