SPECIAL REPORT

2021
STATE
OF ABM
BLENDING TRADITIONAL DEMAND GEN
WITH ABM, FOCUSING ON INTENT DATA &
PERSONALIZATION TO BOOST ENGAGEMENT
 Introduction

While there’s no shortage of best practice claims for account-based marketing (ABM),
there’s plenty of certainty surrounding its success.

Demand Gen Report’s 2020 ABM Benchmark Survey found that marketers who utilize
ABM strategies have seen positive trends and results when using or reinventing their ABM
strategies. Seventy three percent of respondents indicated that ABM has greatly exceeded
their expectations, pointing to efficient use of marketing sources (53%), a clearer path to
ROI (37%) and more trustworthy results (36%) as some of the major payoffs they’ve seen.

“ABM is one of the most effective kinds of B2B marketing,” said Rob Leavitt, SVP, Consulting
of ITSMA, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. He cited company research that shows
ABM has a higher ROI, drives more revenue and generates more relationships compared to
other marketing strategies.

However, despite visible success, research shows that many companies are still hindered
by common marketing challenges, such as lack of internal resources (36%), poor alignment
between marketing and sales (35%), developing target account personas (31%) and
predicting which account will purchase (31%).

This report will address those challenges, provide actionable solutions and discuss:

• How marketers are blending traditional demand gen strategies with an account-
based approach;

• How a Fortune 500 company saw 94% engagement increase with intent-driven ABM;

• Methods to increase engagement with target accounts;

• Best practices, missteps and a future look at ABM;

• The advantages and limitations presented by intent data;

• The six steps organizations can take to connect ABM to the buyer experience; and

• How to personalize ABM functions at-scale.

2021 STATE OF A B M | 2
 Q&A With Randi Barshack,
CMO, Rollworks: The Resurgence
Of Account-Based Marketing

While many marketers view account-based marketing (ABM) as a relatively new strategy
made possible by technology advancements, Randi Barshack, CMO of Rollworks,
takes a different approach. Instead of viewing ABM as a novel approach to marketing,
she believes the ABM trends we’re seeing now are actually derivative of marketing
strategies from years past that are re-energized by enhanced technology capabilities. To
find out more information, DGR sat down with Barshack to discuss the resurgence, the
technologies enabling it and what the future holds.

Demand Gen Report: Why do you think that today’s ABM strategies are an adaptation
from decades ago? How have technological advances contributed to this evolvement?

Randi Barshack: We’ve always been looking at accounts, even when we were at the height
of personalized marketing one-to-one, but our excitement about personalization took us
on a bit of a detour. For example, let’s say we’re engaging with someone named Angela
Jones from Acme Corp. It’s not that we’re particularly excited about the fact that her name is
Angela; we care about who Angela is in the context of her role at a particular company.

Some of the marketing technologies that emerged from 10, 15 years ago allowed us to
know who Angela was, her specific path and how she interacted with us on a super
granular level. It caused us to become so laser-focused on the individual that we lost
sight of the fact that B2B is not about the individual and rather who the individual is in the
context of an account.

Now, we finally have all that granular data and the ability to contextualize and understand
how that individual fits into an account and how Angela’s actions fit with others from the
buying committee within her company. I think we took a bit of a detour on our path to
being enthralled with the ability to personalize. We went too deep into the individual and
lost sight of the account, and now I think we’re back and we have the capabilities to do
that with an account lens.

2021 STATE OF A B M | 3
 DGR: At its core, what is ABM about? What are the most important steps
organizations can take to improve ROI?

Barshack: ABM is about efficiency and the ability to align your resources — whether it’s
marketing’s budget and time or sales’ resources and efforts — with the accounts that
matter the most. These accounts — or target account list (TAL) — should be reflective
of those proven algorithmically to be the best fit with those demonstrating intent at any
given time.

Ranking that list into tiers helps go-to-market teams further refine how resources could be
allocated. For example, for accounts that are a high fit and exhibit intent, you might want
to gain their attention with a high-end gift (from marketing) coupled with personal SDR
outreach. Accounts that have a high fit but might not be showing intent might be good for
account-based advertising to increase brand awareness.

