ABM at Scale – Is it a ‘thing’?

When people talk about ABM, they often refer to the ABM pyramid, which has 1:1 ABM at the top, 1:Few as the next layer and 1:Many as the base of the pyramid. Here’s why I think ABM at scale or 1:Many ABM is an oxymoron.

Firstly, the ITSMA definition of ABM is that you treat each customer as a market of one which clearly is impossible at scale. Secondly, ABM works best when it involves insight about and from, your customer. This enables you to really tailor your content, messaging and approach not only to that customer as a single entity, but to the key buyers and influencers within that customer individually. For me, this is the major difference between ABM and demand generation or outbound marketing. It’s about an pull, not a push, approach. What do I mean by that? Well, in my experience, most corporate marketing is split into two main camps – brand and product marketing. Both of these are push approaches to marketing. Brand marketing is concerned with how the brand should be portrayed, making people aware of the brand and its messages and a lot of time is spent on how clever design, copy and messaging will ‘land’ with the target audience. (Of course, what the target audience as a homogenous group, or even as segments, wants is considered as part of this process, but it’s very much driven by the values of the brand and how the brand is perceived and understood.) So, all the messaging is coming from the company out to the market – pushing the messages out. The same with product marketing. Obviously, the product team know how great the product or service is…they’ve been at the frontline of developing it. So they can talk enthusiastically about all the benefits it can deliver. Of course, again it’s all useful and serves a purpose - but the purpose it serves is giving the audience information about the product – after they have decided they are interested in it.

What ABM does is turn these approaches on their head and instead start with the customer. What are they trying to achieve? What’s keeping them up at night? What direction is their business headed in and what competition, threats and opportunities impact their decisions? Only with knowing this – at a company and individual buyer/influencer level - should the ABM process start. Because once you know this, then you know how your business can help. And this might not be the core message that brand or product marketing want you to put across; it could be something entirely different! Someone else may offer a similar service for example, even at a better price, but if they can’t offer it reliably, that could cause a huge problem for the customer. In this case, your ability to consistently deliver might be the most important factor in the customer’s decision-making process. If you know this, then you can tailor your message and it will instantly resonate with that customer. It will pull the customer towards you.

1:Few ABM uses many of these principles but across a group of accounts with a similar profile; they could be in the same industry, or stage, or development, or use case. With this approach, much of the material that affects a 1:1 target account in one of those clusters can then be re-used for similar accounts. For example, if your 1:1ABM account is in insurance, and you’ve researched the insurance market to understand influences, developments and opportunities for your 1:1 account, much of this will also resonate with a similar account in the same market and you can re-use a proportion of this research and messaging. However, done well, 1:Few ABM should still see you tailoring your message and collateral for other accounts in that cluster – overlaying specific insights about that account, the marketing personas and influencers that make up the decision making unit, and so on.

So now we come to ABM at scale or 1:Many ABM. I can see why some may use this term – what they’re looking to do is apply the same principles of insight, research and tailored messaging to a wider group of clients. However, personalisation does not equal ABM. It’s easy to send out a personalised campaign and of course that helps increase relevancy and penetration – we’re all more likely to answer an email that addresses us by name rather than ‘Dear Valued Customer’ – but personalisation at scale is still push messaging. It is still broadcasting the brand and product messages to a large group. It has not taken into consideration what each individual company is looking to achieve and tailored the messaging accordingly. It has instead made use of clever marketing tools and automation to give the customer a pseudo personal experience. But that experience delivered without insight, without tailoring and at scale….it’s just not ABM.