We must, as usual, begin at the beginning and adopt the conventional understanding of what ABM and DBM are.

Deal-based marketing (DBM) and account-based marketing (ABM) is trending concepts, particularly for tech media companies where increasing awareness and establishing connections are crucial to earning clients' trust and securing contracts.

This time, the main concern is whether account-based marketing and deal-based marketing can actually coexist together or not.

The reality is every Tech company does ABM and DBM to some extent, even if they don't call it that. How do you define ABM and DBM specifically for the B2B space?

ABM is a long-term strategic approach that allows marketing and sales to collaborate as equals in order to open doors or forge close relationships with high-growth accounts. It's not an easy strategy or campaign. It's not a one-time thing, it's a business plan.

When it comes to DBM, it essentially uses the same methodology and effort (as ABM), the difference is that DBM has a shelf life as opposed to expanding an account.

Similar to account-based marketing, which is a strategic method of targeting an account as a market within it. This perspective is slightly modified by DBM, where we use a strategic strategy to focus on a deal as a market itself. Every sale, after all, has its own product or service, audience, clientele, message, and distribution methods, so how you use all of this to aim for a deal may determine whether you win or lose.

Despite the fact that certain discussions can take three to six months to finish, strategic ABM, or this type of marketing, is actually quite short-term. So, should we treat DBM and ABM differently, or can they get along just fine? Using the following circumstances, let's comprehend them:

1. When you are aware of ABM - They can co-exist together because, regardless of the tier of the ABM ladder you're considering, if you're having good ABM approach, you'll already be aware of these deals and able to influence them as part of your planned ABM journey.

2. When you are not aware of ABM - To provide the sales team the best opportunity to persuade a customer and influence them beyond the realm of the actual deal, you must be extremely detailed about the deal. A deal is difficult enough to manage on its own even without considering all the other issues of ABM.

Here we can see that both the above conditions are correct and favorable.

The difficulty in making this combination work, though, is in the requirement!

If you don't carefully evaluate deal qualifications, you can find yourself quickly aiming for the marketing function of your company's smart worker! When it comes to DBM qualification, you need to think more like a salesperson and be more focused on the wins (since, at the end of the day, that's what any company wants), and you need to take into consideration which deal is marketing support more likely to aid to succeed? This undoubtedly raises the bar for qualification! At the best of times, we're all still just beginning to understand account qualification, despite the fact that it is very crucial.

There are two carriages here for me. You have one carriage where you support deals on your top ABM accounts and another carriage where you support deals on accounts other than those listed above.

You should definitely be offering deal support to your top-tier ABM accounts; this is just one of the many ways you can support those accounts in achieving the most elusive of the 3 R's, reputation, relationships, and revenue. Focus on the major deals where marketing can have the biggest impact instead of being drawn into every single sale because doing so will just result in daily account churn rather than strategic growth.

Qualifying the deals outside of your "Top Accounts" is a totally separate matter altogether. How can you pick the best deals when every business organization may have thousands of them going at once? As is often the case with ABM, it relies on your business priorities.

It is actually possible to ride both of these carriages simultaneously if the proper strategy and team workflows are in place! But this is where the whole blog merely fuels the debate over whether ABM is actually taking over as the standard method of marketing! DBM is certainly another important aspect of ABM that should be taken into account by anyone tackling the wide variety of ABM methods at their reach. Monitor your sales. When performing ABM and DBM, align with your leadership team and your delivery team; create an ecosystem because ABM and DBM cannot function separately.

Wrapping Up

Find out whether DBM is indeed the best option for your company! The best thing about DBM is that you get to show results quickly (depending on the length of your deal cycle), and you can be very innovative about how to excite the customer in what is one of the most deadline-driven contexts a marketer can be put into. As a result, as we see DBM should undoubtedly be a part of every ABM leader's toolkit.