According to Forrester analyst and ABM expert Malachi Threadgill, “a combination of neglect and rules and regulations have left many other regions [outside the U.S.] underserved.” 

Now more than ever, business at an enterprise scale is global, bringing new challenges and complexities for B2B marketers as well as new opportunities. Account-based marketing (ABM) can successfully drive global sales – but only if the right capabilities and processes are in place to support an orchestrated multinational effort.

Given the interconnectedness of today’s economy, operating across borders is now table stakes for enterprise businesses. Pre-pandemic, 65% of Fortune 500 companies had physical locations in countries outside the U.S – since then, further digitization combined with the ‘next great disruption’ have triggered even more dispersion of corporate teams worldwide, creating dozens of virtual locations alongside physical regional offices and subsidiaries.

Not only are workers and locations increasingly global, but leading enterprise companies are increasingly multinational in origin. As of 2021, just 24% of Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in the U.S, while China accounts for 27%.

In this global marketplace, ABM should be a natural fit for marketers to address the unique regional needs of B2B buyers with culturally appropriate strategies and compliant with local regulations. But too often, these efforts fall short.

Research from MRP and Demand Metric found that just 23% of enterprise B2B marketers report a significant positive impact on revenue derived from ABM initiatives. Most companies have yet to prioritize the synchronization and collaboration needed to drive global ABM success, the MRP/Demand Metric research found.

Technology stacks with inherent U.S. bias contribute to the challenge, making a shaky foundation on which to build international ABM programs. Malachi Threadgill, principal ABM analyst for Forrester Research, recently noted that “a combination of neglect and rules and regulations have left many other regions [outside the U.S.] underserved.”

To succeed, global B2B marketers need to empower regional teams to conduct campaigns that achieve their local goals while supporting a unified view of accounts across the enterprise. Here are three strategies to cut through complexity and boost local and global performance:

Customizable Data Privacy:

Regulations that protect consumer privacy affect B2B marketing data collection by third-party entities, including the intent signals many ABM practitioners rely on to identify and target active buyers. Those laws vary from country to country, with multiple overlapping statutes in some regions. In Europe, for example, some countries supplement the GDPR with further legislation. In the Asia Pacific region, an effort is underway to align regulations amidst a patchwork of existing laws, even as the usage is heavier of technologies perceived in the U.S. as invasive, such as facial recognition.

To build successful ABM programs at scale, marketers need tools that automatically silo data according to location-specific business rules while enabling information sharing across the enterprise to the extent allowed by law The MRP/Demand Metric survey found ABM leaders were nearly six times more likely to have visibility into engagement strategies across accounts’ regions and lines of business.

Truly Multilingual Capabilities:

Google delivers search results in 149 languages, yet most intent data captured by marketing platforms is parsed in North American English. Technologies must reflect global reality with robust multi-lingual support and full geographic context that marries data with technographic information to identify buying center locations and weaves in predictive analytics to prioritize accounts and identify next-best actions.

Local Autonomy, Global Visibility:

Teams located within regional markets can understand the nuances of not only the local language, but also the market culture in which they operate; they can also bring knowledge of target accounts’ specific regional needs and help identify new cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Enterprises that include on-the-ground experts on ABM teams are twice as likely to achieve significant revenue impact, according to the MRP/Demand Metric study.

To leverage this expertise, individual teams need the autonomy to localize campaigns, strategies, and objectives, while still coordinating insights and data at the account level across the enterprise. Technology that enables role- and location-specific data management capabilities can support this collaboration.

Enterprise application software provider SAP successfully honed its list of 4,700 target accounts for a new product by leveraging its organization-wide data in combination with highly targeted efforts. Targeted intent keywords specific to key regions were combined with existing first-party account data and inside sales calls using localized scripts. Synthesizing the data enabled SAP to pinpoint the most receptive accounts and engage, connect, and convert buyers with messaging tailored to their individual interests and regional needs – resulting in a 400 percent increase in buyer responses.

Marketers must adapt to new global capabilities as enterprise companies reach new audiences across borders. ABM practitioners with the technology to support region-specific practices and business rules while enabling enterprise-wide visibility and collaboration at scale will thrive in 2023 and beyond.

