What Account Based Marketing Looks Like 2025

BDR is one of the hardest jobs. It’s a tough gig. And if agents can help take some of the repeatable tasks off their plate, give them the space to curate personalized responses and outreach to prospects, give them back some time so they can be on the phone doing the actual selling. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Sixense investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. So, Saima, happy actually, I can’t say happy new year according to any number of sources. It’s far too late to be said. Fiscal new year. You can say Fiscal okay. Fiscal new year. Let me see. Aren’t you clever? I’m coming up with a fiscal New Year. Happy fiscal New Year. Save you. You said it, and I you gotta make it relevant. There you go. Thank you. Thank you. So this is actually we’re a couple episodes into two thousand twenty five calendar year, And we are just in for those who have a fiscal year starting in February. Welcome. And I think we wanted to talk about something that we both have been chit chatting quite a bit about. And we’re not gonna do predictions per se. We have some predictions, but what is account based marketing gonna look like this year and going forward? Yeah. And what’s working? Like, let’s be honest. There’s things that No. I’m kidding. There are plenty of things that still work. Lots of things work really well. Let’s talk about what’s working. I mean, again, this is an Adam and Zaima episode. There are no guests, but I feel like we are, qualified to speak on this topic because it’s kind of what we do every day. Yes. So what works and what will always work and will never not work, and this is a bold claim, but is understanding your core ICP and understanding Focus. Who you should be going after. And I don’t know how many times we’ve said ICP. We had a whole episode on it. It comes up every episode. Perhaps we should market the ICP drinking game, but that’s for another time. But that level of focus, that doesn’t change no matter how much technology, AI shifts the way the world changes. No way to argue with that. Agree. Now what might change in the ICP, if I may, the ICP might shift. I think the ICP definition should be extended to incorporate post sale performance, and, you know, you wanna make sure that your ICP is reflective of customers that are successful and the qualities of customers that are successful, whether it’s techno graphics, firmographics, and whatnot. So if today your ICP definition is firmly focused on that initial land, think about expanding that definition beyond that. The other thing around the ICP that doesn’t change, but maybe should if if this is not the truth in your organization, is that sales and marketing and CS all need to be aligned around that definition. There’s no sales list over here and marketing list over here. One definition to rule them all, one source of truth. And that actually goes back to your opening statement about post sale. Right? Because if you’re taking in post sale, well, then CS come on board. Right? And whether you’re a software company or you have any sort of post sale implementation of a product. Right? We we get software tech focus here. But, again, it’s it’s really no different. If you just have a customer, they’re buying x, they’re implementing it, and you want them to be successful, and it may be software, maybe something else, and they’re not, that data has to feedback. And, like, again, CS is gonna help you with that. So that’s driving alignment right there. Okay. So definitely the focus on the ICP, making sure that the entire go to market team is focused on the most winnable and successful accounts for the company. In terms of day to day, Adam, what is working really well? What is working really well? Well, things that are helping to drive personalization and drive an experience. Right? So customers coming to a website and having that website be tailored to their industry or, you know, their specific persona. Like, if we look across things that we do at sixth sense, we’ve talked about persuasion before, but Yeah. Those are always providing a lift. Right? A lift on conversion, let’s just say, if it’s lift. To a demo request or whatever it may be. Engagement, you know, time on-site and just engagement in content. Like, it’s sort of one of those things where there’s little ambiguity on if you create something that’s more relevant to somebody, which obviously what personalization does, like, it’s gonna work. It’s gonna do something. It’s gonna provide that lift. Is it gonna be a hundred percent lift? No. But there are endless use cases of it and endless case studies of success. And so we can talk about internally from what we do here, but it’s it works. And I think we’re in an age now where that level of personalization can get really specific, and what you can personalize is pretty remarkable and how granular you can get. And, again, test and iterate. Your prospects almost demanded at this point. They’re getting a personalized experience in every other part of their lives. Why not on the b two b side? And so whether it’s something as simple as when a specific account within a specific industry hits your page, maybe the logos reflected of your customers on that page should be dynamic and reflect, you know, hey. This is a financial services company. Let’s talk about or let’s at least show the logos of the financial services customers that we have versus another industry. I think that’s like a, you know, a simple thing that is very effective all the way to one to one pages being built for your top accounts that you you’re looking to break into. Yeah. And meeting them, you know, and meeting the CTA where your customer the prospect is in their journey. Right? So if there’s somebody that’s never been to your site before and maybe they are on a target account list, you’re not just don’t start throwing, like, the most high value talk to somebody, give me on say, whatever it may be because, again, they’re not there yet. Right? And, again, we’ll