Clive Armitage, Chris Boorman and Cat Dutton; Caroline Lotinga, John Clarke, Brendan Dykes, Sandra Judd and Jen Campbell; David De Smedt
The marketing team at Genesys came up with a new term – opportunity-based marketing – to increase focus on the end-goal of its ABM programme.
Jen Campbell, who leads marketing in the UK and Ireland for the CX and contact centre, told the audience: “We coined our own acronym, OBM – opportunity-based marketing. It was a natural progression.
"We’d identified the accounts we wanted to target and within those accounts we needed to pinpoint what the actual opportunity was. And that’s why we came up with OBM, it focused us.”
Genesys’ campaign was a one-to-one ABM programme targeting decision-makers in four sectors.
The company worked with agency MOI to execute the campaign and delivered 173% over target. The agency support was vital, said Campbell.
“We’ve always had the skillsets in-house, but there’s always been a resourcing challenge, which is where having the support of an agency and a technology vendor has really been helpful.
"We wouldn’t have been able to do what we did without access to those external resources.”
The most valuable thing David de Smedt did in the 10 months since corrugated packaging business DS Smith launched its ABM programme was to book four-hour appointments with the account managers of their targets.
When DS Smith selected two accounts to pilot its ABM programme, they chose customers where the account manager was present and had a deep understanding of the client, to increase the chances of success.
David says: “I was personally nervous, going to an account manager and asking I want four hours out of their agenda. [I thought] these guys are going to say to me: ‘You’re nuts!. I’m not going to spend four hours speaking to marketers. I don’t have time I need to be in calls, do my paperwork’. But I was quite surprised these guys were prepared to sit down with us.
“We went in with a really long list of questions – we thought better be prepared, we don’t want an awkward moment if we’ve asked for four hours of their time – but we never really needed that list.
"Once you get through the first phase and they get comfortable, they really opened up, and say they’re really struggling with this customer and he’s blocking me, or we don’t really have the material to explain that to the account.
The key challenges were agreed at the end of the meeting, which could then be summarised into one grand ambition for the programme.
David’s 3 lessons learned