This article by Sudipto Gosh, originally appeared on MarTechSeries.
CRM Integration with Madison Logic ActivateABM Brings Better Alignment Between Marketing And Sales By Providing Richer Account And Contact Insights To Enhance The Sales Workflow
If you belong to the new-age B2B ‘school of speed’, you will agree that velocity and a quality-first approach are key to achieve the full return on lead generation and display advertising products. However, modern B2B marketers find it extremely hard to tune their ABM strategies with their CRM. With sales and marketing teams breaking their siloed approach, it was expected that ABM platforms would make B2B conversations more precise, effective, and velocity-driven. To enable B2B marketers achieve all this within their CRM, global ABM leader—Madison Logic, has announced new integration capabilities for its ActivateABM platform.
“Comprehensive ABM has demonstrated 80% better pipeline velocity, and 40% better average order value, and 150% better conversion rates than traditional account based marketing.” – Madison Logic CEO, Thomas O’ Regan
Madison Logic ActivateABM is now offering customers the ability to know what accounts are actively researching solutions, along with the exact topics they are searching. The new CRM capabilities in ActivateABM are powered by the account-level intelligence that gives sales teams real-time insights into a prospect’s unique engagement with their organization. With powerful account-based intelligence at the core of ActivateABM, Madison Logic customers would witness the real essence of bridging the “big” traditional pain point for sales and marketing teams.
Mission ActivateABM: Building a Comprehensive ABM and CRM to Bridge the Sales & Marketing Divide
At the time of this announcement, we spoke to, Madison Logic CEO, Thomas O’Regan. Thomas took us deep into the core tenets of Madison Logic’s ActivateABM and how the new CRM integration spells the arrival of new-age sales enablement strategies.
Thomas spoke of Madison Logic’s mission to help B2B marketers identify, engage and ultimately convert their best prospects into customers. Thomas said, “Increasing marketing ROI is now a necessity, which requires greater alignment between sales and marketing teams. Both teams must learn from each other, and to succeed, they must integrate their efforts.”
Listening to a customer is an art and Madison Logic picked the right brains to build their powerful data-driven ABM platform. Thomas acknowledged how clients were handicapped to run ABM program for two reasons—
- Constrained by size of the marketing team
- Costly ABM components or cheaper alternatives that are barely a notch higher than the ones segmenting accounts with spreadsheets
However, Madison Logic focused on the biggest challenge—bridging the gaps between marketing and sales. Thomas added, ‘We’ve seen that sales and marketing alignment is the number one challenge. We must assume that this is due to ABM’s maturity in the marketplace. As marketers reject technologies that aren’t right for their organizations and start to embrace a more comprehensive approach, many of these challenges will pale.”
Building a Powerful ABM+CRM Integration Key to Driving Maximized Customer Engagement for Higher ROI
Thomas said, “Prior to ActivateABM, B2B marketing organizations struggled to identify the metrics that actually evaluate the performance of their ABM efforts making it difficult to measure their true impact. Madison Logic’s advanced reporting changed that, providing marketers unparalleled attribution and insights into how to engage and influence target accounts. With these CRM integrations, sales teams can now have the data-driven conversations that lead to conversions.”
By introducing new features for its ActivateABM, Madison Logic is consolidating its position as the leader in ABM platforms. The new CRM integration expounds the importance of having a clear vision into what prospects are searching, engaging with, and buying along their customer journeys. ActivateABM enables sales to understand the precise topics an account is researching, to influence marketing and sales messaging to encourage more meaningful conversations with their clients.
Thomas provided a brief outline of Madison Logic’s new-age ActivateABM and its core components—
Integrated Data Platform (IDP)
IDP is the only B2B data platform that leverages proprietary and third-party sources to create the most advanced B2B audience graph, enabling marketers to identify and engage all decision makers and influence their target accounts.
The IDP solution enables segmentation and measurement by many demographic and firmographic variables such as function, industry, size, location and others.
Comprehensive ABM
Central to bridging the gap between marketing and sales data and intelligence, ActivateABM is the most comprehensive account based marketing platform in the world.
ActivateABM is built from the ground up to power sales alignment and marketing ROI. When the goal is to influence a target account, Madison Logic found that companies that leverage both digital advertising (native, video, display) and content syndication were able to reach users at all stages of the buyer journey simultaneously, driving the greatest engagement and best results.
Targeted Display Advertising
This is a unique audience solution that unlocks Madison Logic’s unrivaled scale and global reach with its digital advertising solutions, across the most effective formats.
Madison Logic’s enhanced analytics, which integrates seamlessly into CRM solutions, provide a 360°-view of account-level insights on media content trends and engagement metrics.
With the click of a button, sales and marketing teams can access a full, unified picture of a target account—without having to access third-party sites or data. This narrows the gap between marketing and sales and ultimately results in quicker, more efficient and a higher volume of prospect-to-customer conversions.
Content Syndication
ActivateABM is powered by a proprietary content syndication buy-side platform, enabling delivery across a wide array of inventory sources, including Madison Logic’s very own proprietary content syndication ad server and proprietary B2B publisher network. This technology and data-enabled platform also leverage multi-layer data verification to ensure the greatest scale and quality of leads for B2B marketers.
