ABM Expert Q & A Megan Heuer, VP Research, SiriusDecisions How can marketers scale the insight Is content creation a major burden in ABM? How personalized does ABM content need generation needed for ABM? It’s only a burden if Marketing hasn’t done the work to be? The first thing is to understand how your accounts to improve content strategy and is too focused at We see a lot of content still targeted at the top of the are segmented, because there’s a different level of the top of the funnel. funnel for overly generic personas. This happens insight needed for major strategic accounts, versus, when marketers say, “We sell into 20 industries and say, a broad base of mid-market or SMB type It’s a must to tune content development to buyer we’ve got 5 different personas in each and 5 sales accounts. Then for each of those account types needs and all buying stages (not to mention stages and we can’t develop content for all of them.” there will be different insights required to prioritize customer needs and post-sale lifecycle stages, but So people throw up their hands and write something focus and determine what actions to take. This is the that’s for another discussion), and to target the for CIOs in general and call it thought leadership. idea of account personas, where you understand the types of accounts that Sales wants to reach. different sizes and types of accounts in your What happens next is the overly generic content audience and build from there. Smart marketers have already started to develop a goes to Sales and can’t be used because Sales content agenda that maps better to buyer personas and says, “I’m calling a CIO in this specific industry and With segmentation in place, the next step is to use buying stages. Some also layer in industry or other he only cares about these two things.” tools to automate insight gathering and analysis. account-type considerations. These content You need technology that helps you bring together a inventories, when done right, are a starting point to build So marketers really do need to go back to the bunch of different data sources and serve it up in a what’s needed to reach the right contacts in buying drawing board, inventorying their content in a much way that helps Sales and Marketing make good centers in target accounts. So the raw material that the more account-oriented way and identifying holes in choices and timely responses. ABM folks can pull from is getting better. From there, it’s coverage — then creating content that will reach, not customizing so much as configuring new content. hopefully, more than one account. In addition to automated data feeds, there’s also a role for traditional phone-based insight collection. I suggest that marketers worry less about scale Of course, when you have very, very large strategic Generally this works better with a third-party doing it, when it comes to content in ABM, and be more accounts with massive deals, that’s often going to rather than inside tele-functions. Companies who do concerned about relevance — there’s too much be a completely customized content effort. this type of profiling on a regular basis get more content being created for a need that doesn’t exist. information about the accounts than an internal ABM folks need to connect with the people defining business development team can get. the content agenda to make sure that the content will ultimately be useful to help Sales bring value to the accounts that the business cares about growing. 60