Terry Arnold, Anteriad Vice President of Marketing, Terry Arnold, was one of 30+ speakers at the recent Account-Based Engagement Summit hosted by ChatFunnels. Demand gen leaders who attended gained valuable insights from all the sessions, and we’ve captured key points from Terry’s talk in this article.

Account-Based Engagement = ABM Version 2.0?

When we look at how account-based marketing (ABM) has evolved, account-based engagement is version 2.0 of that. Marketing in the classic context is about planning your audience, creating messaging and language for content, and communicating with an audience to get a response.

That’s been traditional marketing, and account-based marketing for the most part wrapped itself around that, but in a very specific way. In ABM, brands go after an account that we have or desire a relationship with.

Account-based engagement is that next level of traditional ABM. It’s not just one carefully planned, deliberate message, but a carefully planned, deliberate engagement over time, in fact, over the customer lifecycle. Marketing is just part of an ABE approach.

Build Pipeline for Relationships, Not for Leads

ABE looks at how to pull things together to build relationships for sales. How do we continue that dialogue in meaningful ways to build relationships and ultimately, create opportunities for sales to land and expand. How can sales use data-driven knowledge to not only sell more products, but essentially solve more problems. This is long-term engagement from a sales perspective.

That’s a unique perspective too, because you’re thinking about that next step. It’s not just this top-line goal of building all these things to make sure accounts are marketed to. It’s asking for that response – the next step that creates engagement.

And then in turn, whoever is running account-based engagement looks at the response, looks at the data, looks at whatever is happening and takes that next step, too. They iterate the process.

Engage Then Iterate: Intent Intelligence Shows How

Marketing is all about evolution. How do we iterate what we’re doing to get better? Everything in life works that way. As we grow up and mature, we get better. We iterate on top of things to improve.

That’s what business constantly looks for, too, and that’s what data-driven ABE is all about. How do we take our current circumstances and environment, and optimize to get increasingly better results?

In making engagement better and better, you identify whom you’re speaking to and provide personal, relevant messages that lead to a relationship. That comes from using data, specifically intent data, to make sure we hear buyers as they respond and engage.