The law of diminishing ABM returns

Why personalization is so hard to scale

If you scale it, they will buy it … won't they?

When ABM personalization is done well, it delivers great results. Get personalization right, and you can achieve goals like those on the right.

However, sometimes ABM can be a victim of its own success. The pressure to deliver more and more sales meetings leads businesses to prioritize scaling over personalization – killing the thing that got the results.

Effective personalization is typically a time-consuming, manual process, making it impossible to scale without hiring an army of people.

Reduce acquisition costs by up to

50%

Increase efficiency of marketing spend by

10-30%

Lift revenue by

5-15%¹

¹ How Marketers Can Personalize at Scale, Heller et al, Harvard Business Review, 2015

Although marketers have incredibly sophisticated tech stacks that power their ABM campaigns, these solutions mostly sit in silos, slowing things down further, and hiding important customer insights from the teams that need them.

The upshot of all this is that scaling ABM means ramping up costs or damaging campaign effectiveness (or worse, both).

How manual scaling breaks ABM

Personalizing content for a handful of accounts is relatively simple. But once you start scaling, the traditional ABM process quickly breaks down.

Time to inject some automation into ABM

For a profession that relies so heavily on automated technologies, it's odd that marketers still work with slow, manual processes to run large-scale ABM campaigns. But with a content automation platform pulling all the data and insights together, and integrating your entire ABM tech stack, personalization at scale becomes a whole lot easier.

It's easier to do more of something than to do it better. So if you scale up ABM without focusing on effective personalization, you're just creating laser-targeted spam.

David McGuire - Creative Director, Radix Communications

Where are you at in your ABM journey?

Just getting started 🧨
Early days/piloting programs 🌅
Experienced & looking to scale! 🚀

Breaking point #1

You have tons of insights into your target accounts, but gathering them from all the different sources is a long, manual process.

Breaking point #2

Your personalized content is good to go, but getting it into your marketing automation tool is incredibly difficult to do at scale.

Breaking point #3

When you manage to get everything loaded into your marketing automation tool, you then have to figure out how to deliver specific pieces to specific individuals. Obviously each contact would prefer personal, relevant, and targeted content, but it's impractical.

Breaking point #4

Great news: you've sent all your content! Not so great news: you have no idea if who you sent it to actually reads it, how long for, or what parts they engage with. Even if you did have that data, there's no way to feed it back into your account insight platforms or CRM to optimize future campaigns.