Contact-Level ABM: Strategic Advantage for B2B Marketers

Thank you so much, everyone, for joining and your interest and your time, we certainly appreciate it. Again, my name is Doug Madey. I lead the comms function here at Influ2, and we're going to be hosting a discussion today, obviously, by the slide you can see right now on the strategic advantages for B2B marketers using contact-level ABM. So, a few housekeeping things right at the top. Yes, this meeting will be recorded, so if you're on it right now, don't worry, you're going to get an email afterwards, and you'll get a recording of the whole discussion. The deck will be available as well. If you have questions throughout the talk, please feel free to drop them into the chat, but we will be saving all Q&A to the end. So, just know that if you have a question, we will get to it, but we're going to wait for the end of the discussion. So, with that, I'd like to introduce our presenters today. Dmitri Lisitski, co-founder and CEO of Influ2, and Nora Conklin, Principal Analyst with Forrester Research, focusing on demand and ABM. Dmitri and Nora, welcome, thank you for joining us.

Thank you, excited to be here.

Awesome. So, Nora, you headed up this research, so why don't you kick us off here?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again, and thanks for the introduction.

So, I'm here to help and share some of the findings of a quantitative survey that Forrester put together. Influ2 had approached us to validate some of the things that they were seeing in the market, which were confirmed by some of the things that we at Forrester were seeing in the market, particularly that ABM has proven itself to be a successful approach. This is something that we've written about extensively and spoken about at Forrester, ABM has proven itself more successful than traditional demand gen programs, but that people are still having challenges in realizing the full benefits of ABM or in putting it into practice. That's something we'll speak more about in a moment.

The questions we wanted to see, particularly with this survey, were: did B2B marketers agree that targeting individual buyers within an account was critical? Was this something that they thought would pay off in business results? Was this something that they were having challenges with? If so, what sorts of challenges? How was it affecting their operations? These were the sorts of questions that we wanted to ask, with the observation or assumption that this was a critical element to ABM success, and that it would pay off in business results to the tune of stronger sales alignment, faster deal cycles, and higher ROI.

So, that's a bit about the framing, or what shaped this survey. We received responses from 163 B2B marketing decision-makers in the U.S., and I'll share a bit more about the firmographics and the makeup of this audience.

As we said, all from the U.S.—this was not a global survey. 100% of our respondents were U.S.-based and in B2B marketing. The majority came from small and mid-sized businesses, although there was some representation from larger organizations of 20,000 employees or more. About 20% of respondents came from that larger organization size.

And we had a good mix and representation of industries. We did have the most representation, about 10%, coming from technology—either technology provider or technology service companies.

As we said, we wanted to hear from B2B marketing decision-makers, so all of our respondents came from manager titles and above. The majority, as you see, over 60%, had a VP or director title, although we also had some managers and some C-level representation.

The majority, 60%, said that they were either solely responsible for their ABM strategy or were part of the team or group that shaped ABM strategy in their organizations. And again, we're talking demand and ABM here, so all of our respondents had demand and ABM responsibilities, although we did track their full set of responsibilities. Some also were responsible for digital, field, or product, as an example.

Before we take a look at what these respondents told us and how they thought about those questions that we posed, I wanted to share a bit more about the underlying data and the backstory in terms of how we shaped that hypothesis and wanted to know more about these questions. I mentioned the findings from the Forrester side that ABM has proven itself to be more successful but is still posing challenges in organizations. We at Forrester field a survey on a biennial basis every two years about the state of ABM to see how ABMers are using ABM, how they're using technology, how they're shaping their programs, etc.

When we did this survey in 2022, we found that 1 in 4, or 25%, of respondents were found to be doing what we called in the report “ABM in name only.” In other words, they said, yes, I'm responsible for ABM, I'm doing ABM programs, but when we asked further questions about how they were working internally, how they were putting these programs in place, they were found not to adhere to ABM best practices.

Now we fast forward to our most recent survey, which was conducted in 2024, and the number hasn't changed very drastically. It's now 1 in 5 respondents, or 20%, that are doing ABM in name only. So, while that is a modest decrease, we're talking about a pretty long time horizon over a couple of years where there hasn't been a dramatic shift.

So, we definitely see that, while it's not the majority, there's a significant and stable set of ABM practitioners that are having trouble putting the best practices of ABM into play. And that was part of the reason that we wanted to look a little bit closer and partner on this research—to see what exactly were the challenges that they were facing as relates to their engagement efforts.