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News & Comment

We talk about the recent firing of Sree Sreenivasan as the head of digital from the Metropolitan Museum, and how he has made lemonade out of this by being very open about his job change status. Also, we discuss how Google will now show you everything it collects about you in a new portal page called My Account that consolidates your browsing and search history, allows you to manage your security and privacy settings, and other important interactions.

Special Guest: Hank Weghorst, CTO at Avention

We talk today with Hank Weghorst about account-based marketing (ABM) and why it is catching on now, along with some of the mistakes that potential users of ABM can first make. Weghorst gave this TED Talk about the process where he describes how his company has assembled a huge database of more than 50 million companies worldwide, and makes this information available to his customers via various desktop programs.

The idea behind ABM is to first figure out what customers you want to do business with, and then go about trying to find them using various Big Data techniques, which is the reverse of what typical outbound marketing programs do. In some cases it is a tougher sell than these traditional marketing programs, but it can be useful, particularly in situations where marketing departments are seeing prospective customers too late in the sales cycle, when they have already made up their minds.

With ABM, a marketer can choose and profile the types of companies that will be successful prospects, and capture the customer earlier in the buying cycle, choosing the accounts that are your best opportunities. ABM’s biggest problem is in doubting that it is actually going to work. He helps their customers to understand best practices and to create appropriate evaluation metrics to use.

A lot of focus about ABM is to enhance existing digital marketing techniques but it also is useful to enable and empower the sales organization and have them work closer with the marketing team.

The big wins are when you can use ABM for the greater good and deliver value to a variety of separate departments within an organization or when customers cut across these different departments. He suggests that you find an initial champion to get started with an ABM project.

He also comments on the Microsoft and LinkedIn merger and mentions that currently individuals enter their information into LinkedIn for a particular purpose: to look for a new job. But now with the merger there is a risk of having this data used for other purposes. Microsoft should be reminded that they don’t own the LinkedIn user data.

About David Strom

David Strom is a former editor-in-chief of Network Computing and Tom's Hardware who has written two computer networking books and thousands of articles about B2B IT.

About Paul Gillin

Paul Gillin, host of FIR B2B, is a veteran technology journalist and a thought leader in new media. Since 2005, he has advised marketers and business executives on strategies to optimize their use of social media and online channels to reach buyers cost-effectively. Full bio