ABM 2.0: The New Wave

Shownotes

Today’s episode features Shashank Salunkhe. Listen as he shares his wisdom on solving the B2B marketing challenges with ABM and MarTech with his years of experience. Shashank describes how the concept of ABM X.0 can be used to better understand the buying patterns and intent of customers. This information is valuable for sales teams when writing emails, giving demos, and negotiating deals.

About the Guest

Shashank Salunkhe is the Sr. Manager of ABM & Demand Gen Marketing at LTIMindtree. He has been working in the digital marketing domain for more than 13 years; he started his career with a digital advertising agency in Search and MarTech segment. For the last 6 years, he has been focusing on solving the B2B marketing challenges with ABM and MarTech.

Connect with Shashank Salunkhe

Key Takeaways

• ABM X.0 is a program to leverage ABM insights effectively that matters to your business.
• Marketers can use ABM X.0 to generate customized messaging for different stakeholders in a deal cycle, which will help sales teams to share more valuable insights.
• Understanding how to buy from a customer perspective is very important in B2B sales and marketing.

Quote

“Everybody says we need to speak our customer’s language. So if we can just go beyond that, we should speak our customer’s language plus we should also pay their respect to stakeholders language also.”

– Shashank Salunkhe

Highlights from the Episode

Could you explain to our listeners the concept of ABM X.0?

ABM X.0 is an analytics program that focuses on capturing and utilizing emotions when analyzing data. It is a way of using data to target emotions in order to generate more opportunities for sales. This helps to better understand the buyer persona and what interests or concerns them. ABM X.0 also provides actionable insights that can be used to generate pipelines and convert engagements into opportunities.

If certain tools can give you details like buying intent and buying patterns, why does it become important to understand the buying behavior of your target accounts?

People have different buying patterns, and understanding these buying patterns can be helpful in understanding the buying intent of a target account.

How does Psychographic data play into this? How does it help generate better insights for the sales team?

Psychographic data helps generate better insights for the sales team by helping them understand what the buyer is interested in and what their buying patterns are. This allows the sales team to tailor their pitch and approach to better fit the buyer’s needs and preferences.

Closing the gap – The success of a good ABM program depends on how efficiently it enables the sales team to close deals. How does the current stage that is ABM 2.0 fare on this metric?

In marketing, an ABM program is successful if it enables the sales team to close more deals. ABM 2.0 does well on this metric. Marketing captures impression data clicks, visits, form fill-ups, downloads, and engagement with content. Sales teams can use this data to map it with buying patterns and buying intent. ABM helps to understand the buying signals and to tailor messaging to appeal to different stakeholders.

As a marketer, how do you go beyond just generating insights for the sales team in a deal cycle? What is the next stage of evolution?

The marketer’s goal is to generate insights for the sales team throughout the deal cycle in order to influence the final decision. In order to do this effectively, they need to understand the emotional data points of the buyer persona and speak their language.

Is there a book, blog, newsletter, website, or video that you would recommend to our listeners?

• ABM is B2B. by Sangram Vajre and Eric Spett
• The 4-question Go-to-Market Framework
• Innovative B2B Marketing
• Demandbase resource center (DB Central)

Shout-outs

Anurag Purohit – Head Digital Marketing LTI