Filling a big, black hole

It is not very often that a book comes along that is as timely and much needed as this one. A quick look at Google Trends reveals a massive spike in interest in account-based marketing (ABM), so clearly something significant is happening out there in the practice world.

The question, however, is whether this book is the right one for all those seeking to understand what ABM is and how to go about implementing it. As a sceptic and fierce critic of books that claim to light the way to a new marketing world, I was expecting the usual consultanttype hype without any real, robust evidence.

It was with great relief that I found myself enjoying the well-written prose and the content, which I found interesting, challenging and, above all, ‘new’. The inverted commas are meant to signal what we all know, which is that there is rarely anything in our domain that is totally new to the world, but in this case it is certainly sufficiently different to make us challenge much of our traditional marketing thinking.

Two decades ago, ABM was another term for key account management (KAM), also known as strategic account management in the US. The authors refer to this as ‘strategic ABM’. It was a strategic approach to creating sustainable growth and profitability with a handful of important customers, bringing skills and resources to individual account teams. Today, based on the success of KAM, defined by the authors as treating individual accounts as markets in their own right, ABM has expanded to include what the authors refer to as ‘ABM Lite’ and ‘programmatic ABM’. This review will focus on ABM Lite.

ABM Lite is a one-to-few model, typically applied to second-tier, named accounts that are not large enough to make it into the KAM programme. Here, buying influencers are reached by what is known as IP-based targeting, and there are many software companies specialising in this. A feature of ABM Lite, however, is the allocation of marketing executives to a number of specific accounts. It is in this area that ABM is making its biggest impact, as it is re-engaging the marketing community with big, important customers. There has been a depressing trend towards the almost total separation of B2B marketers from the real world of customers as they have been drawn into the world of digital marketing.

My recommendation is for marketers to read and learn from this excellent book. It is a great pity that, as usual, few business schools have even heard of ABM, let alone teach it on their curricula. As with KAM, heaven help our poor ignorant students who will graduate with a big black hole of ignorance about what is driving and changing the world of marketing.

A Practitioner’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing by Bev Burgess and Dave Munn. Taken from March 2017 issue of Market Leader