Account-based madness: The new craze in B2B

Account-based marketing is not necessarily a bad idea, but B2B brands focus too much on personalisation, targeting and loyalty when executing it.

Not every new idea is a good idea.

Unless, of course, you work in marketing. In the marketing industry, every new idea is smart and every old idea is stupid. New strategies, new platforms, new creative, new agencies, new management. If it’s a new idea, it must be the right idea!

The problem is that old ideas are much more likely to be right than new ideas. Why? Because old ideas have withstood the toughest test of all – the test of time. Unlike humans, ideas tend to age in reverse, and grow more robust as the decades pass. It’s called the ‘Lindy effect‘.

So what does the Lindy effect tells us about account-based marketing, the most beloved new idea in the B2B marketing industry? Well, given its newness, we reflexively assumed ABM must be a terrible idea. However, as painful as it is – and it is very painful – today we must concede that ABM is not a terrible idea. In fact, ABM is a pretty decent idea, you do it right.

The problem is that today, almost no one in B2B is doing ABM right.

What bad ABM looks like

So what is account-based marketing, exactly?

ABM is a strategy in which the marketing department delivers personalised communications to best-fit accounts, which are prioritised based on data from the sales team. According to enthusiasts, ABM is a much more efficient approach than the ‘outdated’ alternative: targeting a massive number of buyers with one-size-fits-all creative.

This seems to be the most commonly accepted definition of ABM, so it’s what we will henceforth refer to as ‘bad ABM’.

What’s so bad about bad ABM, you ask?

Well, bad ABM is actually three bad ideas – personalisation, hypertargeting and loyalty marketing – mashed together into one unholy monstrosity. We must slay this Frankenstein before it eats the brains and budgets of any more B2B marketers.

Bad ABM: The personalisation problem

Bad ABM assumes…

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