Account-based marketing (ABM) is more than just the latest fad or buzz-phrase du jour of the business-to-business world; it’s the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) and other new and existing technologies to achieve a level of one-to-one sales and marketing that surpasses what was possible just a few years ago.

Michael Kostow

Michael KostowSVP & GM, Salesforce Pardot

“ABM has been around for a very long time,” said Michael Kostow, SVP and GM, Salesforce Pardot. “Customers have employed account-based strategies for a while, but the technology just hasn’t been there for them to do it really successfully.”

Salesforce remedies that void today with the launch of Einstein Account-Based Marketing, a new AI-based solution that identifies, delivers, measures and optimizes a true one-to-one sales and marketing experience for a company’s most valuable accounts.

Salesforce’s Einstein Account-Based Marketing dashboard. For a product demo and larger images, visit the ABM landing page at the bottom of this post.

“We’ve seen a big shift, particularly in the last two years as companies move from much more broad-based marketing to very specific account-based marketing — primarily because B2B marketers have constrained budgets and they want to point their marketing dollars at the highest value accounts,” Kostow said.

The biggest challenge with account-based marketing to date has been fragmentation. It can be difficult for marketers to achieve even the first ABM step of identifying the highest value accounts when data, tools and processes are spread across multiple non-integrated platforms. If the first step is a tall order, then determining the personal journey of an account, customizing campaigns and tracking the results at scale are doubly complex with compounded obstacles.

As Kostow points out, Salesforce’s ABM is an end-to-end solution for B2B marketing built on the world’s number one CRM (Salesforce calls it the Customer Success Platform) and that platform is powered by Einstein, the company’s proprietary interpretation of artificial intelligence. Having the ability to execute on ABM within the platform already used by so many of the world’s biggest and best known brands as their “one source of truth” for both sales and marketing is a market advantage for Einstein AMB that can’t be overestimated.

Here are the key sections from today’s Salesforce announcement that outline the functionality of Einstein AMB enabling companies to:

Identify the right accounts: Einstein Lead Scoring automatically identifies the accounts most likely to convert based on factors such as relationship history and past purchases. Advertising Studio enables marketers to uncover and advertise to new “lookalike” prospects by identifying audiences with similar profiles, based on online behaviors from existing CRM data.

Improve account engagement: Engagement Studio is a lead nurturing solution that enables marketers and sales reps to send personalized emails based on real-time buyer behavior or qualifying values, such as when a lead engages with a specific piece of content or if they have significant influence on a buying decision. Meanwhile, Einstein Opportunity Insights analyzes customer sentiment, competitor involvement and overall lead engagement to determine how deals are progressing.

Synchronize marketing and sales: Einstein Account Insights arms sales reps with the latest prospect news, such as M&A activity and financial results, to inform engagement strategies. Reps can then utilize Salesforce Engage to personalize marketing content and reach out to leads within accounts at the right moment. Reps can also leverage interactive dashboards to track the effectiveness of the messages, including click-through rates of content and exactly when it is opened.

Measure, optimize and modify campaigns: With B2B Marketing and Sales Analytics companies can understand the performance of their marketing campaigns against targeted sales opportunities in a single dashboard, and uncover insight into which campaigns perform best and why. In addition, new Multi-Touch Campaign Insights allows marketers to identify the attributes of marketing campaigns that have the highest potential to drive sales for targeted accounts. For example, it can determine that a sequence of clicking on an ad, downloading an eBook and watching a webinar is the optimal journey for converting prospects into high quality leads.

Additionally, partners on the Salesforce AppExchange give B2B companies the ability to tap complementary ABM solutions in order to meet sales and marketing needs. The AppExchange also includes implementation partners like Bluewolf to ensure customer success with Einstein ABM. Lastly, third-party data partners provide additional data sets, such as intent and firmographic data, further improving account targeting.

Salesforce customers like CareerBuilder, Sika and Slalom are already using Einstein ABM and partnered with Salesforce on the product launch today. Click here to read comments from company executives about how they are using the platform and why it’s important to the future of their business.

Click here to learn more about Einstein ABM.