13 How to improve your account based marketing results an interview with Jon Miller, CEO of Engagio

Summary: B2B lead generation has had to reinvent itself over the last decade.<br> Sales have always used an account-based approach. Now marketing is getting on board by with account-based marketing. But it’s not an easy road.<br> Here’s why:<br> In the B2B, you’re never selling to an individual. He or she is almost always part of a buying team. Moreover, the bigger the potential deal, the more people, departments, and functional areas get involved.<br> For this reason, many B2B marketers using a leads-based approach hit a wall with their account based marketing efforts.<br> ABM isn’t just about marketing. In fact, ABM works best in companies where all revenue-generating areas are closely aligned as one team.<br> So how can you improve your account based marketing results?<br> To help, I interviewed Jon Miller (@<a href="https://twitter.com/jonmiller">jonmiller)</a>, CEO and Co-Founder at <a href="https://www.engagio.com">Engagio</a>. Jon and his team just released the Second Edition of <a href="https://info.engagio.com/clear-and-complete-guide-to-account-based-marketing.html">The Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing</a>. He brings a fantastic perspective on how you can complement a leads-based approach and adopt account-based marketing.<br> <br> What inspired you to start Engagio?<br> Jon: Great.  I’m excited to be here and to have a chance to hang out with you again. It’s been a while since we talked.<br> So, my background: I’ve been in marketing technology almost my entire career. My undergraduate degree is actually in physics, and when I was coming out of college, I ended up doing a lot of work with companies that were trying to take advantage of all the customer data they had [in order] to make decisions.<br> Because I came to marketing with that quantitative and analytical background, that led me into a series of marketing technology companies that were basically all about really trying to use all that data to drive better customer decisions and one to one interactions. You know, very much inspired by the Don Peppers and Martha Rogers book The One to One Future.<br> So, I worked at the company called Exchange and then I was an early employee at a company called Epiphany, which was probably the leading marketing technology company of the mid-’90s.<br> After we sold Epiphany, I co-founded Marketo, along with Phil Fernandez. And I think that’s arguably, or maybe not even arguably, the leading marketing technology of the last ten years or so. Recently, it was sold to Adobe for just under 5 billion dollars.<br> I had this long career in marketing technology, but one of the trends I think is always true is marketing is changing all the time, and the underlying technologies are changing all the time.<br> I just felt about four years ago that Marketo wasn’t, frankly, moving fast enough to kind of keep up with all the new trends and changes in how marketing was done.<br> And I was inspired to start a new company that would be seeking to build out the next generation of marketing product; that could really take advantage of all these new trends.<br> One of those significant trends is what’s now known as account-based marketing. And so, that’s where I decided to start, to focus, to have Engagio be a platform for account-based marketing.<br> How do you define account-based marketing?<br> Brian: Well, there’s a lot of definitions out there about account-based marketing, and I’ve talked with CMOs and VPs, and they see account-based marketing as just good marketing.<br> But I’d love to ask you: you just had this new book come out, The Clear Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing and you’re on your second edition, so how would you define it?<br> Jon: Yeah. So, first of all, let me just say, really excited about the book. You know,