B2B lead generation has had to reinvent itself over the last decade.

Sales have always used an account-based approach. Now,, marketing is adopting account-based marketing. But it’s not an easy road.

Here’s why:

In B2B, you’re never selling to an individual. He or she is almost always part of a buying team. Moreover, the bigger the potential deal, the more people, departments, and functional areas get involved.

For this reason, many B2B marketers using a leads-based approach hit a wall with their account-based marketing efforts.

ABM isn’t just about marketing. ABM works best in companies where all revenue-generating areas are closely aligned as one team.

So, how can you improve your account-based marketing results?

To help, I interviewed Jon Miller (@jonmiller), CEO and Co-Founder of Engagio. Jon and his team just released the Second Edition of The Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing. He brings a fantastic perspective on how to complement a leads-based approach and adopt account-based marketing.

What inspired you to start Engagio?

Jon: Great.  I’m excited to be here and to have a chance to hang out with you again. It’s been a while since we talked.

So, my background: I’ve been in marketing technology almost my entire career. My undergraduate degree is actually in physics, and when I was coming out of college, I ended up doing a lot of work with companies that were trying to take advantage of all the customer data they had [in order] to make decisions.

Because I came to marketing with that quantitative and analytical background, that led me into a series of marketing technology companies that were basically all about really trying to use all that data to drive better customer decisions and one to one interactions. You know, very much inspired by the Don Peppers and Martha Rogers book The One to One Future.

I worked at Exchange and then as an early employee at Epiphany, which was probably the leading marketing technology company of the mid-’90s.

After we sold Epiphany, I co-founded Marketo, along with Phil Fernandez. And I think that’s arguably, or maybe not even arguably, the leading marketing technology of the last ten years or so. Recently, it was sold to Adobe for just under 5 billion dollars.

I had a long career in marketing technology, but one of the trends I think is always true is marketing is changing all the time, and the underlying technologies are changing all the time.

I just felt about four years ago that Marketo wasn’t, frankly, moving fast enough to kind of keep up with all the new trends and changes in how marketing was done.

I was inspired to start a new company that would be seeking to build out the next generation of marketing products that could really take advantage of all these new trends.

One of those significant trends is what’s now known as account-based marketing. And so, that’s where I decided to start, to focus, to have Engagio be a platform for account-based marketing.

How do you define account-based marketing?

Brian: Well, there’s a lot of definitions out there about account-based marketing, and I’ve talked with CMOs and VPs, and they see account-based marketing as just good marketing.

But I’d love to ask you: you just had this new book come out, The Clear Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing and you’re on your second edition, so how would you define it?

Jon: Yeah. So, first of all, let me just say, really excited about the book. You know, it is a second edition; I wrote the first one about three years ago. I’ve learned a ton more about ABM in the last three years.

I’ll start with a colloquial definition of ABM then I’ll give you my formal one. I think the colloquial one I like to use is a comparison back to the kind of marketing that we did with Marketo. And that is the marketing that I like to describe as fishing with nets.

When you’re fishing with nets, you run your campaigns, and you don’t care which specific fish you catch. You just care– did I catch enough? That you can then do lead nurturing, and lead scoring to kind of run it through the system.

But when you’re going after bigger or more strategic accounts, or maybe because you’re going after your existing customers for expansion, or you’re in a narrow industry.

Any time you have a specific list of named accounts, you don’t want to wait around for those big fish to swim into your net. You’re going to find ways to reach out to them proactively. It’s much more like fishing with a spear. And so, to me that’s the simple definition of account-based marketing: it’s spearfishing as opposed to net fishing.

A breakout of account-based marketing

Jon: My formal definition is that account-based marketing is a go-to-market strategy that will coordinate personalized marketing and sales efforts to land and expand at target accounts. Can I just explain what some of those words mean?

Brian: Yeah. If you could break that out that would be great.

It’s a strategy

Jon: First of all, I’m very precisely calling it a strategy. ABM is a way of running your go-to-market. And how your sales and marketing and customer success teams work. It’s not a campaign or a tactic. So, you really do need to kind of say, “We use ABM as our go-to-market strategy or at least one of our go-to-market strategies.”

Personalized to the right people and accounts

Jon: Second, ABM is really all about being personalized. There’s so much noise in the market today; if you’re spearfishing and you’re trying to reach out to the right people at the right companies, somehow you’ve got to break through all that noise and the best way to do that is with relevance, resonance, and empathy, which I know we’ll talk about.

ABM is a misnomer because we’re saying it’s account-based marketing but right there, in my definition, I’m talking about marketing and sales. And let’s talk about that a little bit later.

Landing and expanding revenue

Jon: ABM is about landing and expanding. I think that especially today, so many companies earn revenue through subscription and recurring revenue models.

Just focusing on that new business, which is what the net fishing is all about, is a minimal myopic focus, and ABM expands, or changes, the marketer’s mindset to focus on the entire revenue journey:

• landing/creating new pipeline


• accelerating existing deals


• expanding and retaining existing relationships.

ABM plays across all that. So, that’s why I chose that definition.

From leads-focus to account-focus

<figure class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_16325" style="width: 993px;"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-16325">Source: The Clear & Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing (p. 132)</figcaption></figure>

How is ABM is different than demand generation?

Brian: Well, it makes sense, and I appreciate what you’re talking about, just the overarching trend.

CEOs focus on lifetime value (LTV) and CAC (customer acquisition cost). And so, ABM is providing answers to that.

There still is so much confusion out there, and you say, ABM isn’t just about marketing. How do you mean?

How is it different from demand generation? Because I still think people out there, even though we’ve just talked about the definitions, yet are getting confused.

Jon: Yeah. Well, so I always thought it was ironic that we called the category Marketo played in marketing automation. People think marketing automation means that you have fewer humans doing less work. The reality is the exact opposite.

When you buy a tool like Marketo, or any marketing automation platform, it requires work. People have to do stuff.

ABM is not just about marketing; it’s about everything

So, in many ways marketing automation is a misnomer in the same way that ABM is a misnomer because ABM is not just about marketing.

If you’re focused on the entire revenue journey (creating new pipeline, accelerating existing deals, expanding and retaining relationships) that can’t just be marketing: it has to be an orchestrated business initiative between the different functions.

And frankly, if it’s just marketing, it’s not a strategy; it’s a campaign.

At Engagio, a lot of our customers have their strategies, and they’re not called ABM.

They call it something like account-based everything. Or the account first initiative, or something as simple as account-based sales and marketing.

I’ve seen all of those at play, and I think it really is the right way to think about it because otherwise, as I said, it’s just a campaign