These are 20 loosely connected takeaway from a day at the #FlipMyFunnel Boston 2016 event yesterday.
1. Kudos to Sangram Varje for the progress in the ABM #FlipMyFunnel movement
2. A well produced event and the growth from Year 1 to Year 2 was significant
3. Although for comparison sake this is way, way behind Inbound – and not measured by scope or size, just purely on the passion of the practitioners. This will be key for #ABM going forward is to transfer the passion you hear from Sangram and Jon Miller to the customer/practitioner level.
4. ABM is at the “vendors driving it” stage of adoption.
5. Which begs the question, are all of these vendors eating their own dog food? Are they practicing ABM? Because the tipping point for both Marketo and HubSpot was leveraging their own products to drive growth. Which of the ABM vendors will do the same?
6. Certainly seems like InsightSquared is because they seemed to be the case study for half of the vendors -- which is great marketing for them!
7. ABM means different things to different people – in spite of the good work of the folks at Terminus, Engagio and others in defining frameworks.
8. There are a lot of companies who could benefit from an ABM approach where this is not even on their radar screen.
9. ABM is a great landing spot for post marketing automation stars. Lots of ex Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot faces and names.
10. Engagio has a great approach to ABM metrics. A key tipping point for ABM adoption will be when marketing organizations (along with sales peers, executives and finance) adopt those metrics as their KPIs.
11. In my view the crux of ABM should be on driving customer acquisition. In Jon Miller’s own words, he turned to ABM when he realized Marketo’s demand generation couldn’t scale to support the enterprise. This is the problem that needs to be solved – how companies can most effectively dovetail outbound marketing with inbound marketing to drive customer acquisition and demand generation growth.
12. This is why the EMC case study missed the mark for me. This was centered around a massive organization managing a relationship with other massive organizations. I don’t consider that to be the heart of the #ABM and #FlipMyFunnel movements that Sangram and Jon are evangelizing.
13. To get to that customer acquisition, Jon had some good reminders that inbound principles, like being helpful and adding value to prospects, apply to outbound too (as I said here in When Inbound Marketing Isn’t Enough)
14. I agree with Jon that “Account Based Everything” stands out from “Account Based Marketing” because the whole point of the account-based approach is to create cross functional alignment across an organization. In Jon’s words, “ABM perpetuates marketing silos”, and words do matter.
15. There are a ton of technologies out there. Ton. Integrating a common view of the customer is a challenge for everybody. Exciting how Bedrock Data can help here.
16. Stat of the day from SalesForce State of B2B Marketing Study 2016 via Vala Ashfar: high performing marketing teams are 14X more likely to have integrated their business systems for a single view of the customer. A big part of the value Bedrock provides.
Excerpted from the SalesForce 2016 State of B2B Marketing Study:
17. Personal highlight for me was meeting Scott Brinker, ChiefMarTec himself, for the first time. Have an exciting upcoming collaboration with Scott.
18. Good also seeing Jeff Coveney, Matt Benati, Tim Ceruto, Charlie Liang, Gar Smyth, Shaun Pinney, Chris Rudnick, Adam New-Waterson, Aaron Dun, Samantha Stone, Matt Heinz & Matt Senatore.
19. The best breakout session, by far, was the CMO Roundtable MC’d by Katie Martell, moderated by Kelly Ford and featuring Brian Kardon, Shelley Eleby and Claudine Bianchi
20. I’m really bad at naming my favorite song (you might see this in an upcoming video series from Jeff Coveney, although hopefully that gets chopped in the video edit). Hopefully I did a better job on data and ABM questions though.