“State Of” Series
When discussing the modern buyer, it’s tough not to sound like a broken record. Practitioners know that buying journeys are shifting every day, and despite their best efforts to keep up, there’s still a major disconnect in how they engage with their prospects and accounts. A recent Salesforce study revealed that while 65% of practitioners believe they prioritize the buyer’s needs, only 23% of buyers feel that way — indicating the need to pivot.
To deliver those better buying experiences, practitioners are doubling-down on their account-based efforts: 57% of marketers plan to increase their investment in account-based strategies, while 45% indicated they want to test and/or deploy ABM campaigns throughout 2024.
Throughout this special report, we’ll highlight the key trends and challenges practitioners are facing with their account-based strategies. Specifically, we’ll discuss:
- How to improve and maintain sales and marketing alignment to ensure complete coverage of target accounts;
- The role of advanced data analytics and segmentation strategies in delivering hyper-targeted content;
- How to overcome the still-lingering hurdles of data integration, securing organization-wide buy-in and effectively measuring success; and
- Identifying the creative approaches to content creation within the account-based framework.
Uniting Teams Around Shared Initiatives
If companies had a penny for every time they were told their marketing and sales teams were unaligned, they’d have enough money to invest in resources to bring those departments into lockstep. With studies suggesting that 90% of practitioners see misalignment across strategy, content, processes and culture, leaders need to get to the root of their alignment problems. According to Kahlow, the cause is often because companies are too comfortable in their functional siloes.
Leveraging Keyword Marketing & SEO
The benefits of collaboration go far beyond merely creating stronger interdepartmental relationships — aligned teams also have more success with content strategies. Historically, 60% to 80% of the content created for sales teams isn’t leveraged due to a lack of communication and misunderstanding of needs. To help create better content that’s valuable to both sales and marketing, Kahlow noted that’s not enough to create assets that resonate with accounts; instead, it should also resonate with search engines.
Leveraging Tech & Analytics To Unify Teams & Data
On the topic of disastrous CRMs, Gartner research found that 30% of B2B customer data is inaccurate on average — and for 64% of practitioners, the No. 1 data challenge in maintaining database quality is old or outdated data. Further, a study from WhatTheyThink indicated that while 85% of marketers consider their data strategy to be strong, only 32% leverage that data effectively to deliver a cohesive customer experience. According to DigitalOcean’s Steve Armenti, this is because marketers are only good at asking for data — not actioning it.
