Forrester’s New Wave Report on ABM Gets It Wrong
The Forrester New Wave for ABM Platforms, Q2 2020 says B2B marketers like me can use their review to “select the right platform for their ABM needs.” Unfortunately, they’re looking at ABM and the platforms that support it through the wrong lens — unless you’re a unicorn startup that has a limitless budget and no previous investments in martech/CRM. Or, on the flip side, you’re a massive Global 2000 company that has both the budget and staff to take on a herculean effort to integrate yet another platform. I have several problems with this report.
1. Vendor selection and continuity. Some of the largest, oldest mail merge marketing solutions are included while other ABM disruptors like Folloze were not even mentioned. I like 6sense but they went from outsider to leader within one reporting cycle. Clearly the measuring paradigm shifted even though the criteria didn’t change.
2. Minimal focus on data management. In the world of ABM, data enrichment is king — having access to proprietary data sources for appending lead data on import is a critical factor as more leads come in from SEM and LinkedIn with generic/missing data. Data management (enrichment, compliance and integration) was measured but it’s not clear where the weighting was. Respectively, clear leaders in data enrichment like TechTarget, Metadata.io and Terminus were on par or needs improvement.
3. Overlooking marketing attribution. Sample size testing with AI is a key factor for understanding what is working within your ABM account. I need to know when and where to pivot — what channel, firmographics and CTA to focus on within the funnel to shorten the path from MQL to customer while keeping my cost per lead down. Forrester alludes to this, but none of the 14 solutions evaluated provide systemic marketing attribution (largely limited to paid media).
4. Table stakes and overlap: The Forrester report looked at engagement management to define how they measured ease of use for email capabilities. First of all, if you are still looking for an emailing solution, go back to bed. I wish I had a problem segmenting my audience — even at SAP we only had 26 industries across 3 market categories. ABM analytics (snore)! Don’t get me wrong — I’m about as metrics-driven as they come, but I wouldn’t pay an extra penny for a net-new analytics package. On a daily basis, I spend a fair amount of time looking at analytical discrepancies from one “single source of truth” to the next. (As CMO of a small company, I have six marketing dashboards that I am aware of.) Forrester seems to have weighted the value of analytics quite high when I view it as a given/base expectation.
Rebuilding a plane while it’s flying
A bit of context for the challenge I was facing… I joined Virtana to help transform both the company and its go-to-market strategy and execution. Virtana, formerly Virtual Instruments, was a decade-old infrastructure optimization hardware and software company. In 2019, Metricly was added to the portfolio, giving the company deep expertise and rich solutions in both on-premise and public cloud. The company rebranded with a focus on building a single SaaS platform to optimize performance, cost and risk for multi-cloud/hybrid cloud environments.
In addition to a new SaaS-based roadmap, the company needed to change its way of discovering, nurturing and expanding pipeline. And the plane was already in flight.
· The company was almost 100% reliant on physical events for lead generation and awareness, and contracts for expensive physical events around the globe were already signed.
· Technology platforms, including Marketo and Salesforce, were already in place.
· Social selling and ABM were largely foreign to the company.
· With the rebrand, SEO was a challenge — and had been mostly overlooked when they built a new website on a new URL in 2019.
I didn’t have the luxury of demolishing my martech house, building a new one from the ground up, and then coming back to market. I need MQLs that turn into SQLs that turn into sales opportunities — quickly and in a virtual sales relationship. It’s important to be able to act and move forward and then append and fix later. I’m not going to shut down my demand gen to launch a new marketing platform. I need action now.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which events I could cancel and which events we “had” to do. Then COVID-19 closed down every event from March to the end of 2020. This allowed/forced us to migrate to 100% digital demand gen, but having it happen overnight was not easy.
To reduce the cost of sales, we made the tough but necessary decision to remove the in-house SDR role from our sales support and lead nurturing and qualification. This required a sea change as our regional sales teams went from being farmers to being hunters. The lead quality, nurturing and data quality all became critical in the process, as they had to have 100% trust in the lead source and data quality. Of course, data is always a challenge. If you just landed in a new company, chances are you’re moving into some type of legacy data model and structure. I needed to be able to use the tools I already had rather than buy yet another app that overlays bad data on top of bad data.
Changing the way we assemble the stack
The martech landscape — not to mention marketers themselves — has changed in the 20+ years since I got my second job out of college at a marketing automation company called MarketFirst. (Yes, I am older than the internet.) The way we evaluate marketing technology solutions needs to change, too.
Marketing used to be the forgotten child of IT. Now we have deeply technical members of our team who are evaluating the APIs and SDKs for integration and enhancement of their own martech stack. At Virtana, James Bettencourt manages Marketo, SFDC and nurture campaigns, and he used to teach advanced Photoshop. Our former office manager Jen Brumbaugh, who is now our PM/events lead, is a power user of Airtable, Infinigrow, NetSuite and SFDC, to name a few. Trent Wasky is a future CMO who manages our digital demand generation, and he’s part data scientist/part creative who can write copy, code and design in Illustrator.
This new generation of marketers knows what we need — and don’t need — from our platforms. We do not want to pay for overlapping technology, and we don’t want modules that take longer to get “working” and require deep training. Marketers need solutions with fast and minimal onboarding that can be spun up, integrated and achieve ROI in days or weeks, not months.