One common mistake we see if companies trying to have massive TALs without any type
of ranking or tiering. For some channels, like email marketing or broad scale advertising, it
is possible to have massively scaled ABM, but tiering allows you to refine that and engage
many more channels that might take more resources.

With account-based advertising, for example, you might allocate a more concentrated
budget on targeting the top tier accounts and optimize the frequency within accounts that
SDRs would have the bandwidth to reach out to in 20 days or so. Even something with
this simple level of coordination — created by air cover — can create better connect rates
for SDRs. ROI is garnered in the ability to reach accounts, the efficiency of SDRs and the
ability to accelerate sales cycles.

DGR: What are some of the biggest challenges companies run into when
implementing, restructuring or scaling ABM? How can they combat them?

Barshack: The biggest challenge is getting buy-in from marketing and sales teams. This
is probably the most unfortunate one, because internal cohesion creates such amazing
levels of efficiency if you can get sales to buy-in to having a target account list, scoring
and ranking that list, and coordinating marketing and sales outreach. The biggest
challenge is getting over that hurdle. And once you get there, you’re on a good path to
implement ABM.

2021 STATE OF A B M | 4
 If mrketing and sales work together to create that target account list, whether it’s for a
specific campaign or across the entire go-to-market strategy, that’s great. It’s important
for marketing leaders to allow sales to take a first pass at that list to ensure it aligns with
what sales is doing. Rather than trying to force the list, even if it might be more accurate
because you’re using more data, the buy-in is more important than the accuracy. Once
you get the buy-in and sales sees the results, you can go through another round with
more accuracy.

DGR: Where do companies typically misstep when scoring the success of

theengagement their ABM strategies drive?

Barshack: ABM isn’t about increasing engagement rates in general; it’s about increasing
engagement rates with the accounts that matter. Most marketers out there would say
they’d rather have less high-quality responses than more low-quality responses. ABM
allows you to put your funnel on a diet — you don’t need a big wide funnel; you can have
a narrower funnel that looks like a champagne flute.

DGR: Why is ABM important for a company’s continued success? What does the
future hold?

Barshack: There’s a message that your competitors are likely utilizing account-based
strategies using ABM strategies and if you’re not, you’re falling behind. A large part of
ABM is the ability to identify intent signals or target account lists to identify prospects you
may not be currently engaging with. There’s a resurgence because it’s always been about
accounts. It’s about how the technology has advanced to the degree that we can identify
the buying committees within the accounts, both those we have and have not engaged
with. Skinnier funnels and more marketing optimization are common objectives that are
valuable in the go-to-market pipeline that aligns sales and marketing. That alone removes
a lot of the ambiguity between marketing and sales team, so you’re going to see more
tightly aligned go-to-market teams with a newfound level of respect for the disciplines.

2021 STATE OF A B M | 5
 Prioritizing
Personalization For
Greater Account Retention

While experts agreed that the personalization level with ABM is suitable for attracting new
clients, external factors forced companies to shift their priorities to client retention over
prospect generation.

“In the last year — with the pandemic and economic disruptions — ABM became even
more valuable because many companies shifted their focus on existing customers over
generating new ones,” said Leavitt. “With your existing customers, you have a lot more
information and a relationship with them, so it’s that much easier to be more personalized,
targeted and relevant with your marketing.”

Given the popularity of personalization — research showed that 42% of respondents

are personalizing their content to increase account engagement and build long-term
relationships — it’s no secret that it’s not all smooth sailing. In fact, that same research
showed that 35% of marketers are still struggling with personalization.

“In the last year — with the pandemic and

economic disruptions — ABM became even
more valuable because many companies
shifted their focus on existing customers over
generating new ones.”
ROB LEAVITT, ITSMA

2021 STATE OF A B M | 6
 To help increase personalization success, Leavitt suggested marketers refer to what he
calls the three “R’s” of ABM:

REPUTATION
ABM strategies must showcase expertise, thought leadership, reliability, trust and
responsiveness, as ABM can strengthen or change a company’s reputation with
target accounts;

RELATIONSHIPS
Marketers and sales teams should focus on building relationships with clients instead
of pitching to them, which promotes brand advocacy and helps form stronger
partnerships; and

REVENUE
ABM is revenue-focused at its core, and teams need to ask themselves if they’ve
generated and accelerated new opportunities to help close deals.

