Mark Nardone, EVP at PAN Communications speaks with Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared. Watch the video, listen to the podcast or read the transcript below as they discuss the ever-evolving landscape of an ABM approach to marketing and sales.

Mark Nardone, The Evolution of ABM:

When you target an account base, anywhere from 5-7 targets up to 10-12 different targets inside of a brand, that complexity and the way in which you approach it with content, how do you treat all of that? What does it look like, does it become absolutely overwhelming? Do you have a dedicated team that’s specifically responsible for that target audience inside of the brand?

Joe

I think content marketers and inbound marketers tend to be threatened by ABM. For one, they just finally wrapped their arms around something new, they’ve adapted to it, they’ve honed skills or developed new skills that fit into that world, and then all of a sudden, this wave crashes and now it’s ABM and they’re expected to retool. This shouldn’t be a threat to content marketers, as you just clearly pointed out. When you go with an ABM strategy, you have to have content for so many different roles across buying committees that there’s actually more of a need for content than there is the purely top-of-funnel, demand gen world. I’m not saying that this is right for everybody, but the way we do it is by conducting an inventory of all of the inbound content that we created.

Some of it is totally useless in our world – like “How Selling is Like Game of Thrones” might be good for getting traffic to your blog. I’ll be damned before I go and sell this and that to a VP of sales operations at a serious company. So, we had to do an inventory of our sober content and map that to every member of the buying committee across our customer segment by vertical and by company size. You basically create a master grid, and within that grid you’re going to have some cells that have a surplus of content, and you’re going to have some cells that have gaps. With the size of my team, the first thing I’ve got to do is take the surplus content and modify it to fit the gaps, because I can’t recreate all of that new. And then, if there are very important personas that have emerged that have gaps, I’ve got to either write that in house or contract with experts or people that can turn out really good content quickly – like journalists.

Interested in learning more? Check out other sections from the conversation here:

• Insight from Experts: The Relationship Between Sales and Marketing with Joe Chernov

What are your views on ABM strategies? Let’s continue the conversation @markcnardone.