Comprehensive platforms do have their place (CRM, HCM, and ERP, for example, where you need a database of record or single source of truth). But we’ve now got 8,000+ applications in the martech landscape — including 50 just for ABM. Instead of expecting one or a few big platforms to do everything, I’d rather be able to curate the right solutions to build an ideal martech stack for my particular needs. Fortunately, with today’s open platforms and APIs, it’s much easier to stitch together those niche pieces into your own integrated platform without needing to buy everything from a single company.
Plugging into the bigger picture
I’ve been exposed to many of the platforms reviewed in Forrester’s New Wave report for ABM, and Metadata.io, which Forrester ranked as a “Challenger,” is a great case in point. Metadata uses AI to automatically identify target prospects, run multivariate tests and operational tasks, and optimize paid digital campaigns in real time. In the report, Forrester writes, “Customers praised the quality of Metadata.io’s enrichment data and its iterative experimentation approach to ad campaign optimization but also noted they were using other ABM platforms for additional functionality.”
I don’t see this as a weakness — in fact, it’s the reason I’m taking the time to write this down and share it with you — it’s a strength. We don’t need a broad platform that claims to do all things ABM (but still falls short). It’s like buying a tank manufactured by Ferrari when what I want/need is a really fast Honda.
For me, Metadata is an ABM enabler, and it’s quickly becoming my demand-gen command center. Metadata plugs seamlessly into our existing stack, which I didn’t want to mess with. (Though I am likely to replace Marketo with Hubspot in 2021.) The experiment management and audience management/enrichment make it dead simple to launch campaigns that plug into our broader ABM strategy.
Moving fast and experimenting at scale
Our first campaign on Metadata launched flawlessly within just a few days and has already produced incredibly high-quality and low-cost leads, all being enriched and pushed to our marketing automation system without me having to worry about anything. It really was plug and play. But it’s the results that brought it home. Metadata helped us achieve our all-time best cost per lead, quality and volume — surpassing any digital campaign we’ve ever run.
· Reduced our cost per lead almost 68% below 2020 targets (off-the-chart lower than 2019 but that’s apples to oranges — physical vs. digital), allowing us to scale our spend and double our weekly lead volume.
· More than 75% of leads were MQLs, which for us equates to the right title and firmographic attributes, as well as belonging to our target organizations.
· Enriched data enabled us to prioritize, score and assign the leads through our automated utility, so sales had increased confidence that they were hunting the right leads.
Metadata lays out a breadcrumb trail to guide your strategy and execution and then make it very efficient for you to track, pivot, analyze, test — all the things we need to do as marketers. Metadata removes all the friction with experimentation. So I can see which combinations of audience, creative and offer are producing the best results as well as the pipeline impact they’re having.
As a result, we’re able to scale and act and react way more efficiently than we could as a single individual. Metadata helps us act faster. We can spin up high-quality, enriched audiences in seconds to test new things and truly experiment at scale. And that’s the holy grail, right?
More strategic campaigns and media spend
Besides scaling with a small team, we’ve been able to improve our lead scoring and routing and improve the cost and quality of leads. For example, our paid media channels include LinkedIn, SEM and now Facebook. I didn’t want to spend money there because I think of Facebook’s advertising as lower credibility and strictly B2C. (It’s also super creepy when something my wife and I talked about buying shows up in my feed.) But Metadata tracked our users there, and so now Virtana is there. And we converted the low-cost leads to MQLs to SQLs because we gave them access to relevant content that met their information needs.
We’re now able to plan more strategic campaigns — cross-sell existing accounts, move top-of-funnel leads to buying intent, segment audiences by product — all without having to build yet another platform. Our regional sales teams — who are now hunting rather than harvesting leads — can have full confidence and trust in the lead source and data quality. We’re providing high-quality content to educate and motivate prospects to buy — always important but during COVID an absolute must. Having the AI-backed software intelligence to put the customer, our marketing assets and the regional sales managers at the same intersection is our equation for success.
How Forrester could actually help marketers like me
Forrester is doing traditional analysis through a traditional lens, which not only does a disservice for the niche software vendors they’re evaluating, but also for their clients who are trying to make the best decisions based on Forrester’s analysis.
If Forrester really wants to help B2B marketers like me make better decisions about the marketing technology we invest in, they should rethink the way they categorize and evaluate vendors. Instead of aiming for a behemoth, one-size-fits-all platform, look at the individual pieces that best support the strategy. Marketers have evolved and so should their analysis of our solutions.
In the case of ABM, they need to define what ABM is from their point of view and then create sub-categories based on that. That would do a lot more to help clients like me evaluate these platforms in the context of my strategic goals for ABM and consider how they fit in with my existing stack. I don’t need a software vendor to provide the vision to make ABM and sales the “center of gravity for all customer experience and engagement.”
Forrester has a brilliant business practice called “TEI,” where they interview several customers of a solution provider and create a composite company and then report back on hypothetical ROI findings. A right-sized Wave report with composite profiles that align to your business would enable you to leverage Forrester’s guidance in a way that is a lot more usable, instead of a one-size-fits-all assessment for a best-of-breed category like ABM vendors.
I need to know which software will most effectively help enable me, mid-flight, to move fast at scale and deliver the leads, pipeline and revenue to exceed our goals.
Virtana is a client of Forrester — I approved the annual contract.
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1 The Forrester New Wave™: ABM Platforms, Q2 2020, The 14 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack up, by Steven Casey, June 9, 2020
*I hope you are all happy and healthy. Please, during this increased time of need, remember to give back to your community as you can. Any money earned from this post will be donated to The Second Harvest Food Bank of Silicon Valley.