Account Based Convergence

AI buzz has accelerated the already pressing need to align the technology and data layer of the business. Corporate leaders want internal operations to match the deep strategic partnership between marketing and sales. Everyone wants more from their tech stacks, and marketers rightfully believe that integrating different systems and databases together will deliver a more personalised customer journey. When it comes to marketing technology, consolidation and integration are hot topics.

The Rise of Revenue Tech

Yet, over the last twelve months, one martech trend has flown under the radar. It has been seen quite clearly among martech vendors such as Demandbase, as well as among Sales Automation vendors such as SalesLoft. It has been a significant driver behind the widespread adoption of 6sense among companies of all sizes. It's even been a consideration behind the far more frequent desire for companies to migrate their core marketing and CRM platforms. All of these factors are driving the increasingly deep convergence between martech and sales automation tools.

Now, this is not necessarily a new trend. Martech vendors and sales tech vendors have been trying to encroach on each other's turf for decades. The initial wave of marketing automation promised to address sales use cases as well as marketing ones. When that approach failed to deliver, sales instead adopted new technologies such as Outreach and SalesLoft to fill the gap. The rise of ABM and Revenue Operations has given a new impetus to this trend. ABM vendors of all perspectives increasingly offer solutions that address both sales and marketing use cases.

New Requirements

All this was sparked by changing customer behaviour and the desire among buyers to control the purchasing process. Sales automation vendors have realised they need to move their customers beyond generic drip email sequences, and are developing the tools to run more sophisticated campaigns across more channels. Meanwhile, marketing needs to improve their account qualification process, by taking into account a wider range of factors before passing a lead across to sales.

Unusually, Demandbase were late to this trend. They announced a new sales operations package a few weeks ago. In the interim, 6sense have developed a very successful narrative around intent-based account qualification and BDR-focused account discovery, allowing them to become the go-to ABM platform vendor in many markets. The sales capabilities of 6sense are inferior to a specialist tool, but the platform is widely used among both sales and marketing teams to spot engaged accounts and prioritise follow up activities. That sales outreach can be managed within 6sense, but this is very much an upsell for them. It's the data and discovery piece which is the core capability.

That is a significant contrast to Demandbase which has long focused on becoming the central hub for actually executing account-based campaigns. The account selection and discovery features do exist, but they have been developed to support the campaign automation features of the platform. Demandbase do not want people to use those features as a standalone tool, although they can be. Whereas, 6sense are willing for their platform to be used purely for data management.

Divergence and Convergence

As for the actual sales outreach, that can be managed by CRM or whatever sales technologies exist in the organisation. Sales outreach sequences were never just about email, although sending BDR emails has become the primary user case for the platforms that send them. Earlier this year, Google caused a panic among BDRs by imposing stricter deliverability requirements for cold email campaigns. We saw a considerable effort by both vendors and sales teams to expand the scope and content beyond generic book a meeting messages.

Better, more personalised, sales automation sequences are undoubtedly a good thing, but they do increase the overlap between sales campaigns and marketing campaigns. All that requires better alignment between departments and technologies to ensure conflicting messages aren't being sent. Both marketing and sales need to see the same version of the funnel, and have the same understanding around where each account is in the buying cycle.

That need for alignment not just at a strategic level, but also for each individual account is why martech and sales technology are increasingly converging. Two decades ago, CRM was supposed to offer the solution. A decade ago, it was marketing automation. Now, a fully mature ABM tech stack has emerged to offer a new solution to the same challenge.

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