According to Mark Ogne, Founder and CEO of ABM Consortium, the difficulty with
personalization is attributable to companies focusing too much on one aspect of the data
and not opening their eyes to the bigger picture.

“Each source of insight is a piece of a puzzle, and while those puzzle pieces may include
intent data, a content portal or website behaviors, they are incomplete on their own,”
said Ogne. “Incomplete or incorrect insights corrupt personalization efforts because they
cause marketers to personalize with the wrong content.”

According to Ogne, most organizations struggle to see success with their ABM
personalization efforts because:

• The content is reflecting the desires of the marketers, not the needs of the buyer;

• Personalization doesn’t come from an extensive knowledge of the target

audience; and

• Marketers assume they can send the same message to multiple accounts in a
similar industry or provide similar solutions.

2021 STATE OF A B M | 7
 Fortune 500 IT Company
Increases Engagement By 94%
With Intent-Driven ABM Strategy

An almost $1 billion Fortune 500 enterprise IT solutions company wanted to evolve

its marketing strategy to reach its goal of becoming No. 1 in its field. Throughout the
company’s two decades in business, it had relied on inbound marketing to drive buyers
into its sales pipeline.

However, the organization realized it needed to add ABM to its toolset so it could be more
strategic about identifying the right buyers at the right time in the buying cycle.

Challenge
The company lacked the ability to measure success metrics. Specifically:

• Understanding its customers’ journeys to better target marketing efforts;

• Identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities;

• Attracting new accounts via digital channels;

• Overcoming an existing lack of personalization based on affinity and intent data;

• Measuring the success of its ABM program; and

• Making buyers aware of what its full portfolio of offerings.

The company needed a partner that could offer a range of ABM solutions to help set
up a new program of targeted and personalized experiences, backed by AI-driven data
and insights.

2021 STATE OF A B M | 8
 Solution
To help identify ideal buyers through data and drive contextual engagement, the
company turned to Dun & Bradstreet’s (D&B) datasets and platform. The companies
worked together to use AI and data to build predictive models that identified the best
accounts to target with cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

The company relied on D&B’s predictive model to analyze buyer profiles and help identify
when buyers might upgrade or what their next actions might be through affinity and
intent data. Armed with data and predictive modeling, the company targeted buyers that
showed interest in similar products.

Additionally, the organization wanted to use digital channels to extend awareness

and attract new demand. This meant using data, drilling down with dimensions
and generating strong messaging to demonstrate the company’s value prop. D&B’s
data and insights provided a foundation to understand intent and other behavioral
signals that helped build targeted segments to capture the right audiences. Those
insights were then activated and multichannel tactics were deployed, including
programmatic, paid search and paid social ads.

To show buyers the right message at the right time and create personalized web
experiences with relevant offerings and customized CTAs, D&B helped the company
build best-fit profiles. Those profiles were based on a foundation of intent data that
generated personalized messaging based on buyers’ interests in solution areas and their
stage in the buyer journey. 

D&B Lattice helped the company see which accounts were searching and which
were active, helping it realize potential cross-sell opportunities. Based on this, the
company created a “frequently bought together” path based on products customers
frequently bundled to drive interested buyers to more solutions. The organization also
developed cross-sell messaging based on the product the customer was likely to buy next.

To empower sellers with insights to prioritize accounts and enable a more contextual,
engaging conversation, the company relied on D&B’s data and insights to provide a
global view of buyers and their buyer’s journeys. This helped it gain an understanding
of where buyers are in their sales journeys so sales teams can have meaningful
conversations that lead to conversion.

2021 STATE OF A B M | 9
 Results
Since implementing D&B’s ABM programs, the company received positive feedback on
conversations between its sales teams and customers and saw higher conversions and
engagement. It found that customers gained information and awareness of the company’s
offerings at every stage of the journey, even before engaging in sales conversations.

Specifically, the company saw a:

• 25% higher conversions on up-sell/cross-sell efforts;

• 20% increase in customers signing up for trial offers;

• 94% increase in engagement; and

• 5X pipeline through digital channels.

