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Account Based Marketing - Now with AI!

03/29/2021

As the classic sales saying goes, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your accounts. As new start ups and physically distanced companies realize all year, selling to existing accounts has become an important success factor. Keeping that in mind, Salesforce announced new AI-powered account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities within Salesforce Digital 360 designed to help sales teams scale their campaigns. Einstein Key Accounts Identification analyzes engagement-based buying signals and customer characteristics to identify the accounts most likely to make a purchase. Meanwhile, Accounts as Campaign Members lets companies target an entire account directly even if there are not any contacts for the account.

Statistics

ABM is increasingly seen as critical for marketing teams looking to deliver personalized experiences. In a 2021 Salesforce survey, 92% of business-to-business marketers now cite ABM as “extremely important” to their overall marketing efforts. SiriusDecisions reports that 33% of companies allocated at least 30% of their marketing budgets to ABM in 2016, while in 2017, that percentage increased to over 50%. ITSMA and the ABM Leadership Alliance recently found that 80% of marketers adopting ABM achieve significantly higher returns on investment.

Every business needs to deliver connected digital experiences for their buyers, from anywhere. However, buyer behavior is changing and they are bringing business-to-consumer buying habits to business-to-business purchases. These buyers have done the research, read the reviews, and they know all about the product before the sales team reaches out.

With Einstein Key Account Identification, companies can analyze marketing engagement data across the web and customer relationship management platforms to tier accounts in a prioritized order. According to Salesforce, the goal is to help marketing and sales teams focus on priority accounts, potentially optimizing the resources to close deals faster.

Accounts as Campaign Members allows companies to leverage AI-powered insights to create personalized ABM campaigns for buyers within top-tier accounts. The feature automatically syncs new account contacts into marketing campaigns the moment they are identified. Previously, marketers could only target an account if they had an individual contact in their roster.

The COVID-19 pandemic set off a seismic shift in the marketing industry, as every business was forced to transition to a digital-first world. Previously, business-to-business representatives would meet customers where they were looking to do business: dinner meetings, live entertainment events, and industry conferences. Now, these customer interactions are primarily happening digitally, as Zooms are the new conference rooms and sales deals are closed in home offices. As customer demands for digital experiences grow, business-to-business companies need a platform to build a single view of their customer, identify key accounts, and quickly turn new leads into deals.

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