Globally, organizations across different industries have embraced account-based marketing (ABM) to reshape their go-to-market (GTM). This is a result of fundamental change in how businesses buy and how B2B marketers must operate. The power has shifted from the seller to the buyers, who often have already put their shortlist together before they have direct communication with a vendor. The internal make-up of a buying team has also grown more complex as it encompasses different influences in addition to key decision-makers. Fortunately, ABM is a way to more acutely appeal to the needs of a given buying group, which is especially important as they grow in size and the need for role-based personalization becomes critical. ABM is not something that can be undertaken effortlessly. For some organizations, it will be a huge shift from how they currently go to market.

During our virtual event, Focus: What’s the Future of ABM?, Informa TechTarget’s Sales Director, EMEA, Jackie Thomas sat down with MOI Global’s Julie Wisdom and Callum Miskell to discuss research on the top challenges organizations face when implementing an ABM strategy, and how those challenges differ regionally from EMEA to North America. In this blog, we’ll share the key points from their discussion and talk through the challenges organizations must overcome as they build their own ABM practice.

Top five challenges that are impacting ABM (and how to address them)

To better understand the ABM landscape, MOI ran two surveys: Divergent Paths, Converging Strategies and A B2B Market’s Guide to Data Creativity. The data showed a key commonality between North America and the UK and Europe. Namely that data quality, accuracy and availability are perceived as the top challenges for ABM in both regions. However, there were some notable differences in responses as well. For example, alignment between Sales and Marketing was seen as the second greatest challenge in North America but wasn’t among the top five in the UK and Europe. Instead, building a business case for ABM ranked second in the UK and Europe, making it one of the greatest challenges.

Let’s take a look at the top five challenges for EMEA-based organizations specifically, why each is important to overcome and how you can address each one to build a more successful ABM strategy.

1. Data quality, accuracy and availability – For ABM to be successful the marketing and sales organizations must be data-driven because they need information about their target accounts to inform activities such as prioritization and personalization. Data is so foundational to making ABM successful that it’s not surprising that it’s the primary challenge organizations need to overcome. You’ll need to strategize how you can get the firmographic, demographic, and technographic data your team needs to fuel insight gathering, account prioritization, and content personalization.

   Recommendation: If getting the information you need was easy then this wouldn’t be the most prevalent challenge. You’ll need to leverage multiple techniques and sources to get insights into an account and the members of the buying team within it. Marketing and Sales must collaborate to collect current data from trusted third-party sources (like the first-party intent data from Informa TechTarget’s Priority Engine) and validate it as part of outreach and engagement.

2. Building a business case for ABM – Successful ABM starts within your organization and requires buy-in from internal stakeholders. Presenting a viable business case is a prerequisite to attaining buy-in and aligning the organization around the strategy on a larger scale.

   Recommendation: Start by looking at your organization’s current approach. Is it focused on high-volume, lead-based strategies? If spend is high and conversion is low (especially in certain regions) then you’ve already got some metrics to build the case for spending more time making sure your key messages are resonating with key target accounts. The business case needs to demonstrate how ABM will bridge Marketing and Sales so be prepared to build internal support by demonstrating to the sales organization how they stand to benefit. If revenue goals are clear and Sales understands how they can benefit you’ll have a stronger case to bring to senior leadership.

3. Personalized content, communications and experiences – A personalized approach is crucial since we need to target specific accounts and their individualistic needs. However, creating effective highly personalized content at scale is a challenge and for a geographic region like EMEA with a dense concentration of different cultures and languages, localization is a prerequisite to deeper audience-based personalization.Recommendation: Personalization is more than just addressing someone by name, you need to have knowledge of the account, its relevant personas, and what they’re trying to accomplish so you can custom-tailor messaging to engage them. Knowledge of your target accounts’ tool stack is also important given the prevalence of regional service providers in EMEA, unless you’re extremely well versed in a specific industry you can’t make assumptions that different accounts will be having a shared experience.

4. Account and audience insights gathering – Before you can prioritize accounts and personalize your approach you need a deep understanding of the account. The buying group, their needs, and use cases – all of these insights are important to understand how you can provide value to an account and tailor your interactions.

   Recommendation: Intent data and ABM platforms can help you collect or enrich data to better understand what makes an account unique, leading to more effective outreach. At a macro level, you need to conduct or consume research to provide information about relevant markets and accounts within them. At a more micro level you need to collect data on the demographics, firmographics, and behavioral signals of target accounts. However, for marketers, it isn’t just about collecting relevant data on the broader organization, it is also about understanding the ways individuals at a target account are performing their research so you can know what channels to use to reach them.

5. Account prioritization – Since ABM is about driving revenue from a set of target accounts, you need to be able to determine which accounts are worth the maximum effort. While prioritization may be a lesser challenge it’s still a fundamental question that marketers and Sales must grapple with dynamically in real time.

   Recommendation: One approach is to refine your understanding of the ICP and examine past success to look for trends. This can include accounts in similar verticals or with similar levels of maturity that can be indicative of things to look for in prospects. A more buying group-focused approach is to score individual members within select accounts and use intent signals and scoring to prioritize specific accounts that are collectively demonstrating meaningful engagement.

What’s next for the future of ABM

We can expect that data quality and availability will remain a massive challenge for ABM. In EMEA specifically, we’ve seen the impact that GDPR has had, and as regulations evolve, they will inevitably impact the quality of intent data and how we obtain it. No single source will be sufficient, and methods will need to continuously evolve. For example, much was said about the death of the cookie and although Google later backtracked, it’s a reminder that the actions of regulators and vendors can impact the tools that underpin your data strategy. This underscores one of the benefits of Informa TechTarget’s opt-in, person-level intent data. It’s a source of quality data that can’t be found elsewhere and is GDPR compliant.

We can also expect emerging technologies to influence how marketers mitigate common challenges. For example, many organizations are experimenting with incorporating generative AI (GenAI) into their personalization strategy to achieve scale and meet demands. However, GenAI is not a silver bullet and an overreliance on it for content creation or customization can potentially degrade quality and negatively impact the way prospects perceive content. Despite the snowballing adoption, we’ve seen in studies that 52% of organizations consider content quality and integrity a risk when it comes to using GenAI. Marketers will have to continue to assess their trust in existing solutions and determine in which use cases it is most beneficial.

The way we implement ABM will be impacted by the ongoing evolution of available tooling, but ABM will continue to be effective so long as marketers are able to understand their target accounts and personas to drive meaningful engagement.

Enhance your ABM with intent data

Good data is the foundation of any solid ABM strategy, without it you won’t be able to detect and understand intent signals. Informa TechTarget’s Priority Engine is designed to give you what you need to understand, engage, and convert in-market accounts and active buyers with the industry’s most powerful audience, data, and intent insights. Ready to dig into intent signals in your target accounts? Reach out to get started today.

Want to learn more about the future of ABM and where the industry is heading? Check out our recent summit on this topic, Focus: What is the future of ABM?