As Easy as ABX – A Cost Saving Solution?

We’re living through interesting – and daresay even difficult – times. The economic pressures are impossible to ignore on a personal level, while in business we’re feeling the immediate impact with budget and resources being squeezed.

Return on investment, economic downturn edition

It’s perhaps unusual to view sales/martech as a cost-saving solution, but it’s a huge part of the value that companies like Demandbase are providing for many.

How?

By ensuring their budget, resources, and time are spent only on accounts within their addressable market, and getting rid of the waste associated with the traditional “spray and pray” approach used and abused throughout B2C, but proven ineffective time and again in B2B.

When budgets are being squeezed as tight as they are now, there’s no choice but to ensure that every part of the funding allotted is spent only on companies and accounts that your business can actually sell to. Demandbase was built to deliver exactly this.

Present day, same old story

How does it make sense for a B2B company to advertise to people it cannot sell to or to target accounts that are not in their ICP, or worse, perhaps may even be competitors?

It doesn’t.

But incredibly, that is exactly what still happens in the B2B landscape today. They spend a large part of their media budget blindly without knowing who is seeing the ads, or even where they are appearing. Would you risk your brand being shown on those dodgy sites?

Worse still, they rely on anonymous CTR rates (with zero insights on who is clicking) and impressions delivered (no idea to whom or where) as the only metrics to measure success.

This is fine as a B2C tactic where you can cast your addressable market net to cover almost anyone, but it simply makes no sense in the B2B world, where the pool of accounts we can actually sell to is dramatically reduced.

If you can’t determine whether your advertising is showing up in front of your target accounts, and are not able to report on the influence you’re having on them, how can you align sales to the effectiveness of your activity? Even more astounding, how can you get buy-in from the CFO/CEO to continue throwing money around aimlessly, effectively wasting much of that budget?

POV: you’re in sales (with account blindness)

From a sales perspective, the best you can hope for with this approach is having the time to sift through a pipeline full of poorly fit opportunities that are unlikely to close.

This not only kills the much desired alignment between sales and marketing, but worse, it results in sales teams wasting their time focused on the wrong opportunities, with nothing to show for at the end of the quarter but a missed quota.

POV: you’re in sales (with account intelligence)

Imagine that every ad impression/marketing campaign and sales engagement is focused only on those well-fitting accounts that your business can actually close on – how does that turn out? You massively reduce the amount of budget, time, and resources needed to execute, instead making those precious resources 100% effective.

From a business perspective, this results in a stronger, more relevant pipeline that will always deliver accelerated sales cycles, higher AOVs, and improved close rates.

It’s not just a wish, it’s reality

Saving time and money while delivering better results should be a best practice for us all in B2B every day of the week. But in today’s climate, it’s essential.

If you’re wasting budget, time, or resources advertising to companies you can’t sell to, chasing accounts your sales teams can’t close, or you’re missing in-market opportunities because you’re focused on the wrong areas, let’s chat. I’ll show you how Demandbase can make all the difference, especially in the current economic landscape.