Marketing Leader Crowned Top “Sales Driver” Based On Enterprise ABM Success With MRP

MRP, the only enterprise-class account-based sales and marketing platform, today announced that distinguished partner Heather Rath, ServiceNow’s Director of Field Marketing West, has been recognized as a 2022 B2B Innovator in the Sales Driver category.

The 6th annual B2B Innovator Awards celebrates the quick thinkers, innovators, and leaders pushing the envelope to engage prospective customers effectively and meet their buyer needs in the new world of B2B marketing. Rath was recognized for her notable success in enabling her sales counterparts to engage, educate and close deals in the latter stage of the buyer journey.

“Ultimately, our goal is to drive ACV for sales in a very complex B2B selling environment,” said Rath. “MRP Prelytix has been incredibly helpful in maximizing our spend, increasing campaign ROI, and cementing trust between marketing and sales based on joint success for our teams and the business at large.”

“MRP congratulates Heather on winning this prestigious industry award,” said Mark Ogne, CMO of MRP. “Her success in driving sales across a very complex B2B buyer journey is a testament to her vision, knowledge and creativity. We are proud that Heather has chosen MRP as her strategic ABM technology partner, and we look forward to continuing to deliver innovative, high-impact enterprise marketing strategies together.”

The full case study on Rath’s award-winning innovation and strategic use of MRP Prelytix can be found here: “Increasing Speed to Revenue with Insight-Driven ABM.” Rath will be a featured guest speaker at “Accelerating From Insight to Action to Outcome: The Keys to Activating Account Intelligence,” a boutique virtual event hosted by Demand Gen Report in partnership with MRP on Sept. 14, 2022. The executive roundtable event is by invite only.

About MRP

MRP Prelytix™ is the only enterprise-class predictive account-based sales and marketing platform. For organizations that serve multiple partners, lines of business, geographies, or industries, MRP Prelytix empowers sales and marketing teams to simplify their environment’s complexity and produce measurable and high-performance conversion, pipeline velocity and closed revenue. Applying the industry’s only real-time predictive analytics and data management, we fuel over 1,000 ABM engines across six continents to coordinate, execute, and optimize their ABM programs using eight channels produced in 20 languages. Powered by KX, Prelytix sits on top of the fastest streaming analytics database in the world. For more information, visit: www.mrpfd.com.

Contacts
Emily Brady, emily@bradypr.com

Prestigious International Annual Awards Program Recognizes Standout Marketing, Advertising and Sales Technology Around the World

LOS ANGELES – August 11, 2022 – MarTech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global marketing, sales and advertising technology industry, today announced that MRP Prelytix, the only enterprise-class account-based sales and marketing platform, has been recognized as “Best Account Based Marketing Platform” in the fifth annual MarTech Breakthrough Awards program.

The 2022 MarTech Breakthrough Award recognizes the breakthrough innovation of the MRP Prelytix platform, which provides enterprise marketers with the ability to orchestrate and deliver meaningful, personalized buying journeys in real-time across multiple channels, geographies, and languages. MRP’s next-generation Prelytix platform leverages the power of AI and ML to parse signals from around the globe and derive instant insights and predictive recommendations.

MRP’s purpose-built platform provides revenue performance insights for sales and marketing teams operating in the sophisticated enterprise environment. MRP Prelytix’s guided role-based approach enables functional experts to work within their domain expertise without needing to become experts on the entire platform. Operating on a single platform, enterprise marketers are able to share insights and measurement, and execute high-impact programs independently, within lines of business, regionally, and in concert with subject matter experts across the organization.

“We’re flattered to be recognized as the ‘Best ABM Platform’ by such a prestigious organization,” said Mark Ogne, CMO of MRP. “Our clients are sophisticated marketers and our sole focus is to solve their challenges, from global ABM programs covering multiple lines of business, to simply creating stronger engagement. We are grateful to work with so many enterprise leaders, and this award is a testament to their partnership and support of more than 20 years.”

MRP Prelytix: Breakthrough Insights & Orchestration Drive ABM Performance

The MRP Prelytix platform uniquely provides enterprise marketers with the ability to leverage the next generation of intent and predictive analytics to identify signals across the buyer journey with AI that prescribes the next best actions.  Through the platform, enterprise marketing teams can aggregate account-based data from contact-based systems, interweave intent data and first-party customer history records, and create a central source of truth for accounts that teams across the globe can access.

In addition, robust capabilities for omnichannel orchestration enable consistent delivery of messages across touchpoints that address target account needs with easy tailoring by product/solution area. Users can coordinate content and messages across channels with real-time insights and lightning-fast ML that influences the buyers’ journey as well as prove the success of these programs with account-level measurement, drilling down from programs to tactics.

“While some martech solutions can aggregate data, most only provide marketers with limited passive capabilities like pulling list selects to turn data into action. Additionally, many ABM platforms rely exclusively on translating anonymous digital behavioral signals from one language,” said James Johnson, Managing Director at MarTech Breakthrough.

“MRP Prelytix’s ‘Active’ approach represents a breakthrough approach that enables marketers to identify actionable insights and trigger responses in real-time, ensuring they remain in step with buyers. Also, the added ability to leverage multiple languages and regional nuances fully optimizes engagement in all markets.

We’re thrilled to recognize MRP with the ‘Best Account Based Marketing Platform for the fourth year in a row.’”

About the MarTech Breakthrough Awards

The mission of the MarTech Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the innovation, hard work and success in a range of marketing, sales and advertising technology related categories, including marketing automation, market research and customer experience, AdTech, SalesTech, marketing analytics, content and social marketing, mobile marketing and many more. This year’s program attracted more than 2,950 nominations from over 18 different countries throughout the world.

About MarTech Breakthrough
Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the MarTech Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in marketing, ad and sales technology companies, products and people. The MarTech Breakthrough Awards provide a platform for public recognition around the achievements of breakthrough marketing technology companies and products in categories including marketing automation, AdTech, SalesTech, marketing analytics, CRM, content and social marketing, website, SEM, mobile marketing and more. For more information, visit MarTechBreakthrough.com.

About MRP

MRP Prelytix is the only enterprise-class predictive account-based sales and marketing platform. For organizations that serve multiple partners, lines of business, geographies, or industries, MRP Prelytix empowers sales and marketing teams to simplify their environment’s complexity and produce measurable and high-performance conversion, pipeline velocity and closed revenue. Applying the industry’s only real-time predictive analytics and data management, we fuel over 1,000 ABM engines across six continents to coordinate, execute, and optimize their ABM programs using eight channels produced in 20 languages. Powered by KX, Prelytix sits on top of the fastest streaming analytics database in the world.

“Marketers Roadmap to Mature Omnichannel Account-Based Experiences” provides strategies to move from linear campaigns to everything, everywhere, all at once.

For decades, marketers have described the B2B sales process as linear. Prospects enter a funnel and move along a narrowing pipeline. They travel a path to purchase. 

To reflect this reality, marketing campaigns and the technologies that support them are designed around linear progression. Buyer actions trigger automated email campaigns containing progressively more detailed messages. Prospects are automatically targeted for contact by inside sales teams after a set number of digital interactions. 

But digitization and the increasing complexity of enterprise operations have exploded this linear view. For one, the majority of buying groups include four or more decision makers, and fully 23% – more than 1 in 5 – number 7 participants or more, according to DemandGen Report’s 2022 B2B buyer study. Given the large group sizes, it’s not surprising that decision-making takes longer than ever, and  77% of buyers say their last purchase was complex or difficult, according to Gartner.

ABM marketing is ideal for this complexity, given its foundation in personalization. So far, most ABM marketing programs fail to hit the mark. Fewer than a quarter of ABM practitioners say their programs contribute significant revenue to the bottom line, according to MRP and Demand Metric research. In contrast, 38% say their programs are unknown, unmeasured, or negative.

The remedy is to step up the agility and orchestration of ABM initiatives to match the complexity of the B2B buyer journey, according to “The Marketer’s Roadmap to Mature Omnichannel Account-Based Experiences,” a new report from MRP and DemandGen Report. 

The report describes how ABM leaders have adapted to new buying behaviors such as “looping” to repeat or update steps of the evaluation process; using multiple digital channels simultaneously for research; and conducting the vast majority of research independently – vendor sales rep meetings make up only 17% of buying groups’ time, Gartner found. 

Successful ABM marketers have adapted their programs to this non-linear environment. Among their strategies:

• Cross-functional ABM teams with on-the-ground expertise. MRP’s research shows that high-performing enterprise marketers have bigger ABM teams to match prospects’  bigger buying teams. In addition to sales and marketing generalists, subject matter experts (such as product managers and regional leads) and business intelligence/data specialists can contribute valuable insights that help align campaigns to current conditions. 

• Highly orchestrated data management. ABM teams succeed when they have complete visibility into how accounts engage with their brand across channels and lines of business. Leveraging existing first-party data for existing customers is an essential capability for enterprise companies. Combining third-party signals from new prospects with technographic and firmographic data can strengthen messaging. MRP found that high-performing organizations are 2.5X more likely to have deep integrations in their tech stack.

• Align content to buyers’ needs at the moment. To deliver the right content at the right time, successful ABM programs develop and revise a wide range of content tailored to each target account’s evolving needs along the buyer journey. Compared with lower-performing peers, more than twice as many ABM leaders have a library of content to serve specific target-account goals. This content is influential, with 84% of B2B buyers in DemandGen Report’s survey stating it informs buying decisions, and 68% communicating demonstrated knowledge of specific company needs was a crucial deciding factor.

Download “The Marketer’s Roadmap to Mature Omnichannel Account-Based Experiences” for a 10-step roadmap to enterprise ABM success, along with case studies from top performers. Schedule a demo to see how MRP’s global enterprise ABM platform can help your company navigate today’s complex environment.

Personalization is one of the key aspects of ABM, however it can be challenging when it comes to multi-channel messaging. Mark Ogne, CMO at MRP, speaks to Media7 and sheds light on the transformation in B2B space, personalization in ABM, and provides a vision for a substantial ABM strategy.

MEDIA 7: You have been active in the B2B space for about three decades and have driven revenue for various organizations. Being a CMO of MRP, how do you look at the transformation of the B2B market?

MARK OGNE: The complexity and speed of B2B marketing continue to accelerate, particularly for the enterprise. Digital is at the center stage, which has forced marketers to reevaluate every aspect of their programs – from data management and intent to channel orchestration, sales hand-off, and close. At the same time, marketers must support go-to-market changes, new product lines, and new regions, and prepare for changing economic conditions while making sense of the ripple effects of the massive disruption caused by the COVID pandemic. It’s an incredibly dynamic time – but also an exciting one!

The competition for attention is fierce as marketers must learn to stand out amidst thousands of daily digital messages. Companies must demonstrate an understanding of their audience’s needs on a more granular level than ever before. To make meaningful connections with prospects and customers amidst these changes, ABM initiatives need to shift their focus from trying to define needs, a top/down vision, to instead identifying needs at the account, and now even buying center level, and use those insights to deliver truly personalized experiences. Ones that are defined by the audiences, a bottom/up vision. Demonstrating relevance at this depth, at scale, and globally, is a steep challenge – but the definitive opportunity in the market right now. I like to say that relevance is in the eyes of the beholder of your messages. They, not you, define what they’re interested in. As a marketer, it’s your responsibility to identify those needs and to use them to make it easier for buyers to do what they do best.

One major positive trend is that account-based strategies are rapidly maturing as a practice – and not a moment too soon. Primary research from MRP and Demand Metric finds that the percentage of companies who consider their ABM programs to be fully adopted versus experimental has grown to 45% – up a third compared with 2020. Yet revenue impact can remain elusive, 83% of enterprise marketers report the pace of their campaigns has intensified over the past year. And, as the channel mix continues to change and data management intensifies, more than a third (42%) admit they’re still struggling to execute successfully.

