Bridging the Gaps: Finding the Buying Group
Buying groups are the basis for successful ABM. Yet, how do you map them? AI removes the manual tasks no one wanted to do anyway.
ABM is everywhere. Everyone is doing it. Traditional lead generation approaches focus too much on the individual and not enough on the actual customer. That led to the widespread adoption of ABM, with its focus on buying groups rather than individuals. Yet, the concept of a buying group has always been loosely defined. Everyone knows that ABM should be based around them. Yet, it's always unclear what a buying group looks like in practice. The concept is elusive, only matched by the difficulty in identifying who belongs to a specific buying group for a specific opportunity.
Finding Influencers
Ultimately, the marketing view of an account doesn't neatly fit actual corporate structures. Many large companies will have multiple concurrent relationships open with the same vendor. According to ABM best practice, the individual subsidiaries behind those different relationships should be split into separate buying groups so that campaigns can be personalised accordingly. In reality, marketers rarely bother. Mapping contacts to buying committees is often a manual task carried out by sales during account qualification. After all, most sales reps will know the key decision makers for a potential opportunity. Finding the critical influencers is far more difficult.
Marketers want to be talking to the entire account. The challenge is actually identifying who all the relevant stakeholders are. It's all very well researching relevant job titles at prospect accounts, but that won't give you all the key names. Buying committees have expanded enormously in recent years, and will continue to do so. The relevance of each contact can never be certain unless you have a clear view of the specific purchasing processes and corporate hierarchies within each company. That requires the type of account-specific intelligence that only a top sales rep can glean. Yet, it's still an essential step towards successful account based marketing.
AI Identification
Thankfully, AI is helping to provide a partial solution. ABM platforms now have added functionality to automatically map the buying group for each account. Buying group identification algorithms will never be a match for a trained sales rep, but they can act as a stopgap during the awareness phases of a buying cycle prior to sales engagement. Lead to account matching has become an integral part of the ABM tech stack, linking newly collected contacts to the relevant account based on domain or company name. Buying group identification takes this a stage further, highlighting related contacts so that gaps in the database can be exposed. It adds a persona layer to the ABM stack, allowing marketers to assess whether they're reaching all the key roles in each target account.
The likes of Demandbase or Anteriad use this technology to sell you the missing buying group members. Third-party data acquisition has its own compliance challenges, which means that it's not viable for many organisations. However, those same third-party databases still hold value, as they are a source of useful insights that can really enhance ad targeting. If you know where the database gaps are most significant, then campaigns can be created around the missing personas to collect those names and drive awareness for future activity. In turn, that increases the value of marketing to the sales rep working the account.
Deeper account penetration is often one of the key objectives driving an ABM approach. Yet, engaging the right contacts is still important. Historically, account penetration KPIs have tended to focus on the number of contacts at each account. Less attention has been paid to whether you're collecting all the top personas. That leads to duplication in the database, and a much less successful ABM strategy. AI enables a more detailed examination of data quality, allowing marketers to look beyond the high value KPIs. At last, marketers can measure the relative completion of each account and automatically identify the buyer role of each contact. In turn, that enables much better account-specific marketing strategies.