“The core element to ABM really sits within

digital and data. It’s about the digital and
programmatic tactics of how a campaign
integrates with demand gen activities and
sales priorities.”
ALEX SOUTHWORTH, DUN & BRADSTREET

2021 STATE OF A B M | 1 0
 Leveraging Intent Data
To Identify Buying Signals

With the ability to integrate into Salesforce and existing CRMs, account-based intent data
solutions collect web users’ information and track their behavior to determine where
they’re from, their interest level, their likelihood of taking a specific action and identify
what that action might be. According to research, 63% of marketers are already using
intent/behavior signals (an 8% increase from 2019), with 28% indicating they plan to
incorporate them.

The ability to accurately generate intent data ensures a successful baton pass between
marketing and sales. However, to achieve that, Leavitt explained that the intent data
review process needs to occur on two levels: Strategic and tactical.

Strategically, he explained that marketers must do their homework to understand the

specificities of each account’s needs. Marketing might view an account that downloaded
three blog posts and listened to a webcast as a promising lead, but sales could explain
that they’ve been dealing with the account for years and they’re unlikely to buy.

On the tactical side, Leavitt said that approaching a prospect needs to be interactive,
smaller, more intimate and innovation oriented. Customers are looking for new ideas
and information, but they don’t want a sales pitch. Marketers need to present an
understanding of the account’s issues, create a compelling future vision and relay it to the
sales team, so reps can immediately open lines of communication with targeted insights
and actionable solutions.

Of course, successful analyzation of intent data is only helpful if the data is high quality. It
needs to be specific enough to generate accurate insights into the needs and desire of a
company, as well as gauge how likely they are to act and what they’re specifically seeking
from a platform or solution.

“Data quality is so important — think of it as the gas in your ABM engine,” said Russo. “If
you have bad gas, you’re going to get bad performance; if you have premium gas, you’ll
have premium performance.”

2021 STATE OF A B M | 11
 However, there are limits to intent data’s accuracy. Leavitt cautioned that account-based
intent data is not as useful when targeting large corporations, as you can’t determine who
from the company is browsing the web page or what their buying power is. For example,
he recalled a project that one of his clients worked on with a major oil company. When
analyzing the data, the company believed it had hit a home run.

“The client would say, ‘Oh, my gosh, we ran ads and the personal landing page, and we
got 100 people from the oil company,’” continued Leavitt. “So, I asked, ‘who are those 100
people? Are they people fixing oil rigs in West Texas, or are they executives?’ There are
limits to intent data when it’s account-based, so it’s important to recognize those limits.”

Despite its limitations, intent data is growing in its usefulness and importance. In fact, it’s
one of the many elements of traditional demand gen strategies that are quickly finding its
place in the ABM funnel.

“Data quality is so important — think of it as

the gas in your ABM engine. If you have bad
gas, you’re going to get bad performance; if
you have premium gas, you’ll have premium
performance.”
JON RUSSO, B2B FUSION

2021 STATE OF A B M | 12
 6 Steps To Reconnect ABM
To The B2B Buying Experience
By Pierre Custeau, MRP

The B2B purchasing journey is notoriously long and arduous, requiring a coordinated
sales and marketing effort to influence networks of stakeholders whose input,
recommendations and decisions can fast track or derail a sale at almost any moment. This
difficulty is evident to all: Research shows that more than three-quarters of B2B buyers
describe their purchasing journey as very complex or challenging

According to Google Research from Jan. 2021, this complexity accelerated during the
COVID-19 pandemic, as business priorities shifted and buyers and vendors alike “brought
work into our lives” instead of “went to work.” Marketers, most of whom were already
disappointed with ABM results prior to the pandemic (87%), must find new ways to deliver
a contextual customer experience in the midst of complexity or lose ground to those who
do as purchasing behaviors and cycles rapidly evolve.

The B2B Buying Experience Gap

Target accounts interact with marketers across channels, so marketers must engage them
between platforms. At face value, this concept is intuitive, yet fails at scale. The average
considered B2B purchase involves researching prospective vendors using an average of
six channels, and two-thirds of buyers leave the process disappointed.

ABM promises to use data and personalization to make it easier for buyers to buy,
empowering marketers to construct account-based programs based upon buyers’
dynamic needs and preferences that arise rather than executing top-down campaigns.
However, several challenges disconnect marketers from the B2B journey and keep ABM
success tantalizingly out of reach.

Common but critical difficulties include losing control of data and visibility into target
markets and an inability to scale in the delivery of high-impact engagements. At the
tactical level, marketers often struggle to identify the right accounts to focus on at the
right time, as well as stand up the right campaigns to orchestrate effective handoffs
between marketing and sales teams.

2021 STATE OF A B M | 13
 In addition, ABM efforts are compromised by organizational data silos and the lack of a
unified, comprehensive source of data to personalize the customer experience. In parallel,
ABM can go quickly off track when siloed from other multichannel marketing efforts and
“bolted on” to existing programs.

6 Steps To Reconnect
Connecting ABM to today’s B2B purchasing journey requires enterprise-class capabilities
to derive actionable insights from data, personalize communications and stay in perfect
step with target accounts and buyers across every channel. For marketers who want to
reconnect, these six simple steps will help simplify operational complexities and drive
bottom-line performance:

1. Collaboration Between Sales And Marketing

Only 36% of companies executing ABM programs consider their sales and marketing
teams tightly aligned, despite years of conversation about “alignment.” The goal is to
find ways for sales to participate in a coordinated manner with your ABM program. To
move forward, companies must provide transparency through real-time intelligence that
includes account-focused engagement reports, proactive sales alerts and notifications
and more.

2. Prioritize Enterprise Administration

Consider a single platform with multi-tenant capabilities to ensure the freedom to build,
manage and measure multiple, simultaneous ABM programs while sharing insights,
targeting and methodologies for measurement.

3. Integrate Data Intelligence

Seek out enterprise-ready master data management technologies that organize, cleanse,
map and append data to improve insights and reporting. This provides a powerful
foundation for accurately targeting and personalizing the buyer journey across channels.

4. Create A Full Picture Of Target Accounts

Combine intent data with predictive models to gain a solid understanding of audience
needs and their propensity to act, then determine the best engagement approach at
enterprise scale.

2021 STATE OF A B M | 14
 5. Orchestrate Across Channels
To deliver high-value sales and marketing actions, coordinate and prioritize activity
between marketing teams and ensure message consistency through advanced controls,
real-time triggered connections and recommended “next-best actions.”

6. Map ABM To Business Objectives

Embrace common measurement frameworks that align to existing KPIs and systems, and
the capability to view ABM activities across individual programs and global teams.

What Does This Mean For ABM In 2021?

For organizations that already market in multiple channels, true customer experience
success is challenging, yet fundamental to success. To effectively connect to the B2B
purchasing journey, marketers need to embrace the view of customer experience as a
dynamic path defined by each buyer and target account.

With this understanding, marketers can effectively assess and coordinate their target
account marketing — even within general marketing programs — and use all the data
at their disposal. This includes using intent data and predictive analytics to identify
actionable target account insights, needs and timing to see sustained success in the
months ahead.

“ABM promises to use data and personalization

to make it easier for buyers to buy, empowering
marketers to construct account-based
programs based upon buyers’ dynamic
needs and preferences that arise rather than
executing top-down campaigns.”
PIERRE CUSTEAU, MRP

2021 STATE OF A B M | 15
 Blending Traditional
Demand Gen & Modern ABM

Over the past few years, marketers have realized the multiple levels of overlap between
ABM and demand gen. In fact, research showed that 58% of organizations integrated their
traditional demand gen and ABM strategies to streamline their marketing efforts.

“There’s an operational connection between ABM and traditional demand gen initiatives,”
said Leavitt. “A lot of companies have invested to make their demand gen marketing
strategies more efficient through email marketing campaigns, events and social media
campaigns. All of those tools and systems can and should be used for complex marketing,
but in a more targeted, personalized, smaller-scale way.”

This blend of strategies enables organizations to strengthen the lead qualification

process, and lessens the time and guesswork dedicated to which prospects are likely to
make a purchase.

“If you look at demand gen 10, 15, even 20 years ago, the traditional approach was
reaching out to prospects, getting a lead, conducting a bank qualification, ensuring you
were talking to the right person… there were a lot of steps,” said Alex Southworth, VP of
Marketing for Dun & Bradstreet.

