I was presenting yesterday and was explaining how many of today's modern marketing techniques are not fit for purpose.  What do I mean?

Lead scoring - I'm aware of one organisation that set their lead scoring so high that only a request from the C-Suite would register as a lead.  The whole process was based on the fact, that unless they were called up by a most senior person it wouldn't register.  This was total arrogance / stupidity, because, of course they said "we sell at C-Level".  There is nothing in there to reflect "real whole", which is the fact that if anybody rings up for information, it is probably the intern.  Which then didn't register as a lead.

SDR Follow Up - The Inside sales follow up assumed again that there was a call was to a senior person in the team.  Do they have budget? No! - Do they have Authority? No! etc, so the call meant no lead ever met BANT.

You may think this is idiotic, but this is a real life example.

So what has this got to do with ABM.  First thing, Is we need to call this Account Based Sales not Account Based Marketing.  To many times i see ABM as an excuse for "sales" to sit back and wait for leads from Marketing.  Rant over.

Every piece of inbound needs to be treated not as a person, but as an account.  An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) should now be a MQA (Marketing Qualified Account) and SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) should be a Sales Qualified Account (SQA). 

We all know that there are (at least) 6.8 people involved in a purchase.  So find them.  One piece of inbound, means there are others also party to that decision.  You need to find them, through research, or of course you may find them through intent data.  It's not beyond the realms of possibility that different people have contacted different suppliers.

Go!