ABM helps stand out in a crowded market by prioritizing quality over volume. Learn why it’s a great strategy for many B2B agencies.
ABM is a buzzword, we all know it. Yet, the underlying concept behind ABM serves as a solid framework for many agencies to run their marketing and sales operations on.
In the B2B game, success or failure is determined at an account level. Making it logical to market, sell to and service accounts first and contacts second. In simple terms, if you can only sell to CMO’s of software companies, then a CMO of a Bank is worthless and so commercial engines need to be designed accordingly.
This article presents our thoughts on why ABM is the right choice for B2B agencies and discusses problems many encounter. Concluding with why we decided to build Ortium to facilitate the go to market (GTM) operations of agencies.
I don’t want to turn this into a what is article, however, to kick things off, it is important we cover a few fundamentals that support the reasoning behind why ABM makes sense.
Simply put, it’s a strategy that focuses on a relatively low volume of high quality engagements, ensuring marketing and sales teams find good quality insights they can use to interact with prospective customers in a meaningful way.
Within ABM, there are 3 tiers. 1:1, 1:Few and 1:Many. To keep it simple, 1:1 entails exceptionally detailed research, unique content and outreach for each company. 1:Many is on the other end of the scale with less research, more generalised content and semi-automated outreach.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, why does it make sense specifically for agencies?
Agencies have a tough time differentiating, as of January 2024 there are 433,400 advertising agencies. This does not include the broader category of ‘’marketing agencies’’ so one can only imagine how many firms are out there.
The result is the commoditisation of marketing services. Making it hard to stand out from the crowd. For example, if a buyer has 25 companies trying to sell them google ads the only way a competing firm can differ from the other 24 is through referrals, reputation or putting in more effort to understand the buyers business. Not via the service, aka Google Ads.
Since ABM is in essence the process of researching a company and it’s people, then tailoring offerings in a highly specific way. It aligns well with beating the competition through superior customer understanding (at some point they just can’t ignore that you have gone above and beyond).
When it comes to researching a business, marketing provides a unique opportunity. Imagine for a moment you needed to investigate a companies cyber security strategy and technologies. Almost everything is hidden from view, making the research and tailoring difficult.
Marketing on the other hand is visible. You can easily see if a company uses google ads, drives organic traffic or has a podcast. So completing quality research and tailoring your offerings to each business simply requires putting in the work. This is of course a different challenge for time strapped agencies with thin profit margins, but we’ll get back to this later.
Additionally, agencies often have a preferred mix of services due to efficiency, proven success, in-house knowledge or higher margins. Whatever the mix, by effectively researching prospective companies, it’s easier to pick matching marketing strategies or those that could benefit the most from your mix. Making for an easier sales process, better customer onboarding and retention.
Profit margins and average customer lifetimes will ultimately determine how large deal sizes should be per tier to justify the investment. Typically for 1:1 ABM, deals should exceed $100k, whereas 1:Few works well from $50k upwards and 1:Many is applicable from $20k.
Aside from project work, most agencies offering a combination of service will have have an average deal size of more than $20k and so it makes financial sense. The trick is of course working out the optimum tier and level of investment based on your personal position.
Time. Yes, it’s really that simple. In a world in which non-billable hours directly subtract from profit margins, they are not always easy to come by and should be thoughtfully invested.
ABM is a strategy that historically took up considerable time from sales and marketing teams. Think research, content creation and manual outreach. While technology has enabled more streamlined processes and partial automation, ABM is going to take more time than volume based outreach activities (there’s a reason it performs a lot better).
Spray and pray. Spam cannon. The list goes on. Outreach at volume is the customer acquisition strategy for many organisations and agencies are no different. However, there’s a elephant in the room and the sooner we address it, the better growth will be over the medium to long term.
Everyone is relying on volume and this in turn is how we find ourself in the position we are today. What worked 5 - 15 years ago doesn’t work today (this could also be said for inbound marketing but that’s a topic for another time).
In cold outreach / outbound sales circles on LinkedIn, regular posts detail ‘’amazing results’’ and include performance screenshots. What’s frightening? They are sending over 10 000 emails to book a handful of meetings. This is in no uncertain terms, unsustainable and only serves to speed up the loop. We’re in an arms race to the bottom.
