In B2B sales and marketing, you’re not selling to individuals. You’re selling to companies. To find and target the right companies, you need to understand them not just as potential customers, but as organizations with specific characteristics, structures, and constraints.
Selecting the right accounts to pursue in your ABM program is perhaps the most consequential decision you’ll make. You could have brilliant messaging, flawless execution, and world-class coordination between sales and marketing, but if you’re targeting the wrong accounts, the results will disappoint.
In B2B sales, the length of the sales cycle directly impacts your business. A sales cycle that takes six months instead of three means you need twice as many deals in progress to hit the same revenue. It means more resources, more cost, and more uncertainty.
Personalization is increasingly expected in B2B interactions. When you receive an email from a vendor, you expect them to know something about your company. When you visit their website, you expect to see content relevant to your industry or company size.
Most B2B companies have a sales pipeline problem. Not too many leads, but not enough good leads. The leads that do come in are often poor quality, not sales-ready, or misaligned with what the sales team can actually close.
Your Ideal Customer Profile is the foundation of every strategic decision your company makes. Which accounts to target. Which prospects to close. Which content to create. Which partnerships to pursue. Which product features to build. All flow from a clear understanding of your best customers.
In consumer marketing, ad targeting often focuses on individual demographics and behaviors. Show a coffee ad to coffee drinkers. Show a fashion ad to people interested in fashion.
In B2B sales, timing is everything. The difference between reaching out to a prospect at the beginning of their buying journey versus after they’ve already chosen a competitor can mean the difference between winning a deal and losing it.
Intent data powers modern ABM. It tells you which accounts are actively looking for solutions like yours. But the intent data market is crowded. Bombora is the largest, but competitors like 6sense, Demandbase, and newer players like Abmatic are gaining share.
Every sales and marketing team has limited resources. You can’t pursue every prospect with equal intensity. You have to make choices about which companies and customers to focus on.
Your website is often the first and most frequently visited touchpoint for prospects evaluating your solution. Yet most B2B websites serve the same experience to every visitor. A Fortune 500 prospect and a startup get the same homepage. A prospect already familiar with your solution and a complete newcomer see identical messaging. This lack of personalization leaves significant conversion opportunity on the table.
In traditional demand generation, companies use lead scoring to prioritize inbound prospects. A lead takes certain actions (visits pricing page, downloads a resource, opens multiple emails), accumulates points, and gets passed to sales when it reaches a threshold. Lead scoring works for traditional channels.