Scale: Episode 3 | Why Account Based Marketing struggles to scale

Dave Heywood (00:00)
Data shows that up to 80% of account-based marketing programs fail to meet expectations.

That means billions in wasted capital. It’s time we stop taking ABM at face value.

This is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast, and I’m Dave Heywood

So what’s getting in the way here? Why are we still making such avoidable errors when it comes to enterprise targeting?

What I’ve seen over the years is a tendency to take that phrase, account based marketing, literally. We pick fifty or so dream logos, we go and scrape their LinkedIn profiles, their websites, and then teams spend weeks pulling together highly customised content, unique campaigns for accounts. but we’re not even sure they’re actually in a position to buy.

And then when you look at the actual mechanics of all that, it ends up feeling a lot less like strategic targeting and a little bit more like gambling.

And we’ve talked about some of this before. We know that a hundred percent of your target market isn’t in buying mode at any given time. They might be locked into multi-year contracts, they might not have the budget, or they might not even trust you enough. Or the internal timing is just completely wrong.

So if you’d restrict your approach to a fixed list of fifty specific logos, you’re essentially betting a good chunk of your revenue stream on the two or three accounts that happen to be ready to buy.

and the moment we realise that this manual one to one approach just requires far too much human labour, we look for shortcuts. And today’s temptation is to plug in Gen AI to automate that personalisation

having it write hundreds of custom emails to try and build that relationship. But it backfires.

Discerning B to B buyers have a really keen bullshit filter. They can smell synthetic content a mile away. And none of it proves that you actually understand their business and it can end up doing more harm to your reputation than good.

So what’s the alternative here?

If we want this revenue engine to actually scale, we’ve got to stop solely chasing those individual logos and start thinking in terms of look-alike cohorts. And there’s a really good example here

Snowflake are a really successful cloud-based data platform, essentially widely known for powering the AI data cloud, where we can build data pipelines, develop applications, and use machine learning and all those bits and pieces. But that’s not the interesting bit here. It’s really easy to, from the outside, to look at the huge growth and assume that reps were

handcrafting individual pitches for every single target organisation on that list. But that wasn’t really what was happening. They didn’t scale through manual one-to-one account-to-account campaigns. They actually targeted clusters of hundreds of accounts facing identical structural challenges. So for example, think about a legacy tech stack with an enterprise contract.

expiring within an eighteen month window. Those sorts of scenarios that actually apply to multiple businesses in a given market.

And they tailored their approach and go to market to the challenge, not necessarily the individual account. And so by doing that, they’re able to pull together and deploy one master message across 500 lookalike accounts using all the automation and channel technology at their disposal. So they got the real leverage of a broader, larger campaign, but

with the precision we often equate with account based marketing.

Now you might have just listened to that and gone Well Dave, that just sounds like a highly targeted segment campaign, not ABM And that’s kind of my point here.

Somewhere along the way, what we used to call key account management got a bit of a rebrand and it ended up confusing the hell out of everything. So if you want to map, nurture, and handhold a singular account relationship over the course of a year, that’s key account management. It’s human to human, a one to one play.

That belongs within your sales or customer success departments.

But when we think about marketing, we want to build for leverage. And when we start confusing key account management with marketing, we end up breaking that machinery and

all we end up doing is eroding margins along the way.

So let’s bring this back to your own operation. If you’re looking at your current target account strategy, How do you guard against this trap?

First of all, we stop looking at pure output, like how many personalised emails we sent. and we start taking a look at our strategic inputs. And there’s a few simple questions that we can use to filter that current strategy.

First of all, look at your list and ask, are we after logos here? Or are we chasing particular triggers? are we targeting these accounts because they’re brands that we want on our website and that will give us a lot of perceived credibility, or because we have objective data proving that they’re facing a specific structural challenge right now that we can help address?

Second question to ask is are we confusing marketing with sales and customer success? are we deploying our marketing team that are built to scale to essentially act like individual account managers?

And finally, are we tailoring to the person or the problem? So if our messaging ends up relying on AI generated scraping around an individual’s hobbies or interests, rather than how we can solve a real challenge or bottleneck, we’re not going to get very far.

Ultimately, real account targeting

Isn’t about handcrafted bespoke pieces. It’s around uncovering that shared friction across a market and building a repeatable process to be relevant, reach it, and convert it. Thanks for listening. I hope you found that useful. I’m Dave Heywood and this is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast.