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Martin Simcock, CEO at Enigma Marketing Services explained why ABM at scale can still be as personalised as choosing a Subway sandwich
Seven breads. Foot-long or six-inch? 19 filling options. Cheese or no cheese? 64 salads variations. That's 272,348 potential sandwich combinations. That's before you even consider the various sauces or to grill or not to grill?
Martin’s point with this analogy is that just because you’re targeting a larger group of people (through one-to-many ABM or a single account with a big DMU) that doesn’t mean you need to lose the benefit of personalisation. Marketers should tailor the aspects of their campaigns.
“Subway has done a brilliant job of creating a product that can be personalised to me. That’s our challenge as marketers,” said Martin.
This creates 217,728 options
It’s been four years since O2 piloted ABM for the first time. Zoe Hominick explained how the ‘challenger approach’ differentiated the brand and made its efforts a success.
O2 piloted its ABM on energy company SSE because it was an existing customer with potential for growth.
The first and most important step was conducting research to understand the account as much as possible. This level of knowledge gave O2 the chance to take the challenger approach, telling SSE something about itself that O2 could help to solve.
O2 make a bespoke calculation about how much money SSE could save and sent it a report with this figure on the cover. This grabbed the attention of SSE, leading to ROI of 1229:1.
After this success, the sales team were bought in. It was here the marketing team split ABM into two categories: one-to-one and wider ABM. The one-to-one accounts, got more dedicated attention, while resources were used efficiently with the rest of the accounts.
These efforts have generated £100 million pipeline and £22 million sales for O2.
