Account-Based Orchestration: The Last Piece of the ABM Puzzle

With SiriusDecisions event happening last week, I’ve seen a ton of Account Based Marketing, Account Based Everything, Account Based Whatever posts.

It got me thinking about the Account Based approach and why so many tools are necessary. So much effort and time can go into not only convincing internal teams to move to Account Based strategies but also implementing that strategy. It’s a lot of hard work and constant work.

It’s the leaky bucket, drip by drip, that’s your tweaking of everything in every tool you have. It shouldn’t take much time but before you know it you walked into work on a Monday and now somehow it’s a Friday. Where did your week go!?

Living in the ABM world you start to notice that each tool is great at what it does. Set up whatever bit of ABM you want within their tool and you’re off to the races. Easy enough right?

The problem comes in when you have multiple tools that you have to log into and set the parameters.

Let’s say you have your predictive tool, your marketing automation tool, a display ad tool, and a technology revealing tool, and of course your CRM. Five tools, five set ups, five different work flows with none of those five tools playing nicely with one another.

We call it the “Frankenstack”. Started off as a joke, but all jokes are rooted in a bit of truth.

The time sink with each tool you add is massive! Each tool as valuable as it may be, requires a human touch with constant updates. Marketers don’t have free time. When’s the last time you came into the office, kicked off your shoes and watched TV all day?

The Answer? Orchestration Across Platforms!

Orchestration should let you get a dynamic flow of data, users, and accounts without the daily hassle of you manually following up on everything. Does the conductor of an orchestra play every instrument everyday? Of course not, so why should you as the conductor of your Marketing Orchestra?

The Conductor runs the entire orchestra telling each musician when to play their note. Data orchestration should do the same. Which tool sends which piece of data and when.

What if you could run one set-up and trigger workflows within your entire ABM flow? Conduct your Account Based Strategy from one tool.

A user comes onto your website, looks at your pricing page and a blog post and leaves without reaching out. You can go set up a workflow to reveal that user within Clearbit, push that user into Salesforce. Then you can have your display ad tool pick them up and serve ads to them while also then adding them to your marketing automation tool. From there you put them in a specific drip campaign and then enrich the user and account with their tech stack only to figure out they’re not a good fit. A lot of work for 0 return, pretty disheartening isn’t it?

That’s a huge time sink for you to set up all those workflows with little to no return.

So many tools plug into Salesforce or your CRM, which means Salesforce can be your middle man for everything you want to do, but you don’t necessarily want to run everything out of Salesforce.

Let’s be real, if you pushed everyone who came to your site into Salesforce your MQL to SQL conversation rate would be pretty sad because not everyone who comes to your site fits in your Ideal Customer Profile or “ICP”. Let’s keep Salesforce clean. Your Salesforce admin might even thank you.

How Do We Take Our Time Back? And How Does It Work?

By orchestrating your data and triggering your ABM workflows you’ll get your time back. Put in the initial effort to set everything up correctly and then it’s smooth sailing.

Get that user’s company’s technology stack from an enrichment tool, like Datanyze or Clearbit. Does the stack fit the ICP? If so, perfect move the user onto the next checkpoint of your Account Based Strategy.

Tech stack matches but is the user in the market for what you’re offering? Send them to your predictive tool dynamically! You don’t want or have to send everyone to your predictive tool. If the company isn’t in your ICP, why see if they are in the market, it’s not worth your time or effort if you KNOW they aren’t going to be a fit.

Tech stack fits and they are in the market. Now we are getting somewhere. Do we want to send ads to the company to get the “Halo Effect”? If they’ve taken certain actions on the website such as visiting your pricing page or viewing a few blog posts, it might be worth a couple dollars of ad spend. Perfect, we can make that happen.

If they viewed a blog post about a certain feature maybe we should put the user into a drip campaign to nurture them along to get them more engaged with your brand to ultimately drive them to get to sales. Done.

With Account Based Orchestration you can take back the power. One way to orchestrate is by having a Customer Data Platform. Is a CDP right for you?