Salesforce unveils AI-powered account-based marketing tools

Yesterday Salesforce unveiled new AI-fuelled account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities within its Salesforce Digital 360 which is designed to aid sales teams in scaling their campaign. Einstein Key Accounts Identification analyses engagement-based buying signals and customer characteristics to pinpoint which accounts are most likely to make a purchase. Accounts as Campaign Members allows businesses to target an entire account directly even without any contacts for the account.

Marketing teams are increasingly seeing ABM as critical in delivering personalised experiences. In a 2021 Salesforce survey, 92% of B2B marketers cited ABM as “extremely important” to overall marketing efforts.

A report by SiriusDecisions found that 33% of businesses used at least 30% of their marketing budgets to ABM in 2016, while the percentage increased to 50% in 2017. The ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA found that 80% of marketers that have adopted ABM achieve significantly higher returns on investment.

Salesforce Pardot SVP Meredith said, “Every business needs to deliver connected digital experiences for their buyers, from anywhere. However, buyer behavior is changing — and they’re bringing business-to-consumer buying habits to business-to-business purchases.” In the same blog post she adds, “These buyers have done the research, read the reviews, and they know all about your product before the sales team reaches out.”

Companies can leverage Einstein Key Account Identification to analyse marketing engagement data across the web and CRM platforms to tier accounts in a prioritised order. According to Salesforce the end goal is to help sales and marketing teams to focus on priority accounts, potentially optimising resources to close deals quicker.

Accounts as Campaign Members gives companies the chance to harness AI-powered insights to create custom and personalised ABM campaigns for buyers within top-tier accounts. This feature syncs new account contacts automatically into marketing campaigns the second they are identified. Before, marketers were only able to target an account if they had an individual contact in their roster.

Brown continues, “The COVID-19 pandemic set off a seismic shift in the marketing industry, as every business was forced to transition to a digital-first world. Previously, business-to-business reps would meet customers where they were looking to do business — dinner meetings, live entertainment events, and industry conferences. Now, these customer interactions are primarily happening digitally, as Zooms are the new conference rooms and sales deals are closed in home offices. As customer demands for digital experiences grow, business-to-business companies need a platform to build a single view of their customer, identify key accounts, and quickly turn new leads into deals.”

Both Einstein Key Account Identification and Accounts as Campaign Members are available now for Salesforce Digital 360 customers.

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