M7: How do you target content to your audience, and what challenges do you face while producing effective content?
MO: High-performing ABM is – has always been – about the audience, their needs, and their experiences. High-performing content is content that’s personalized based on the needs of each account and adapts to fit changing concerns during lengthy buying processes. It’s also tightly orchestrated, personalized across channels and platforms, cutting through siloed data and channels to ensure that all messages work together to create a symphony, not distorted, discordant noise.

When it comes to delivering on this promise, we face many of the same challenges as our enterprise client base. We are a large, global company with several hundred employees in 11 global offices, and 40% of our clients are based outside of North America. So we are very attuned to the needs for sophisticated personalization, advanced orchestration, and multi-language support, to name a few. Looking at our content strategy as part of true omnichannel engagement, we’re laser-focused on controlling ABM processes across teams and real-time triggered connections. We invest in the creation and versioning of content that specifically addresses the needs of each target account, the languages of their region, and adapting that content across the course of their buying process.

We use our own MRP Prelytix platform to train AI/ML models to prescribe recommended content and channels, as well as prescribe the next best action step and trigger that response. Prelytix also allows us to create dynamic audiences and segments, and then automatically trigger engagement action in multiple channels, as well as control personalization of the content and messaging across these channels. We’ve been extremely successful with this approach, and espouse it to our client base, yet we aren’t totally alone in using this approach. In fact, high-performing marketers are 3X more likely to use a platform that automatically changes content across channels as target account needs change or the target account advances in their buying journey.

Approach ABM as a team sport and ensure a mix of job roles and teams across the organization are involved in program execution.

M7: As an industry professional with extensive experience in Marketing, according to you, what are some of the different ways an Account-Based Marketing platform like MRP Prelytix helps businesses expand their businesses into untapped marketable sectors?
MO: Despite their long history, ABM platforms have largely focused on solving simple top-of-funnel needs for an SMB organization. Creating a new array of siloes in the tech stack, these technologies lack a solid connection with other platforms, are focused on channels, and have a tremendous bias against regions outside of North America. Creating new acronyms, like ABX, hasn’t changed this siloed, top/down vision, especially for the enterprise, where they don’t address their core challenges at all. Large organizations typically hold abundant data sets on their target accounts. Unfortunately, this data, the most important of all data, is disconnected from their ABM efforts and left unused in the process of creating insights necessary to discover target account needs, drive impactful orchestrations, and measure actual target account engagement as it exists across the enterprise.

Next-generation ABM platforms like MRP Prelytix allow enterprise marketers to simplify the enterprise operating environment, take control of data, and leverage every channel at their disposal to connect with target accounts and surface new opportunities. With Prelytix, marketers can harness account intelligence beyond intent data, in multiple languages, with full geographic context, to indicate buyer location and buyer centers, with predictive analytics and account scoring to prioritize accounts and identify and time the next best action across all their channels. Marketers using MRP can act on this intelligence in milliseconds, connecting with newly identified target accounts and buyers almost instantaneously, with the right message to engage their goals and interests. For example, in milliseconds, a B2B marketer can bid, win and personalize display advertising while simultaneously personalizing website content to reflect a buyer’s location, language, stage and interests for a seamless, high-value experience as a buyer progresses along the purchase path.

M7: How has MRP’s Channel Enablement been delivering results in the channel for the largest and most complex companies in the world?
MO: Everything I said about increased B2B marketing complexity is amplified in the channel environment. Here, you have what can be called “two-step ABM.” That is, instead of the enterprise marketer having an array of product-level constituents on one side and an audience on the other… they also have another set of constituents between them and their accounts, their partners. An unrestricted stream of intelligence is the only means to make ABM work in the channel environment. This means a single shared data source with open lines of communication between sales and marketing, both at partner and vendor levels.

MRP has been delivering results in the channel for the largest and most sophisticated companies in the world, since our inception 20 years ago. Through the MRP Prelytix platform, innovative omnichannel programs target new partners and support existing ones based on account level intent and predictive scoring, as well as renewal or competitive data. Programs can be executed across 8 channels, performance tracked directly into a CRM system, delivering full control of MDF, conversion, and pipeline objectives.

