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If someone were to ask me what the hardest thing I’ve done as a marketer, I’d have to say it was figuring out a way to get closer to potential buyers who were unknown to us in order to expand our footprint.  Figuring out who our best customers are and then finding more accounts like those is not an easy task.   And, up until recently, the technology to really identify those accounts at scale did not exist.

Luckily for us at Vindicia, the world of martech is rapidly evolving.   Enter the resurgence of account-based marketing (ABM).  I think intuitively we’ve always known that ABM was important, but we didn’t have a way to really execute on the idea of marketing to specific accounts in a scalable way.  In just the last year, the ABM technology landscape has exploded and now the problem is not lacking the technology, but rather selecting the right technology to help your program be successful.

One of the first things we did was to identify the types of vendors that we knew we needed.  For instance, we knew that data was core to our ABM program, so we sought Avention to help build the strong data foundation that we knew we needed to scale our programs.  For our particular scenario, we also added several other vendors to complete our ABM stack and allow us to deliver targeted digital messages to key contacts and accounts.

If I had to give advice to someone just starting an ABM program, it would be this:

• Start with a solid data foundation.  Without the right data, your program is built on sinking sand.   Providers like Avention can help with this.
• Identify the tools that you need for your particular stack.  They will vary depending on the way that you run your marketing programs, so it’s important to really understand what you want to accomplish before you start the vendor selection process.
• Make sure that the vendors you select will connect with your customer relationship management system (CRM) or marketing automation system (MAS) so that your sales and marketing teams have the same view of the data.  This allows a unified approach to the ABM process and also makes success easier to measure.

While we are still fine tuning our program, we’ve seen tremendous success in the first two quarters of this year and expect to exceed our goals in Q3 as well.  If you’d like to learn more about how we launched a successful ABM program with Avention as out partner, read our case study or recent press release.