In this episode of "Digital Marketing from the Trenches," your co-hosts Dan Nedelko and Joseph DellaVecchia discuss the differences between Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing. The Differences Between ABM and B2B Sales and Marketing B2B is a subset of ABM, emphasizing the importance of understanding ideal customer profiles and target accounts. While ABM focuses on high-value, personalized engagement, while B2B casts a wider net. There is still a need for a strong sales and marketing alignment, effective cold email outreach strategies, and the role of platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator all play a part in getting better more actionable information. We also touch on the importance of diverse content and authentic engagement on LinkedIn to build relationships and maintain interest throughout the sales process. TL;DR Version Target account lists and how to build them. Data enrichment and how it relates to target account lists. We'll be creating workshops and tutorials on YouTube about using platforms like Apollo.io and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Transcript Expand to read the full transcript Dan Nedelko 0:09And welcome everybody to another episode of live at the hive digital marketing from the trenches. I am your host, Dan Nedelko, and I'm here with Joseph DellaVecchia 0:19Joe dellavecchio, one of your other hosts as well. And I feel like it was co host, but I feel like at this point I've been promoted. I'm promoting myself, Dan Nedelko 0:25okay, promoting yourself to host. I am now the co host with Joe. There we go. We are. We are co hosts, truly co hosts. Welcome to another episode of digital marketing from the trenches. And in this episode. We are going to talk more about ABM. As we started out this process, we thought it would be an episode. We quickly realized it was going to be a whole bunch of episodes. There's a lot to unpack today. We're going to be talking about the distinct differences between Account Based Marketing and B to B marketing, which often get conflated. So we're going to talk a little bit about the two differences between the two approaches, how B to B is actually kind of a subset of ABM, and you can actually prep your B to B or your ABM efforts, I should say, by creating a strong infrastructure on B to B marketing, which is really time well spent. Joseph DellaVecchia 1:23There we go. Bit of a mouthful there, little Dan Nedelko 1:26bit, little bit. And I ad libbed that Joseph DellaVecchia 1:30it was very it was very smooth, very well done. Dan Nedelko 1:32Thank you reliving my high school drama days. So yeah, but just Joseph DellaVecchia 1:37to build on what you were saying there, Dan, one thing that we talk about all the time. We're talking about as the inspiration for this episode is just how often so many people think they're ready for ABM, but they're not ready for ABM. And we touched on that a little bit in our last episode, but and we talked about so too, the how sales and marketing alignment needs to be strong, and in order to that, you have to have a fair understanding of what each thing is. So let's just quickly go back and let's recap what is ABM from what we talked about last time, ABM is Account Based Marketing. It's a strategic approach that focuses on targeting and engaging specific, high value accounts, rather than casting a wide net. It's a method that aligns marketing and sales efforts to create personalized buying experiences for key accounts. ABM treats individual accounts and markets as their own right. It involves tailoring marketing campaigns and content specific accounts, and it's data driven and relies heavily on customer insights and also on teamwork as well, and being able to align your initiatives objectives and taking the data real time and reports and being able to adjust your strategies effectively. Dan Nedelko 2:43There you go. Actually, it's funny because in one of our clips from the last episode that we put up on YouTube, someone said, like that, looks Joe looks like he's this guy looks like he's reading from his script. And actually, it's funny because you weren't reading from a script. No, Joseph DellaVecchia 2:55I was not reading from I did see that too and that, yeah, they were like, reading from a script and not talking to anyone, and I'm like, I am very much just talking to someone about marketing right now, and Dan Nedelko 3:06I'm the person that doesn't exist in that conversation, which I don't know if that says something or what it might mean. But anyhow, getting back to the matter at hand, yeah, so ABM, and I'll talk a little bit about B to B as well, but ABM really has a significant portion of it that is philosophical and and structural to your organization, about how you sell, about understanding the customers, about aligning sales and marketing at a fairly deep level, and where BDRs and SDRs can Actually, in certain functions, be part of the marketing team, and in other functions, they're part of the sales team, but you have this kind of very strong alignment between the two groups and that and that goes deeper than a platform. It goes much deeper than how you target accounts, etc. So it really takes a lot of heavy lifting, especially when it's new for businesses to really get their heads around how this can work collaboratively. So it's, it's definitely a heavy lift, right? I mean, it's, it's not something you're just going to walk in one day and say, Okay, everybody we're doing ABM, and it's just going to start happening. So, yeah, yeah. So you know it's, it's definitely non trivial, and then, you know, we'll get into it, but on the B to B side, and we have this little visual that I drew in, like two seconds. But if you were to imagine a circle of ABM and encompassed inside that completely is a smaller circle of B to B. Like a lot of what you need to do in the ABM side, you need to do for effective B to B marketing, but just to kind of follow on exactly what you said, then what is B to B? Right? If that's all that stuff is ABM, then what is B to B? Well, there's some real distinct property. Of what B to B marketing is. And one it obviously does come down where target accounts are really much more granular at the B to B level, they're a little bit more general, but you still do have to understand your ideal customer profiles. Who are you selling to? Right? And one of the things that I will often hear, and I know you do too, Joe, is you'll hear, oftentimes people say, I'll use an example. We sell to government. That's our ideal customer. And then the reply would be, okay, well, let's look at government. It's a huge topic. If you were looking at government, you've got everything from small townships to cities to municipalities to major centers like the GTA, for example, and then you have provincial, and then you have federal, and then you have provincial, and in the US, you'd have state level. And then inside of that, you've got various departments, from military to civic, civic works to, I mean, all sorts of stuff, right? Joseph DellaVecchia 6:11And then to just, sorry, just to build on that, though, like, I think that's part of like, the battle too. I think that people don't realize that knowing this part is half the battle. You say to someone, do you know who your target account is? Do you know who you're going after, who you're marketing to? And they say, just build on your example, yeah, government. So let's go market to government. But they don't realize that that's knowing the industry, or possibly even the persona, but the specific contexts and who you need to talk to, the decision makers, the people who are going to champion you, who are going to be interested, who are going to sign on the dotted line you need to know, not in you don't have to have met them in person, or them particularly, but you need to know those to effectively market to them with an ABM strategy, Dan Nedelko 6:54yeah, yeah. And you need to for a B to B strategy as well. Because again, we're going to go through some of these brush strokes as we go through this conversation. One of the things is, if you don't really know who in the government and what department and who the buying group is and where you're trying to get to, and if you start advertising on a LinkedIn, for example, for brand awareness and government, 90% of your spend is going to be entirely wasted on the wrong people that have absolutely no connection to where it is your your what it is you're selling and who you're selling to. So step one in B to B is developing an ideal customer and an ideal account profile. Now that's ahead of target accounts, right? Like you, you have to know what that is in fairly specific terms, right to understand your sales to in order to be able to develop that target account list. So we're not there yet. We're but in B to B, the first step would be, who are you selling to? And and be ruthless with yourself if you're in B to B sales, to really dissect this and really understand it, because nine times out of 10 in a conversation, the definition of that ideal customer profile is far too broad. It's far too encompassing. It does not specify, you know, is it procurement? Is it a field operations person? So I'll give you like another example. In government at a certain level, various managers and directors within a government will have discretionary budgets throughout a year. They can purchase up to some level, right? If your product falls below that threshold, call it $100,000 a year. Maybe that's your threshold for the service or product that you're selling. Well, if that's within a discretionary budget for those people, then you can market directly to them, right? And that sales process can begin within any allotted period of time, not fixed to budgetary restrictions, unless that becomes part of, you know,