Why is it unsustainable? Volume cannot scale indefinitely. While you might be able to increase from 10k to 20k emails per month, soon enough you will run out of volume, get banned or fined. What then? If you haven’t begun developing a strategy to operate and grow in a sustainable manner, in 9 - 12 months the well will run dry and we will be in deep trouble.
To top it off, email providers are implementing increasingly strict measures to filter out spam. Making it harder and more expensive to deliver an email, let alone get a reply, which is of course further increasing the volume required to generate the same performance. As a result, technology advancements and ‘’expert’’ practices are centred around staying one step ahead of Google and Outlook in order to facilitate the continued sending of a high volume of emails.
Aside from the lack of long-term business viability, it’s worthwhile asking yourself, is sending 10 000 generic emails to people who did not ask to be contacted for you to book 20 meetings, really what we have come to? What’s the brand impact? Is there surely not a better way?
Thankfully there is. Do your research, offer relevant solutions to relevant people and get creative from time to time.
Being touted as the not so new solution to outreach is ‘’signals’’. For example, reverse IP technologies unmask anonymous website visitors and 3rd party ‘’intent’’ providers suggest a business is interested. These signals are used to trigger outreach with the aim that it is not completely cold, thereby resulting in higher conversion rates.
However, most are inaccurate and have been proven to generate no better results than random outreach by an MIT study. Others signals from providers like G2 intent data and engagement with LinkedIn content are much better but also available to competitors and expensive.
So some of these solutions may well help a little, potentially even as a placebo to encourage reps to take their time and craft better messaging because they believe their is a higher chance of prospects responding. However, they are ultimately a bandaid or symptomatic fix to the real problem at hand.
Yes and no. Ortium has been developed to solve some of these challenges and make ABM accessible to time strapped agencies. It does not completely solve the challenges inherent within the volume problem and will still require creativity and elbow grease.
Irrespective of if we like it or not, the market is forcing us to move away from a volume based approach to growth. Increasing advertising costs and declining results from SEO are compounding the problem to further increase customer acquisition costs. This is especially prevalent for agencies, due to their lack of or limited differentiation.
If volume isn’t the answer, then quality is key and so we come full circle to ABM. So, how do you go about getting an ABM program out of the ground? Is that really necessary or is just the framework / concept that should be tested and implemented? What about tooling, I’ve heard 6 Sense is expensive?
While setting up a repeatable sales process for a Martech provider facing similar challenges. We created an early solution using a Business Case for sales reps to complete on prospects prior to beginning outreach. Ensuring companies were well researched, insights reliably found and solutions effectively positioned with them.
Initially, Business Cases were only used to enable the creation of email content, yet over time it evolved into a custom report reps shared with prospective customers to book meetings. Developments in AI made it easier to complete parts of the research and models were trained on case frameworks and customer stories. However, limitations existed without building a more advanced solution or investing more time and so Ortium was born.
The purpose? Collect more data in a systematic manner and produce higher quality insights that can be trusted, offering reps and prospects real value. Additionally, the design and ease of access to reports for prospective customers came in to play.
As the article suggests, we believe spamming for growth is a short term solution and so companies need to invest in a long term approach to building systems and process capable of ensuring prospects are provided with value in each interaction across the buyers journey. In doing so, creating a brand people genuinely enjoy interacting with, opening the door to sustainable growth irrespective of the next hack.
Ortium was not built as an ABM solution but rather a means of researching prospects marketing, finding insights and presenting information in a visually appealing format without forcing people to fill out a form or book a meeting. As a result, agencies and ABM made for a natural fit.
Agencies are in a tough spot, there’s a lot of direct competition and growing outreach volume is further increasing competition for share of voice, irrespective of what you sell. On the other side of the coin, marketing costs are also increasing. To combat this, teams should consider following a quality over quantity approach. Allowing them to deliver real value to prospective customers.
In other words, some version of ABM. This is a particularly good approach for vendors and service providers in the marketing space due to the public facing nature of marketing.
Whilst the market would have people believe ABM is a complex strategy that’s expensive to get started, it’s not. It does however require time and this can negatively impact profit margins. Especially if the project does not get off to a flying start.
Ortium was first created to solve our own challenges. In doing so, we improved both the quality and efficiency of certain steps within the ABM process. This in turn leant itself well to agencies and so our focus is to build an improved research and content engine that paves the way for a sustainable customer acquisition strategy that does not wipe out profit margins.
