A couple of months ago, Gabe Rogl, the CEO of Demandbase, posted:
“BGM, or Buying Group Marketing, is the new ABM. There’s been a clear evolution the last 15 years that’s led us to the criticality of buying groups.
It started around 2010, when the lead-based approach reached its endpoint. That led to the decade-plus evolution of ABM as a practice, as a job function, and as a technology. ABM was a huge step forward because it focused resources on accounts that led to the greatest LTV and made sales and marketing alignment a priority. But today, the best go-to markets are supercharging ABM by operationalizing buying groups as:
- Not everyone in an account is relevant to the sales cycle.
- There are more people involved in a sales cycle than ever before.
- Accounts can purchase multiple products, focusing on the account alone without using buyer groups as a data object. This makes it very difficult to prospect, sell, forecast multiple opportunities in the same account.
- Engaging buying groups de-risks every phase of revenue creation. Pipeline, win rates, renewal, expansion.
- It is an absolute competitive differentiator right now, because few companies are doing it well.”
Even though Demandbase’s CEO believes that BGM initiatives will drive the next wave of B2B growth, we beg to differ. On this episode, Jessica Fewless at Inverta joined Kristina Jaramillo and Eric Gruber to challenge Gabe’s post and thoughts.
Listen to the podcast:
In the podcast, Jessica, Kristina and Eric discussed:
- Buying group marketing is not the same as ABM. ABM serves a very specific purpose, and should be layered on top of a solid demand gen foundation, one based on buying groups. Jessica compares the BGM and ABM relationship to the relationship between Bourbon and Whiskey. All bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon. Whiskey is marketing to buying groups. It’s just good demand gen. It’s the way your demand gen engine should be tooled. It’s a go-to-market thing. All go-to-markets should be based on a thoroughly vetted ideal customer profile, and with a knowledge of who the buying group is that is going to be involved in the purchase decision of your solution. That is a demand gen, that is a go-to-market function, period. Full stop, Bourbon is the ABM. It’s a very specialized type of whiskey that focuses on landing and expanding a certain number of accounts that are strategically important to your business. You’re doubling down on personalization and becoming personally relevant to these accounts, to specific buyers, their challenges, and what they need. While BGM focuses on personas, ABM focuses on the human buyers in the accounts you want to land and expand.
- The way BGM should work in an account-based GTM – First, we start by focusing on demand gen programs that source the pipeline on buying groups with your ICP. It’s your one: many program. Then we are going to take the engaged accounts and look for similar situations that buying groups in your ICP are maybe facing or going through, experiencing, and then cluster them into a one-to-few program. Once you prioritize, the strategic accounts that have the greatest predictability of landing and expanding with you, you take a 1:1 ABM approach and focus on the account story. You’re using that account story to enable the buying groups to come to a consensus, get on the same page together, and have the same vision in moving forward.
- How buyer-group marketing should change how demand gen is being executed today, the next steps that ABM should take with engaged buying groups. Most importantly, the ABM roundtable discussed how we can bring the different buyers together to move florward with a big deal where your solution is embedded across the enterprise. While BGM marketing is nothing more than persona-based marketing – ABM is about speaking to and with the human buyers, stakeholders, champions and even the blockers to drive the greatest revenue streams possible YoY. It’s about having the right interactions and delivering the right account experiences across the buyer’s journey and customer lifecycle.
Next steps…
After you listen to the ABM Done Right Podcast episode with Jessica Fewless, Kristina and Eric, read our post on the account-based GTM. You’ll see the role BGM has on an account-based GTM but also see it’s not something that will replace ABM. It should make teams do smarter demand gen that feeds ABM programs with the right accounts and the right buyers.