talk a little bit about AI later. And it’s not all generative AI. There’s other AI that’s gonna help that does help from a company that we both know very well to help you understand where those customers and those accounts are in their journey. And when you’re personalizing and you’re providing offers, CTAs, messaging specific to somebody who’s early stage, later stage, again, highly effective to sort of meet the customer where they are. Meet them where they are. And I think that goes into the next thing that we see work really well again and again and something that we in our day to day and in our campaigns we won’t launch a campaign that is not brand to demand. Right? We pretty much all of our campaigns have an early stage, mid stage, and high intent stage component of it. Your brand drives so much of that initial interest, that initial awareness. You want to be invited to the party when someone’s having a party or at least looking to, you know, kick off an evaluation. And the way you do that is by, you know, getting in front of these prospects early and often. And so whether your account based list has a hundred or ten thousand companies on it, you wanna make sure that you are touching them at every part of their journey. And so a brand to demand campaign that is driving early awareness is crucial. And then as those accounts move through that funnel, making sure that you are providing them with relevant, timely, and, effective communication in CTA is critical. And brand is the ultimate weapon to combat all the things that are starting to get harder and harder to scale and harder and harder to do well and to achieve. When you think about SEO is seriously in flux right now. Content marketing in a sense is hugely in flux because now you’ve got AI content being spit out left and right. So, certainly, like, prospects are smart and they’re they’re seeing that. But what’s gonna distinguish between the noise of that? It’s gonna be brand. And this is like this is going back to, like, the very foundation of marketing. Building brand drives demand, gets you through the noise, is gonna make you more successful on every channel because you’re raising that awareness and then, oh, maybe you’re not number one on search anymore or you’re showing up at an an AI overview, whatever it may be, but there’s an awareness that you’ve built with that investment in early stage that maybe you can’t pinpoint measurement down to it. But building that up is only gonna help. It’s more important than ever. More important than ever. And, again, there’s you know, beyond that, the brand name, I think there’s the feeling that, you know, your brand is associated with and things like your communities that you set up, things like your very sort of curated events or the experiences that you are putting out there, even your your tone on social. Is your employee base engaged? I mean, there’s so much that goes into it. And, again, your prospects, whether you are running ABM at scale or even, you know, not at scale, those are really, really tangible things that that have an impact. And and Carrie Cunningham’s buyer’s experience report only emphasizes that. Right? If eighty four percent of your buyers are beginning their journey, kind of knowing which vendors they’re ultimately gonna choose, you wanna make sure that the brand building that you’re doing is part of every campaign that you’re running. In a vast majority of time, the first brand that they actually engage with when they’re again, they’re so far already through is gonna win. Not always, but a lot. So if you haven’t done that work all the way up to that point, you’ve already severely handicapped your ability to to win that that piece of business. So and when it you talked about tone, what isn’t in that report is that if you can make your prospects cry Adam. You had a higher lift. No. I’m not. But there is actually data. I believe it was LinkedIn, did some research on actually the use of humor in some, like, advertisements and all. And, like, that’s I mean, we saw some pretty interesting and wild and fun, we did some of them ourselves, campaigns. I think you’re gonna continue to see really I don’t wanna say off the wall, but really pushing the boundaries of, a, just humor, emotion, storytelling, that’s brand building. Because, again, it’s it’s a way to stand out. And, you know, again, people just appreciate good marketing, especially if you’re in, like, in our world where we’re marketing to marketers, like, that’s a whole different level. But people just say that just stands out and, like, suddenly, like, you will never forget that brand because they had that crazy ad that went viral or or, you know, whatever it may be. I don’t know. I don’t wanna make anyone cry. I mean, not like not like, I’m saying, like, oh, look. I know. Maybe the emotional cry. Maybe happy. Happy tears. A cute puppy or, you know, like, not like, a Marley and me cry. Did you see that movie? That’s a while ago. Like Yeah. I I don’t even have a dog. I can’t even watch any He’s choking up right now. I’m just it’s okay. I’m alright. Alright. Alright. What else is working? So this is an interesting one too. Right? So, again, we’re in this age of buyers are empowered. They are they are running the show. And this came up again. This isn’t some new science of b to b research out from Carrie and team, the concept of the b to b back channel. So what they found in the data is that over seventy percent of buyers are seeking out subject matter experts within a company that they’re potentially they’re evaluating to talk to to get information. What does that actually mean? Because it’s like a bunch of words that I put out there. Let’s just say, for example, somebody’s evaluating a developer in software. Some sort of development environment. They’re gonna wanna talk to somebody within that company that uses the platform because, you know, again, they probably have folks that are users. Reach out to someone you know, if they’re in DevOps, they’re gonna reach out to somebody in DevOps, and they’re gonna wanna talk to them. So for us, we we’ve done any number of different programs against our target account list and the overall, you know, that are connecting those personas. In our case, it’s marketing ops to marketing ops or marketing leader to marketing leader or sales leader to sales leader. Like, that one, I think, is gonna kinda lead we say the b two b back channel, but the rise of the sort of, like, the SME inside of the business is like an influencer. So we talk about I mean, b two b influencer marketing had a huge year in twenty twenty four. It’s gonna continue to grow, but these are internal influencers. Yeah. I mean, we’re already seeing this work in sales cycles. Simon, both of us, where we are in a lot of calls. But bringing it out to the prospect experience earlier, using as a way to generate and to drive demand, I think that’s a huge thing that’s it’s definitely working, and, well, I think it’s gonna be even bigger this year. Yeah. So let me leave everyone with the stat. Seventy seven percent of buyers engage non sellers inside the winning vendor before they will engage with sales. So do with that what you will, but, you know, I think everyone plays a role, and it adds fuel to the fire that prospects don’t wanna initially talk to sales. They wanna do their research, and this is all part of that research. I have a spicy meatball for you. Yes. Platform consolidation. Oh, boy. K? And let me talk about it for a second. So we all have budget restraints. We all have very complex tech stacks. Right? We just interviewed Scott Brinker that’s on on the podcast who’s got, what, fourteen thousand logos on his MarTech landscape now. And this complexity, the budget restraints, the resource constraints that everyone’s having, it’s pushing organizations towards integrated platforms. Right? We are seeing simplified tech stacks. We are seeing that that will drive better integrations across the tech that you have and allow you to use it more effectively. It’ll unlock better data flow, reduce inefficiencies, and, also, there’s a level of kind of security and compliance that comes with having a simplified tech stack that can be used in a better way. Now that’s what we’re seeing. That’s what we’re hearing, but there are voices, Adam, out there Are there? That are talk yeah. They’re talking about, let’s get twelve separate things and then stitch them together. Unbundling the platform. And and I have feelings on that, but I will say I don’t know of any rev ops professional who hears that and is like, yeah. Sign me up. Yeah. And those are the same voices that have said that if you buy this tech, you don’t have a strategy or there isn’t so, again, we could talk about ABM all day long without tech. And there’s place for ABM without tech. By by no means do you absolutely need to have technology, but it will help you scale and it will help you go broad. Yeah. And we’re gonna talk about tech. I mean, you’re listening to the Sixth Sense podcast. I mean, like, give us something. Right? So this concept that you wanna have one solution to build your ICP, one solution for your outreach, one solution for your data, like, I’m gonna be doubles advocacy. Okay. If you are a small business and some of these point solutions that are lower cost and you can pick up some of them and you don’t have to worry about going through, you know, infosec review. You don’t have to worry about you should be worried about it, but if you aren’t worried, you don’t have to worry about because you’re smaller. Compliance and you’ve got some really, really, really smart people who wanna spend their days stitching together fourteen apps. Maybe. I mean, this is as old as software itself. You want a best of breed solution or best of breed where you’re bringing all these pieces together, or do you want an integrated stack? I think I’ve worked at three companies where everything the reason why the company was founded was to take point solutions and create an integrated stack. It doesn’t make any sense, especially if you are I don’t have to be a large enterprise. Even if you have a couple hundred employees and you’re starting to get to that maturity level to just sit there and your your ops people are gonna hate their lives. I don’t get it. I much of my career on the ops side of things. We are seeing a consolidation. We are seeing platforms rise to that challenge of bringing the best of the best into their platforms. And so Bundle your ABM. Don’t unbundle it. Bundle it. Alright. What else is working? Heated there. We did, but it’s okay. I mean, it’s important. You know? It’s just an interesting time. And, again, like, it’s all being played out on social in real time. And then it’s interesting too, those topics that people get so heated about it. It was like, cool. You have an opinion, but, like, it’s okay. It’s gonna be okay. Okay. And we’re all at different points. I think depending on the company, depending on where you are in your journey, there’s, again, to your point, areas where bringing individual point solutions will help. I think if you’re looking to scale and if you’re looking to drive bigger impact, you gotta simplify. Alright. So everything we spoke about up till now, Adam, didn’t hit on the big topic of AI and how that changes the ABM. So I like the fact that so much of what we spoke about in terms of what works is not AI related. Right? Relationships, brands to demand, ICP, events, communities, simplifying your tech stack. But if we’re being honest, AI is a huge force multiplier here and does have huge implications on ABM in twenty twenty five. We’re seeing it ourselves. Right? Again, we work for six cents. So whether it is generative AI and agents or whether it’s all the other types of AI out there. Right? We have predictive AI. We have prescriptive AI. All of those pieces do play a role in scaling your ABM efforts and just making them way more data driven. Absolutely. And I think when we we talk about predictive and, again, like, taking it more general, the ability and I think