This article originates from a presentation at the Revenue Marketing Summit in New York, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.
Before we dive into account-based marketing (ABM), I'll briefly introduce myself. I’m Marquis Green, Senior Manager of Account-Based Marketing within the Marketing Strategy department at LSEG. LSEG stands for London Stock Exchange Group.
It's a new brand that we're growing, but at the base of it is the London Stock Exchange – a 300-year-old entity focused on global financial markets.
Essentially, we provide data, analytics, tools, and technology for banks and other financial institutions – government entities, pension funds, you name it – within the financial services ecosystem.
They're our clients, they're our customers, and so account-based marketing has become more and more relevant for us over time. Because of the breadth of accounts and the geographic coverage that we have, we need to be able to prioritize certain accounts.
In this article, I’ll be covering:
- The nuances of account-based marketing
- Why businesses today need to pay attention to ABM
- How we do ABM at LSEG
- ABM partners with strategic account program teams
- Our partnership with sales
- How to build a customer and data-led ABM strategy in six steps
- How we align our ABM success with the three R’s
The nuances of account-based marketing
Account-based marketing is a pretty nuanced strategy, and what it looks like depends on what your goals are. If your firm’s goal is to retain at-risk accounts, you may build your ABM program around those accounts.
Or, it may be that certain accounts have such a market share within an industry space that if you cover 10 of them, that can account for 50, 60, or even 70% of a customer or client segment.
Whenever you think about ABM, you want to ask yourself what your priorities are, where the greatest advantage is, and what the sales team’s most concerned about.
ABM is all about putting the account at the center of your ecosystem, so we look at the account almost as a person. Let’s take one of our accounts, Goldman Sachs, as an example.
- What problems is Goldman Sachs encountering?
- What are its goals?
- What’s its mission statement?
- What’s in the press about it?
- How does it market itself?
We can take a holistic approach to the account to best understand how to approach it and promote our solutions and products.
Why businesses today need to pay attention to ABM
I want to share a couple of stats that are very relevant to our topic today. First, in 2021, the global ABM market was worth $750 million – and that was a pandemic year. In 2027, it’ll be more than double that. It’ll be worth $1.6 billion.
A lot of salespeople are learning about ABM, and they're thirsting for it because it forms a great partnership between marketing and sales. It hones in on a more specific customer account profile, allowing us to build a campaign around that account.
The second stat I want to share is that when sales and marketing are closely aligned, overall marketing revenue goes up by 208% – more than double. In other words, if you’re not already driving alignment through account-based marketing, it’s time to start.
How we do ABM at LSEG
Below, you can see a simplified version of our ABM model. We decided to build our program around our 52 top accounts, which we’ve divided into two categories: one-to-one and one-to-few.
A one-to-one approach essentially means tailoring an entire marketing campaign specifically to an account. We let the account know that we're inviting them into this program.
In fact, a very important part of ABM is letting the client know that they’re getting a personalized approach.