By nature, ABM forces more sales and marketing teams to work in close alignment,
which opens the door for streamlined communications. Jon Russo, CMO and Founder
of B2B Fusion, explained that oftentimes, companies have too many funnels running
simultaneously, which ultimately leads to confusion.

“I think marketers go wrong when they say, ‘I’ve got this lead/account funnel and sales
has its own funnel,’ when you really should have one funnel that takes everything in,” said
Russo. “It takes some work to get there, but the benefit is that you get one source of truth
and there’s no longer finger pointing; it’s all in one area.”

2021 STATE OF A B M | 1 6
 The other aspect to consider is the lead handover process. According to Southworth,
internal teams operate in tight silos — marketing puts out compelling content, and once
the content is acted upon, it gets sent directly to sales. The current system is too vague,
he continued, as marketing teams should be identifying what aspects of the account
make it attractive and where they are in the buying journey.

“There’s a challenge in the way that companies are thinking about their funnel and
lead handover strategies,” said Southworth. “Often, an account will engage with digital
properties, such as filling out a form, which sends the form to the sales team. That’s it;
that’s the handover process. Marketers need hand over buying signals to the sales team,
such as when an account started researching the organization.”

ABM has grown into a strategy that utilizes personalization, increased internal
communication and the implementation of intent signals to determine which accounts are
likely to buy, as well identify where those target accounts are in their sales funnel. Rather
than taking a shot in the dark and hoping sales teams are hitting the correct accounts,
ABM streamlines the approach to produce better ROI and stronger results.

Throughout 2021 and beyond, the companies that see the most success are the ones
who take care when implementing or enhancing their ABM strategies. Whether it’s
through increased use of intent data, more personalization, blending old and new
initiatives or targeting key accounts, ABM will continue to bring teams together and play a
key role in success.

“What’s core to ABM is having a single thread of data that you’re pulling together across
the whole funnel,” said Southworth. “This thread must be integrated and enriched to
enable activation across all internal channels to drive specific objectives.”

2021 STATE OF A B M | 17
Dun & Bradstreet empowers B2B marketing and sales teams with the data, insights,
and automation needed to deliver growth and thrive in fast-changing and competitive
environments. With our AI-powered Sales and Marketing Platform, Data & Rev Ops
teams can clean and consolidate customer data, Marketing teams can engage with
relevance by targeting the right buyers across channels, and Sales teams can prospect
smarter by identifying the buyers more likely to convert.

WWW.DNB.COM/CONTACT-US.HTML

MRP Prelytix is the only enterprise-class predictive ABM platform. For organizations
that serve multiple partners, lines of business, geographies, or industries, MRP Prelytix
is the only ABM platform to empower sales and marketing teams to simplify their
environment’s complexity and produce measurable and high-performance conversion,
pipeline velocity, and closed revenue. Applying the industry’s only real-time predictive
analytics and data management, we fuel 1,000 ABM programs across six continents to
coordinate, execute, and optimize their ABM programs using eight channels, produced
in 20 languages. Powered by Kx, Prelytix sits on top of the fastest streaming analytics
database in the world. For more information visit: www.mrpfd.com

INFO@ROLLWORKS.COM

RollWorks offers ambitious B2B companies an account-based platform to align

marketing and sales teams and confidently grow revenue. Powered by proprietary data
and machine learning, we can help do it all — from identifying your targets to engaging
them across channels and measuring revenue impact.

INFO@ROLLWORKS.COM
 Demand Generation What’s Working In 2020 ABM Benchmark
Benchmark Survey Report Demand Generation? Survey Report

Demand Gen Report is a targeted online publication that uncovers the strategies and
solutions that help companies better align their sales and marketing organizations,
and ultimately, drive growth. A key component of the publication’s editorial coverage
focuses on the sales and marketing automation tools that enable companies to better
measure and manage their multi-channel demand generation efforts.

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INFO@DEMANDGENREPORT.COM

KELLY LINDENAU
is an editor and writer who loves covering the latest B2B marketing
trends, research and industry insights. She’s a New Jersey native,
runner and reader who always has a GIF from The Office at the ready.