What does a successful Account-Based Marketing Stack look like? Here are four examples.

In the last 45 days, I’ve been to three conferences: Revenue Summit, Marketing Innovation Summit, and TOPO Summit — all promising insights into Account-Based best practices and cutting edge technologies to help scale SaaS businesses. Why? Because Account-Based delivers revenue growth. It works for our customers, and now we are in the process of making the shift to an Account-Based approach as well. However, in order effectively orchestrate and measure results, you need a significant marketing stack.

Stats to Set the Stage

Matt Senatore, Service Director, ABM, at SiriusDecisions gave a presentation at the Marketing Innovation Summit called “The 2017 State of ABM: Key Trends and Business Impact.” In a survey conducted by SiriusDecisions, respondents stated that certain technology systems / tools will have increased investments of at least 30% for both large ABM and named/industry ABM in 2017 over last year, with investments in Predictive Analytics tools at a whopping 42% increase.

But What Should My Marketing Stack Look Like?

Here are four examples of successful SaaS companies’ Marketing Stacks (apologies for the grainy quality of the images).

1. Peter Herbert of VersionOne shared a presentation at TOPO on “How an Agile Marketing Team Sprinted to ABM Success.” They were part of Engagio’s early adopter program in 2015. Here’s his Marketing Stack.

2. Nick Ezzo of Host Analytics gave a presentation at TOPO on “How to Execute ABM Like a Rock Star.” Nick not only shared his Marketing Stack but also his 360° view of ABM at Host Analytics. He spends 25% of his marketing budget on his stack, and justifies it with a great blog post. Here’s an excerpt:

“I don’t have one hundred people on my marketing ship. I have four. I am competing with organizations that have three times that number. In the case of Oracle/IBM/SAP, ten times that number. That means I need to use computerization and automation to turn my small but mighty marketing ship into a battleship. I wish I had one hundred marketers at my disposal. In the absence of that, I’ll take a kick-ass martech stack. Boom!”

3. Daniel Barber of Datanyze gave a presentation at Revenue Summit called “ABM in Action: How Datanyze Executes Account-Based Marketing Strategies.” Here’s his Marketing Stack.

4. Rob Israch of Tipalti shared a presentation at TOPO called “From 0 to 60: Building a Demand Gen Machine Overnight that Drives Hyper-Growth.” Here’s his Marketing Stack.

Final Thoughts

There is a huge proliferation of tools for the Marketing Stack, and it can be easy to be a kid in the candy store (if you have the budget). A word of caution from Jessica Fewless, Senior Director, Field & Partner Marketing, of Demandbase:

“You can’t buy your way into an ABM strategy. To be successful, do that work before you add technology.”

Meaning, you as the marketer must first truly understand your problem and business process to then know what solutions will help you the best — before you add the toys. As we pull the trigger on our Account-Based efforts at CodeScience, I look forward to sharing the details of our success stories and lessons learned.