ABM Technology Ecosystem

This week, my business partner B2B Marketing held its annual ABM Forum in London and, leading up to the conference, we have been working on a new edition of our Martech Spotlight Report for that topic. As always, my role in the B2B Marketing team is to present an overview of the vendor landscape and profile the most important vendors.

I recall way back in 2016 writing a blog at Forrester titled something like “ABM: Let’s move from Cacophony to Euphony”. ABM was being used in reams of promotional copy distributed by marketing consultancies, data service providers, and software automation vendors alike, but it was not being clearly defined by any of these actors. ABM ended up meaning different things to different people. And this has not really changed — my most recent survey for Research In Action found that four out of five found ABM effectiveness falls short of their expectations. So much for 8 years of marketing spend by all those vendors!

In our 2016 Forrester ABM landscape report, we wrote that many organizations may not have to buy anything at all for their first ABM initiative; it is more than likely that they already have automation in place that they can deploy. We also called out the fact that there are other potentially useful solutions that haven’t (yet) incorporated the ABM moniker into their marketing messaging.

So, one important difference in the new edition of the Martech Spotlight Report for ABM is that we have expanded the landscape extensively – it is not only those vendors who use the term in their messaging. We have created what we call an ABM Technology Ecosystem which is based on the overall ABM process. This is how we see the ABM process:

1. You Build Your Audience. Here, you need CRM tools and perhaps Data Enrichment tools.
2. You Research the Accounts you’re targeting. For which you need Intent and Predictive Analytics tools.
3. Then you map out account strategies/campaigns. Deploying Orchestration and even Sales and Marketing Alignment Platforms.
4. For your engagement with accounts, you will use Content, Event Management platforms. More advanced ABM teams will also deploy Personalization and Sales Enablement tools.
5. In the Campaign Execution or Convert phase, you will use your Marketing Automation platform and perhaps also Data Visualization and Programmatic Ad platforms.
6. Do measure your ABM success, you’ll need to use Analytics tools, even ROMI Dashboards or Visitor Intelligence Software.

That is a total of 16 different martech categories involved., each with their own landscape of vendors. All of which means that I needed to add some 35 new vendor profiles to the report as well as updating the 25 vendor profiles from the 2023 report. The overall Ecosystem graphic was presented at the ABM Forum while the full report will come out in December.

In a Martech Vendor Spotlight, we score each vendor for four important criteria, which we see as being critically important to potential buyer teams when evaluating and shortlisting vendors. The stress is on CUSTOMER SUCCESS more than individual product features, so the criteria are:

• Market Momentum. Here, we have assessed how well a vendor helps prospective buyers to understand the solution offering and how it fits into their environment.
• Customer Focus. Almost all software solutions are now delivered as-a-service and the most successful SaaS vendors are those who help their clients on an ongoing basis, not just in response to support calls.
• Price vs Value. As with any business investment, marketing executives need to be assured that the investments they make in technology are providing an appropriate payback.
• Implementation Success. The true test of a business partnership is the commitment from a vendor to supporting the integration of their system with whatever the client has in place already.

We score each criterion as Strong, Good, Medium, or Low.

Write me if you would like to get more details of the vendor evaluations.

Always keeping you informed!  Peter