Eliminating Guesswork from B2B Engagements Using Advanced Metrics
Madison Logic has removed the traditional barriers to marketing and sales working together, blurring the lines between the two disciplines, enabling both to work in tandem as the leads move the pipeline and to conversion.
Madison Logic’s Activate ABM platform offers marketing, sales, SDR and BDR teams a powerful analytics suite which helps them –
- Validate marketing reach and impact on target accounts
- Design the most effective data-driven content strategy
- Optimize sales messaging for each account
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Activate ABM enables B2B marketers to:
- Pinpoint the accounts that are actively expressing intent through research
- The individuals who are conducting that research
- The topics they are researching
These insights allow them to personalize messaging and content that is most likely to engage. With its new CRM integration, Activate ABM puts this powerful account level intelligence into the hands of sales. With this information, sales can have more meaningful conversations that are more relevant to each account and further drive marketing ROI.
Unified Marketing and Sales Insights Deliver Higher ROI
The sales and marketing divide is a tale as old as B2B marketing itself. The teams are unified in purpose, but in practice, the two disciplines are often relegated to different corners. Sales teams have a list of accounts that they want marketing to target, and many times can’t perceive that marketing’s efforts are influencing them. For the two teams to abandon their corners and meet in the center of the room, something must change.
For years, a B2B marketer’s account based marketing practice (ABM) has taken two approaches:
- Display advertising to influence target accounts
- Content designed to generate leads within an ideal customer profile
Thomas explained further how these two tactics are often siloed and therefore hard to track. He said, “You might be gaining traction with a target account, but it’s difficult to understand and see how these tactics work in tandem. And it’s even harder to show the sales team that you’re moving the needle.”
In contrast, Madison Logic’s ActivateABM takes a comprehensive approach to account based marketing, bringing together a combination of targeted display advertising and lead generation with an advanced measurement platform that offers audience verification and engagement, market trends on research activity, and visibility into how these tactics are impacting and influencing target accounts.
ActivateABM and the Era of Intent Data
The ActivateABM measurement platform leverages intent data to identify which of its client’s target accounts are actively researching the topics most relevant to their campaign. This enables Madison Logic to take a client’s account list and identify the most engaged accounts so they can prioritize their efforts.
According to the latest State of ABM Study by SiriusDecisions, 60% of respondents stated their planned investment in ABM will be greater or significantly greater than last year. As B2B marketers increasingly embrace an account based approach, the need to consolidate disparate ABM tactics in one place will grow along with it.
With intent data driving the engine, Madison Logic’s ABM delivers on its promise to close the gap between marketing and sales.
Thomas explained, “Sales provides an account list, marketing prioritizes that list and directs its efforts against those accounts showing the most activity. Using the analytics built into Activate ABM, B2B marketers can show their sales teams exactly how they are impacting their target accounts as they progress through the buyer’s journey.”
He added, “The same surge data used by marketing to identify and prioritize accounts can now fuel sales interactions. When ActivateABM is fully integrated into a client’s CRM platform, sales teams have insight into an account’s exposure to their message, engagement with their website, and how they’re interacting with their content and creative.
Hyper-relevant Content Drive Effective Product Marketing and Sales Enablement Campaigns
The ActivateABM platform employs rich intent data, enabling B2B marketers to:
- Identify the decision makers at target accounts who are showing intent by actively engaging in product research.
- Engage those prospects before they self-identify with:
- Display Ads including native, and video to generate product awareness across the buying committee
- Targeted Lead Generation by serving hyper-relevant content to active researchers within a target account list
- Measure the effectiveness of marketing programs and how they’re delivering real ROI
- Integrate the measurement into your CRM so that sales can be more effective
With ActivateABM, marketers -and now sales teams- have unprecedented visibility into how their target accounts are engaging with their brand. Account activity, including ad exposure, site visits, and digital asset consumption are now passed directly into a client’s CRM instance, giving sales teams the account-level insight required to have more relevant and effective sales conversations.
Ericka McCoy, VP Marketing, Global Campaigns, OpenText, said,“Madison Logic continues to make media activation and measurement a seamless part of our ABM ecosystem. By activating account level intelligence within a CRM partner, our marketing and sales teams now have a data-driven advantage, making them smarter in their nurturing and sales approach.”
Is ABM Moving From Data-Driven to a Data-Enabled Approach?
We asked Thomas if he feels that ABM platforms are moving ahead with time, transforming from being data-driven to becoming data-enabled. Thomas felt otherwise. He said, “ABM is actually in the process moving from a data-enabled to a data-driven approach. What has changed are the types of signals that ABM relies on for decisioning. Marketers have realized for ABM to be effective they need to stop relying on consumer-based signals, and start developing processes around B2B specific signals like audience reach, engagement, content research and download activity, etc.”
Currently, Madison Logic ActivateABM leverages unmatched proprietary intent data, reach, and scale to identify, engage, and convert prospective accounts. With Madison Logic, B2B marketers can easily gain insights into their target accounts to personalize their message, optimize their programs, and to inform their sales and marketing strategies.
