“I didn’t invent the term, ‘account based marketing,’ but I certainly poured a lot of fuel in that fire.” Jon Miller
Last year, I sat down with Jon Miller and talked about account based marketing (ABM). Wow, a lot has changed in a year as ABM is on the radar of most organizations. Today, I sit down with Jon again to get his thoughts on how the market has evolved and where he sees it going in the next few years.
Q&A Highlights with Jon Miller, Co-founder, Engagio
- Thoughts on the term “Account Based Marketing”? “The whole idea of account based marketing has really taken off over the last two years. In the last two years, the search volume for the word ‘account based marketing’ has gone up 10X, and in the last little over a year since we started Engagio, it’s up 5X. So, there’s huge amounts of increased interest in the term.”
- What’s Driving that Interest? “I think there’s a couple things that are really driving that increased interest.”
1) Being Account-Centric is Easier: “I think that people looked at it back then and said, ‘wow that’s hard, that’s complicated, that’s only for big companies with a lot of staff who are going after really, really, really big deals.’ But, what’s happened in just the last little period of time is new technologies have emerged, and new approaches to ABM make it more scalable and more relevant for companies that are going after different sized deals.”
“People are realizing that it’s not just this big hard complicated thing that’s for the other guys, they’re looking at it and saying, ‘huh, that’s for me, I can do that in my business,’ and a lot more people are adopting it.” Jon Miller
2) Better Awareness: “I think the other thing that’s been happening in just the last year is more and more vendors like us, Engagio, Terminus, who are pretty good at content marketing and buzz building are entering the market and driving content and just driving market creation around the term.”
- In the Next 12-24 Months, Where Do You See Account Based Marketing Going? “Marketing by itself, what can you do? You can buy ads, which is OK. You can hold dinners and other kinds of events. You can send some direct mail. But the reality is, we’re talking about reaching out to accounts. When you reach out to an account, you’re almost always going to at some point need a human to either send a personal human email or make a phone call or do a social outreach. And that’s really the world of Sales and Sales Development.”
- Account Based Sales Development: “And so what’s happened, I think, is you got account based marketing, we’ve seen the rise of something called account based sales development, which is where the prospecting team is trying to go off on their own doing stuff. Even you have some account based sales.”
- The Rise of Account Based Everything: “What we think’s happening in the next 12-24 months is that it’s not going to be about account based marketing, it’s going to be increasingly about account based everything.”
“And the whole idea of ‘Account Based Everything’…. how can I actually coordinate and orchestrate what Marketing does and what Sales does and what Sales Development does to all the people at the account across all the different channels.” Jon Miller
- Football Analogy? “You got the coach, and the coach designs the plays and says, ‘these are the strategies that we want to run.’ Then you got the quarterback, the Sales person is probably the quarterback and says, ‘we’re gonna run this particular play right now,’ for that account. And then the play lines up all the people on my side with all the people on their side and everybody has a role. The running back has to do something, the wide receiver has to do something, the linemen have to do something.
“Just like in account based everything, Marketing has a role to play, Sales has a role to play, Sales Development has a role to play, even the executives have roles to play. It’s about coordinating and orchestrating all of those actions on the play field, that way you can really reach your goals of engaging the account. That’s what we mean by account based everything.” Jon Miller
- What is it like to move from founding one successful company [Marketo] to another [Engagio]? “I’m having a blast, first and foremost. It’s really a lot of fun. Engagio is a year and a quarter old now, but it’s been a pretty amazing year since you and I first saw each other at Marketo Summit last year. Now we’ve got a team, we have 39 customers, we have just over $700,000 of annual recurring revenue which is not a huge number but pretty darn good for a one-year-old company.”
- What are you most excited about? “What I’m most excited about is we just launched our new product, which is all about actually orchestrating those highly relevant personalized interactions across the different teams and across channels. We call it ‘Engagio Playmaker.’”
- OK, now for the really tough questions. If you were stuck on a deserted island and only had one food to eat for the rest of your life, what would that be? “Burritos.”
- Steak or Chicken? “Chicken, a little healthier, no doctors on the desert island.”
Watch the full interview on You Tube.
The post The Evolution of Account Based Marketing: Interview with Jon Miller appeared first on RevEngine Marketing.
