Being a marketer at Act-On is great. We use Act-On for our own business and we represent our own ideal customer profile – so we know the challenges that marketers face. Our customers are marketers and executives who invest in marketing, so in our own roles as marketers and executives invested in marketing, we share their ambitions – and their pains.

This commonality sometimes spurs product innovations.

In late 2015, as we were planning for 2016, we became laser-focused on our ideal customer profile. We’d been developing buyer personas for years; this time we were looking at companies as customers, at the account level. We’d done this before, too, as part of developing scoring criteria and other qualification measurements, but this time around we had an old idea: Account-based marketing.

Account-based marketing (ABM), at its simplest, is focusing on an account as opposed to a lead. This might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s actually a profound change in emphasis.