One great example is our work with a major global technology brand to transform their channel marketing program to a digital-first approach. When COVID-19 pandemic first hit, this company’s channel partners lost their main engine for driving success: in-person interactions with prospects at events. Working with MRP, the company executed a new virtual program, now considered its best-performing National Solution Provider (NSP) campaign to that date, that delivered over $33.9 Million in deal registrations for one category and a 94% increase in year-over-year deal registrations across all partners.

To ensure cohesion and control at every stage, marketers need to take a full-funnel approach that extends through post-sale.

M7: What is your go-to approach for personalization in ABM, and according to you, what is the best way to tackle the challenge of controlling multi-channel messaging?
MO: At MRP, we talk about “putting the ‘person’ back in personalization.” This means coordinating content and messages across channels based on their individual needs and buying stage. This is completely different than other platforms, which use limited intelligence, like simple intent data, and fragment the personalization experience by having this knowledge used in one platform, or one channel at a time, rather than the actual customer experience as it exists across all their marketing channels and platforms.

To accomplish this, we aggregate all account-based data into a single source of truth that can be accessed by our teams across the globe on a single, shared platform. The Prelytix platform applies next-generation insights, predictive analytics, and lightning-fast ML to identify signals across the buyer journey and prescribe the next best actions to influence the buyer’s journey. Then robust omnichannel orchestration capabilities allow us to consistently deliver the right message across the right touchpoints based on target account needs and the appropriate product or solution area.

To ensure cohesion and control at every stage, marketers need to take a full-funnel approach that extends through post-sale. Unlike startups, companies operating at an enterprise scale have an existing customer base whose capabilities and needs can be uniquely addressed. Forrester Research recently noted that B2B marketing organizations are now “moving beyond focusing primarily on acquisition” to concentrate on upsell, cross-sell, and retention. So, it is imperative to customize and target content according to the stage of the individual customer’s buying journey. MRP Prelytix enables this high degree of personalization by integrating CRM data with incoming data signals and AI-powered predictions to highlight which customers are open to new offers.

Thinking global is another way to keep omnichannel messages on message and operating in perfect sync. Most ABM platforms and solutions fail to reflect the complexity of enterprise companies’ international efforts. Technology is often built on a base of American English, and the AI algorithms that ingest intent and power predictive analytics often fail to account for other languages. To capture every opportunity, enterprise marketers need technology that is multilingual and multitenant at its core. This gives individual marketing teams the autonomy to localize campaigns, strategies, and objectives, while still coordinating insights and data at the account level across the enterprise.

M7: What would be your essential advice for marketers struggling with establishing a substantial ABM strategy in their organizations?
MO: My advice is to focus on research rather than conjecture or best practice that really looks more like a thinly veiled platform user guide. Earlier this year, we partnered with Demand Metric on an in-depth primary research study of more than 1,200 marketers across four continents. This research identified an elite group of companies (23%) that report significant revenue impact from ABM and benchmarked the specific practices that set these leaders apart from their lower-performing peers.
Based on this data, my first piece of advice is to approach ABM as a team sport and ensure a mix of job roles and teams across the organization are involved in program execution. Nine out of 10 ABM top performers report close, cross-functional collaboration between marketing and sales to create ABM strategy and include more roles in ABM initiatives. These roles encompass generalists such as ABM leads and specialists such as product marketers, creative experts, and business intelligence professionals.

The second is to double down on data – and data management. Among ABM leaders whose initiatives deliver significant revenue impact, 80% reported three or more systems contributing data to ABM. Still more, 84%, say their tech stack is very or completely integrated – almost the percentage of those with negative or unmeasured ABM impact. These high performers are twice as likely to use multiple data sources, like intent data and predictive analytics, alongside their CRM and MAP data to create account profiles.

Finally, set your focus on matching messages to needs – at scale. Thanks mainly to sophisticated data management processes, ABM leaders orchestrate their programs to personalize messages to a higher degree across more touchpoints. 84% of ABM leaders use three or more systems to deliver marketing messages, and nearly half (56%) automatically adjust content to match viewers’ engagement stage within the customer lifecycle.