Lead-based and account-based marketing approaches that grew out of marketing automation are flawed and prevent marketing teams from quantifying their value. A middle ground fixes this: focusing on opportunities instead of leads or accounts. Daniel Raskin, co-founder, CMO and CPO of Mperativ, discusses the strategies and tools to leverage this middle ground to drive revenue.
The advent of marketing automation was a “Big Bang†moment for B2B marketing. It empowered marketing leaders to shift from “gut-based marketing†to “metric-driven marketing,†leading to the development of marketing science, where marketers try to use scientific methods to measure their impact and convey quantifiable results to the rest of the business. Yet while marketing automation technologies have succeeded in helping marketers to become effective at generating and converting leads, the resulting marketing strategies built on this success are fatally flawed. Both the lead-based and account-based marketing approaches that grew out of marketing automation are defective at their core and prevent marketing from quantifying their value.
Why Lead-based and Account-based Approaches Are Flawed
These approaches are built on faulty assumptions about how B2B buying decisions are made. Forrester researchOpens a new window shows that 94% of B2B buying decisions involve groups of three or more people. In reality, groups of people make B2B buying decisions, not individuals or entire accounts. As a result, teams that implement traditional lead-based or account-based marketing are disconnected from how the rest of the business measures growth and from real life! The outcome is that marketing teams struggle to obtain rich data that connect their activities to revenue, raising a lot of suspicion about marketing’s actual impact on the bottom line.Â
This begs the question: are the foundational marketing practices employed today the only way? Or are we due for another “Big Bang†moment that will reshape how we think about marketing as an orchestrator for the business?Â
For its time, lead-based marketing was a step in the right direction, while account-based marketing has also served a purpose but is now an over-rotation. A middle ground fixes the fatal flaw: focusing on opportunities instead of leads or accounts aligns the entire business on revenue and connects marketing squarely to results.
See More: Account Mapping: The Right Way To Achieve ABM Success
Account-based Marketing Creates Misalignment
With many marketing teams too focused at the individual level on capturing contact data and generating MQLs, account-based marketing was well-intentioned as a response. It came about as an attempt to create a broader view out of the narrow focus on leads. Today, almost 70%Opens a new window of marketers use account-based marketing methods to boost outcomes. However, it has quickly become clear that this does not solve the chronic misalignment between marketing and the rest of the business because many of the fundamental marketing metrics and outcomes have not changed.Â
While account-based marketing tries to broaden the narrow lead-based view, it’s far too macro of a lens to produce meaningful results. An account is simply not a helpful way to think through marketing strategy. People across different functions have widely varying interests in different products depending on their current challenges. Additionally, generating interest at the account level says very little about actual buyer intent and the likelihood of existing quality sales opportunities. It forces sales teams into the position of finding a needle in a haystack because the starting point marketing gives them is too broad to be helpful. Marketing should instead be helping to narrow the focus by surfacing the buying group. Account-based marketing is essentially shotgun marketing under a shiny new name.Â
Adding to this confusion, researchOpens a new window finds that 42% of sales and marketers believe sales teams are overwhelmed by the amount of data available on their account-based platforms. And while account-based marketing had it right by attempting to shift away from leads, it still lacks alignment on metrics with the rest of the business. ForresterOpens a new window agrees, stating that using a traditional account-based marketing approach these days is not enough. Marketers must rethink their approach.
Here’s how the misalignment caused by lead-based or account-based marketing often plays out in companies today. Inside sales teams want to be focused on generating quality opportunities to hit pipeline generation and revenue goals. However, they’re held back by their relationship with marketing because marketing and inside sales are incentivized differently. Marketing teams are dependent on inside sales converting leads quickly to hit their goals, increasing the pressure on inside sales teams to be speed- and volume-driven and convert leads as fast as possible. These tactics are counterproductive to the ideal scenario wherein inside sales would take the time to qualify each high-quality opportunity and attach more people to it instead of just one lead. By aligning around lead-based or account-based metrics, marketing creates conflicting pressures for inside sales and hurts the quality of sales opportunities moving down the funnel.
See More: Conversational ABM: A Solution to the Personalization at Scale Challenge
Revenue Marketing is the Way Forward
Revenue marketing is a new strategic approach that uses opportunities to track the entire customer journey, so the B2B buying decision is accurately represented even before the first engagement with a potential customer. Focusing on the opportunity offers a balance between the overly granular lead-based approach and the excessively broad account-based approach and aligns marketing strategy with the reality of revenue generation.Â
Because sales teams are already focused on opportunities, revenue marketing allows marketers to unify their processes with sales, agree upon standard success metrics, and create a seamless handoff. But most importantly, a single view of the customer journey allows marketers to connect their activities to revenue results across every touchpoint.Â
Revenue marketing takes the last step in marketing science that lead-based and account-based marketing couldn’t fulfill – quantifying the value of marketing, so marketing leaders can build consensus on what works to drive growth.Â
The main inhibiting factor to getting a revenue marketing strategy in place is that marketing teams are expected to figure it out on their own. The technology exists for marketing to focus on opportunities, but it’s left to marketing to piece it all together. Marketing shouldn’t be dragged too deep into the business of data integration, data security, flexible data models, and scalable data architectures. This is a distraction from marketing efforts and often leads to spiraling costs for developers and consultants to constantly customize your platforms. Marketing leaders need to work closely with data engineers and technologists to implement the new revenue marketing model or seek a solution that eliminates the complexity of building it all independently.
With a revenue-centric model, marketing can seamlessly be aligned with sales, customer success, and finance on the cause and effect relationships between marketing activities and revenue outcomes. Interdepartmental collaboration using the common language of revenue delivers a unified way to understand the customer journey and align on a revenue operations strategy.
Do you think revenue marketing is a better approach? Tell us your thoughts on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to know!