with generative AI and kind of just the rise of LLMs and all this just advancement is gonna make the ability to look at and already has the massive dataset that you generated sales and marketing team to help build out the model of who the right fit is in ICP. Talk about ICP certainly. Who to go after, what their journey looks like, where they are in their journey. These are, you know, solutions that have existed already. You know, six cents is one of them. They’re going to go further. They’re going to be able to analyze more data. They’re going to take more inputs in and you’re gonna be able to know even more precisely who to go after and when based on where they are in that journey. I think the precision is gonna continue to get better. And then generative AI, we talk about augmenting that. We talk about agents, and we can go to agents now, I guess. Right? We’ve done a little bit of that. But how your how engagement happens to your accounts is huge. You can have the best, your most defined ICP. You’ve got your accounts set, you know where they are on your journey. But if you’re not reaching out to them at the right time or, you know, getting the right touch points and the right message, then you wasted a whole lot of time and a whole lot of money. So in a world of outbound BDRs that we’re doing outreach, which, let’s be honest, like, scaling continuing to see on an outbound team is expensive. It’s, you know, high turnover. You know, you’re hopefully, it’s turnover because they’re moving into your sales team. So these AI and AI agents have a huge opportunity to fill that gap and help not take over, absolutely not, but partner. I know we could talk a little you you’ve got some strong opinion about how that works. Yeah. I do. I mean, BDR is one of the hardest jobs in our industry. Right? It’s a tough gig. And if agents can help take some of the repeatable tasks off their plate, give them the space to curate personalized responses and outreach to prospects, give them back some time so they can be on the phone doing the actual selling, that’s a great thing. And so if you are, you know, looking to understand how AI can supercharge your ABM programs, AI agents are a huge part of it. And then AI in general around making sure you’re focused on the right accounts, making sure that you are prioritizing the right accounts, making sure that you’re leveraging the right signals on how to talk to them, all of it plays a huge role. Yeah. And it’s predictive plus generative plus whatever. Iterative, is that a word, is coming next. But all those things together, you’re so laser focused and on the right place and doing at the right time that it’s only gonna drive, you know, stronger results. Yep. And then finally, I would say bringing it all together, I guess, in an orchestrated program. Yes. No random acts random acts of marketing. I don’t think anyone can ever fully move away from it because there’s always the, you know, the point in time thing that’s coming up that you need to do, but we should have a holistic strategy, and we should be orchestrating this. Right? We should have a combination of always on campaigns that your ICP is involved in, that is speaking to them and engaging with them throughout the journey, whether it’s early stage or late stage. We should have outcomes that are being driven by this orchestration. Right? Somebody might take an action that means they should get in front of sales. Someone might take an action that shows that they wanna understand more, and we should serve up another piece of content to them. AI lets you do this. AI and and tools like Sixense let you orchestrate a journey so that you’re opening up again time from your team so that they’re not manually either stitching this together on an unbundled tech stack or they’re not, you know, having to manually kind of put these campaigns together. It should be a dynamic, you know, set it and forget it, and then review it and optimize it. Yeah. A hundred percent. And, you know, again, orchestration, omnichannel is more important than ever again because some channels don’t perform like they used to. You wanna, again, meet the buyer where they are. And we think about things that are gonna evolve that are not AI related. We talked a little bit earlier about the b two b back channel, but it’s bringing people to the forefront in every channel. So we’re talking about advertising. If you’re gonna run let’s say you’re running video ads, video ads of your SMEs talking about what’s relevant to the personas that you’re marketing to. Things things that just bring real people, not AI in this case, but real knowledge to the process, brings it forward. That whole thing can be orchestrated along with, you know, your standard advertising and and all that type of thing. But in this journey, connecting people to people is hugely important, and you can’t do it without true orchestration. And that comes with tech, That comes with team alignment. You think about your team this year and how they’re gonna work together. And as your company’s getting larger and your marketing team’s getting larger, how are you orchestrating those things? Has to be. Has to be. Okay. So I I think that’s it. I love that things have changed, but everything hasn’t changed. And good marketing is still good marketing. Putting the customer at the center of it is still the focus, and alignment will drive success. Yeah. I think we had I don’t know when we had a white paper or some topic that goes back years ago where it was just ABM is just good marketing was the topic, the name, and it still is. It’s evolved. It’s changed, but it works that you it’s doing good marketing, and you’re focused on who you should be focusing on. And there’s all sorts of bells and whistles to help you along the way, but, ultimately, the the fundamentals are the fundamentals. Here’s to some crazy good campaigns and innovative ideas for the year ahead. Absolutely. I will drink to that. Thanks, Adam. Thanks, Adam. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.