The point was raised earlier that ABM has a danger of moving marketing away from personal communication and just focusing on a company.
As Michael Avis, Senior Director Marketing EMEA points out below, understanding the needs of the individuals within your target accounts and delivering highly relevant, expert-led content is key to successful ABM.
During Michael's session at B2B Account Based Everything regarding Oracle's ABM journey he commented that doing this well gives your firm an opportunity to collaborate with the prospect/customer which is key to building trust and closing business.
However the challenge is communicating with language that resonates with your client. A company like Oracle has no lack of internal expertise to be able to do this, whether the engineers, sales, pre-sales or consultants.
"We want to have experts in our company talking to experts in our customers and build some trust"
This expert-to-expert marketing is key and as suggested by Michael is key to communicating effectively with your prospects/clients to execute successful ABM.
Michael summarises his guiding principles to ABM:
- Understand Customer and Align to their agenda
- Create a transformational conversation & reset perceptions
- Increase awareness, build trust & win over multiple stakeholders
- Increase engagements and develop future advocates
Marketers should therefore be courageous in pushing the benefits of ABM to their partners in sales, since cooperation is essential to the process of researching and crafting strategic deals for “markets of one” – the essence of account-based marketing. Avis pointed to Oracle’s large and complex product portfolio, which has always necessitated face-to-face relationships. Like many large technology firms, Oracle is famous for its giant gatherings such as OpenWorld, but these are unsuitable for influencing high-value individuals. Instead, Oracle’s ABM campaigns have focused on developing closely-targeted, highly-researched and emotional communications that identify customers’ particular pain points and focus on the needs of their individual business.
http://www.momentumabm.com/blog/google_and_oracle_humanity_to_marketing/
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