Why Your ABM Tiers Are Holding Back Your Pipeline

I remember the very first marketing course I took in university. We spent an entire week learning about segmentation and how to think about factors like age, family, hobbies, and lifestyle that might influence a customer’s purchase decision. My team and I were so proud of our mock business case recommending Snapple sell its fruit-flavored juices in larger pack sizes to appeal to parents of kids who play sports. 

Thankfully, I graduated from university a long time ago, and it’s time to graduate beyond traditional segmentation as well. 

In B2B marketing, account segmentation often results in some version of the ABM pyramid. An easy-to-understand diagram that seemingly gives marketing teams a way to segment their audiences based on something impactful, the engagement they have with your company. More robust programs may overlay additional segmentation, running distinct ABM campaigns for different vertical segments or geographies, but they largely come down to separating accounts by tier.

More often, an account is in market because something changed internally: a new CMO, a contract up for renewal, an expansion into a new country, or a product launch. In that sense, engagement is the lagging indicator of a decision that was already being made.

On top of that, the ABM pyramid lends itself to generic messaging in the awareness stage, with the most specific and impactful use cases being saved for the companies that are already showing engagement. Once account research has taken place, and bespoke campaigns have been created, marketing teams do actually speak to a buyer's unique situation that has driven them to engage - but only well into the sales process. The messaging that lands the hardest is reserved for the most engaged accounts, whilst the “1:few” and “1:many” tiers  get a more generic vertical-based positioning. Certainly, we can segment accounts based on firmographic information, such as geographic territory, revenue, company size, and industry vertical. But are these really the right factors to build a campaign around? 

Not all companies in the Hardware category, for example, have the same needs, so is targeting them all with category-specific messaging and creative really going to move the needle? Probably not.

Cohort-based marketing goes beyond firmographic segmentation and incorporates B2B sales factors, such as buying stage, buying committee structure, known contacts, account-level intent, and the current solution that sales will need to displace. A Hardware brand and a Pet Food brand that both work with the same software competitor probably have more in common than two Hardware brands running their business on entirely different systems. 

Rather than limiting ourselves to an artificial definition of “1:few” in the ABM pyramid, we can build cohorts around use cases. If we create a compelling 1:1 pitch for a single priority account, we can generalize the message and extend the campaign to any other accounts that have the same use case. Similarly, we can run a winback or cross-sell campaign over a longer period of time, dynamically including accounts into the campaign when they become relevant. 

Cohort-based marketing allows us marketers to run campaigns that speak to specific needs, such as: 

• Moving beyond education. If you have a group of accounts in which key buyer personas are consuming a lot of top-funnel educational content, but never reacting to solution-specific content, then likely they aren’t in evaluation mode yet. You can stay top of mind by hosting tactical education sessions or share groups, such as running a workshop with a complementary tech partner.
  
  
• Buying committee expansion. If you have a group of accounts in which you have engagement from the same persona across each, but are missing other relevant personas, you can enable those champions with “convince your CMO” or “convince your finance colleagues” style content.
  
  
• Partner prospecting. If you and a channel partner have overlapping target accounts for a specific product line, you can jointly target them with a better together use case, and bring it to life with a real customer advocate at a roundtable.
  
  
• Easy adoption entry point. If you’re trying to cross-sell a product into existing customers, find the accounts that are actively engaged in the same feature or use case of their current product. Run a how-to campaign to help them do one thing better, either by maximizing value of their current product or trying one new feature for free. Highlight the users, and make them the champions. Use the engagement as an entry point to have a cross-sell discussion.

When we think about account cohorts in this way, it doesn’t require drastically different content and creative to run each campaign. Instead, we can repurpose compelling assets, and tailor the message, use case, and call to action to each group. In this way, we can achieve scalability with account-based marketing. 

The job of B2B marketing can’t be to wait for accounts to engage and reward the ones that do. It’s to recognize what’s already happening inside of the companies you want to reach, and meet them with a message that speaks to the moment they’re actually in. The pyramid is organized by self-serving fit, the Cohort is organized by reality, and companies that can speak to those realities are going to see much more success in their marketing.