Review by michaelmadill -- ABM is B2B. by Sangram Vajre

[michaelmadill]

[Following is a volunteer review of "ABM is B2B." by Sangram Vajre.]

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3 out of 4 stars

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You should read the book, ABM is B2B: Why B2B Marketing and Sales is Broken and How to Fix it by Sangram Vajre and Eric Spett. If you’re a marketing or a sales professional, I think you’ll find it very useful. I rate this book three out of four stars. If the book had dealt better with counterarguments to its main ideas, I would have given it four stars. If it had presented its overall message less clearly, I would have given it two stars. The book is well-edited, though I would have changed the subtitle to “Why B2B Marketing and Sales are Broken and How to Fix Them.” In general, this book presents a radical business idea well, it’s insightful, and it’s easy to read. The authors have put a not-very-new idea into a new package and given it a new life with much greater appeal. Experienced marketers can learn a lot from it. Sales and marketing managers will benefit the most.

The book is structured to convince the skeptical reader of the importance of ABM or Account Based Marketing. Section 1, the Introduction, recounts standard criticisms of contemporary Business to Business or B2B marketing strategy. Section 2 discusses the Maturity Curve, the graphical representation of account penetration. It presents data about the effectiveness of standard strategies for moving accounts along the curve. Section 3 introduces the TEAM framework, a system for Targeting, Engaging, Activating, and Measuring account effectiveness. There is also a discussion of B2B life cycle account management, from account acquisition to increasing pipeline velocity, to account expansion. Section 4 is about operationalizing the TEAM framework and how to structure your team depending on your business goals. Section 5 is a collection of resources. There are testimonials, lists of podcasts, book reviews, and influencers. This book is a complete system for remaking your marketing strategy.

The overall message the book is simple: relationships are key. This stark formulation is the best thing about the book. If sales and marketing professionals pay as much attention to managing their accounts after a sale as they do to getting them to close a sale, they’ll not only increase account penetration and expansion, but also increase the revenue and profit generated by each one. While this is an important insight backed up by abundant evidence in the book, it almost gets lost in the proliferation of metaphors, clichés, and jargon the authors append to every section, almost to every paragraph. You don’t have to be an experienced marketer to understand their basic point, but if you’re not an industry professional or a follower to trendy business thinking, phrases like “flip the funnel,” “land and expand,” and “lather, rinse, repeat” seem unnecessary, and a student might spend too much time deciphering the jargon instead of internalizing the main ideas of the book.

The main ideas are clearly presented, but they would have been enlivened by the addition of some lessons learned or postmortems. That’s the thing I dislike most about the book. In other words, some case studies of ABM failures would have been very helpful, especially to the experienced marketing strategist or skeptical sales manager. This would tell the reader about the limits of ABM in a much more powerful way than the authors’ brief accounts of the obstacles to success in the stories of companies that have mastered the maturity curve. Leaving out a detailed discussion of failure makes it hard to evaluate the book’s ideas except in a thought experiment, and busy marketers and salespeople might be tempted to skip the book altogether or simply trust their instincts. Those are bad ideas that are addressed in the book. The authors tell us that it’s precisely those two courses of action that have broken B2B.

This is an important business book. It’s not without shortcomings, but those aren’t serious enough to totally obscure or invalidate its message. Wise strategists would read the book closely and at least try to implement its ideas, because the theoretical arguments make sense, and the evidence presented in the book suggests that those work in the real world.

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ABM is B2B.
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[Erin Painter Baker]

I have an MBA (though I don't work in sales or marketing), and I had no idea what ABM was until you defined it in the review. This makes me very certain that the amount of jargon in this book is probably over the top, and without much explanation from the authors.