Market View
Beyond MQLs: Reframing success in B2B marketing
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Produced by:
Muzafar Chaudhry
Marketing Director at Teramind
About Muzafar Chaudhry
Muzafar Chaudhry, the Marketing Director at Teramind, an insider risk management company, brings his expertise to lead the company's go-to-market strategy. With a primary focus on account-based marketing, Muzafar manages various tiers of the marketing strategy to effectively engage enterprise accounts. His role involves developing and executing targeted campaigns to showcase Teramind's value proposition to potential clients, ultimately contributing to the company's growth and success in the cybersecurity industry.
How have you seen B2B marketing shift towards account-based marketing (ABM) in recent years, and how has this influenced the way marketing is measured?
Account-based marketing has become a necessity in the B2B sector over the last 10 to 12 years, driven largely by rising advertising costs across all platforms. This compels us to prioritise and segment our total addressable market strategically. Initially, ABM measurement approaches mirrored traditional demand generation, focusing on marketing qualified leads (MQLs). However, the paradigm has shifted significantly closer to revenue metrics. We're now looking more at account engagement and the lifecycle of client relationships, aiming to shorten the sales cycle and enhance the overall experience for both clients and prospects.
As companies mature, they begin to understand their customers better, identifying ideal customer profiles and recognizing opportunities. Many companies then experiment with ABM, often viewing demand generation and ABM as distinct parts of their business. However, the shift we're seeing, especially in companies that have achieved significant success with ABM, stems from a very intentional go-to-market strategy centred around ABM. It involves prioritising accounts, aligning marketing efforts more closely with sales strategies, and integrating ABM comprehensively, affecting everything from customer experiences to budget allocation.
As more companies witness success with ABM, an increasing number of market players are adopting this approach. The lines between sales, marketing, and ABM teams are blurring, with the skill set required to craft messages becoming more centralised to ensure consistency across the entire buyer experience. Demand generation remains active as an inbound stream, while ABM is activated more directly in tandem with sales, for targeted net new acquisition and account growth.
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Account-based marketing has become a necessity in the B2B sector over the last 10 to 12 years, driven largely by rising advertising costs across all platforms.
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Although leads still play a role, we take a more holistic approach to assess the impact on other KPIs like pipeline and lifecycle length.
What are your top key performance indicators for measuring marketing's contribution to revenue generation, and how would you advise organisations trying to shift the perception of marketing from a service function to a strategic function?
Our top KPIs are pipeline closed-won, revenue, account engagement, and lifecycle length. Account engagement varies depending on the ABM program, which might include one-to-one, one-to-few, or one-to-many approaches. We measure engagement by observing which companies interact the most with our initiatives across various tactics and channels.
Although leads still play a role, we take a more holistic approach to assess the impact on other KPIs like pipeline and lifecycle length. This helps us identify the most effective tactics and levels of our ABM program. Ultimately, a business cares about outcomes. While account engagement shows that accounts with more marketing interactions tend to progress faster, a common challenge is determining the right attribution model to quantify ABM's influence on an account.
To shift the perception of marketing from a service function to a strategic, revenue-supporting function, I would advise focusing on common sense and simplifying the approach. Organisations should shift from measuring MQLs as a key performance indicator to implementing a measurement framework that monitors pipeline velocity for accounts, particularly within an ABM framework. It's crucial to blur the lines more between the handoff of leads, ideally eliminating the handoff altogether. ABM should operate across the full funnel, from lead generation to closing and beyond into account growth. It's a revenue motion, not merely a lead generation effort. To transition to a revenue motion, marketers need to fundamentally change their approach, being involved throughout the entire process to truly impact revenue.
How do you leverage data and technology to gain insights into account health and buying intent?
We leverage data and technology to the fullest extent possible, analysing a variety of signals. This includes category intent from publishers and sites like G2, as we're in the SaaS business. We look at how people engage with our competitors and our own pages, making extensive use of first-party data from website visitors and employing company identification techniques.
We use both first-party and third-party intent data to get a comprehensive view, profiling accounts based on these signals and categorising them into different tiers within our ABM program. In some cases, we also conduct surveys directly with accounts to gather data straight from the source. New technologies allow us to identify individuals from target accounts visiting our site, enabling an inbound-based outbound approach. Even if they are not converting directly, we can pinpoint these individuals and proceed with our sales motion.
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Generative AI is making a significant impact in B2B marketing, particularly in two key areas within our revenue organisation: speeding up processes and enabling hyper-personalization at scale.
How do you see the growing role of generative AI impacting B2B marketing, and what specific areas are you applying it in?
Generative AI is making a significant impact in B2B marketing, particularly in two key areas within our revenue organisation. Firstly, AI dramatically speeds up many processes by integrating with human tasks, such as account research. It can ingest vast amounts of data, from personas and positioning case studies to keywords related to buying committees, allowing us to surface key insights efficiently at scale. Secondly, AI enables hyper-personalization beyond traditional segmentation. We can move from job titles and actions to more dynamic approaches, personalising communications based on job changes or other relevant factors, scalable to thousands at a time. ABM has always demanded high levels of personalisation, and AI is making it feasible to achieve this at scale. We are applying generative AI in profiling individuals and buying committees, as well as their interests. When someone from a specific account tier visits our website, we use generative AI to suggest messaging based on pre-trained persona data and their digital presence and extract talking points. This information then goes to a human for further personalisation. However, it's crucial to understand that while AI can generate and analyse vast amounts of data, the human touch remains irreplaceable. AI should be used to enhance human efforts, not replace them. As companies become more familiar with these technologies, the next step is democratising technical capabilities across teams to enable them to create customised, internal AI tools tailored for specific business processes, turning mountains of data into actionable insights with precision while improving productivity and outcomes.
About Teramind
Teramind, a leading provider of user activity monitoring and data loss prevention solutions, offers advanced tools to enhance cybersecurity across industries. Leveraging real-time analytics, Teramind enables businesses to track user behaviour, audit policy compliance, and protect sensitive data. By delivering a comprehensive suite of services, Teramind empowers enterprises to strengthen security, optimise efficiency, and foster a secure and productive workplace.
About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.
