Thought leadership should be fun, fast, and fearless. You tap into excitement about new ideas and advocate for something better. That’s the mindset behind The Idea Sled. Projects glide forward gracefully. It’s the momentum of commitment. This newsletter shows you how.
All the precise, military-grade targeting in the world won’t solve THE core marketing challenge of how to reach the buying decision-maker specifically and directly. The problem becomes more acute the higher the stakes of the decision. For example, I work with companies that serve clients responsible for billions or more in assets. There are few ways to reach them, but they are also the only ways that matter.
It reminds me of a song by The Police, “Message in a Bottle.” Yes, I’m dating myself. If you don’t know, it’s Sting’s original band. If you’re still lost, I don’t know…
Targeting or Throwing?
The point I’m making is that targeting can be a bit of a smokescreen in marketing. It still resembles putting your message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. It sounds slick and data-driven, but it still doesn’t do the job when you have a target of one. The bottle is just floating.
“I’ll send an SOS to the world
I’ll send an SOS to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle yeah
Message in a bottle, yeah”
— Message in a Bottle, The Police
This moment might also be the right time to remind ourselves that “targeting” is a fairly nasty way to think of how we reach and engage human beings.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) as an Alternative
Nonetheless, among all of the models for reaching audiences, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) may provide the best option when stakes are high and cycles are long. ABM aligns marketing and sales to target specific, high-value accounts as “markets of one.” The goal is to identify the best-fit companies and tailor campaigns and content to their particular business needs, challenges, and buying dynamics.
In its most radical form, an ABM strategy could prioritize fewer than 10 accounts. But deals with those accounts have a massive revenue impact. In capital markets contexts, two or three wins would transform a quarter. Sometimes, more wins would even create operational risks.
So, why doesn’t everybody do it?
ABM Isn’t Perfect
First, fewer impressions mean fewer things to measure. ABM doesn’t satisfy marketers’ addiction to irrelevant data. It’s scary to put too much emphasis on so few discrete activities. It feels better to have more busyness to measure. I honestly think that’s the biggest reason.
Second, ABM blurs the lines between marketing and sales. Often, sales feels that it owns specific relationships. Marketing should stick to using their guns to target someone else. ABM also creates sales uncertainty by raising the scenario of salespeople not making quarterly numbers. Most importantly, without clean mechanisms for outreach and follow-up, all that precise ABM effort may still be overlooked or ignored.
“A year has passed since I wrote my note
I should have known this right from the start
Only hope can keep me together
Love can mend your life, but love can break your heart.”
Third, the theory doesn’t translate easily into practice. You have to have something substantive to say, and you have to know how to tailor it with real relevance. Swapping out a few variables won’t work. It doesn’t address the asymmetry between mass exposure and decision-maker attention. That’s where thought leadership comes in.
The Thought Leadership Dilemma
You also have to have a pipeline of thought leadership in multiple formats and lengths. You have to do the work upfront to create tailored enablement assets (talk tracks, email templates, insights decks) to bridge the gulf with sales for each account or persona.
ABM often exposes how little marketing knows about how real decisions happen. ABM can even expose marketing’s thought leadership deficits and lack of thinking partnership with business leaders. Yet, intellectual credibility makes ABM work.
In simple terms, if ABM isn’t also a thought leadership strategy, it will fail, and badly.
The Ocean is Getting Dirtier
The overpopulation and overpollution caused by the content-industrial complex impose an additional limit on ABM or any other strategy, regardless of its precision. Individual moments don’t exist outside a stream of time. Regardless of the quality and relevance of your message, it gets delivered into a pool rife with dead content and choked with slop.
If content marketers started this disaster, content marketers with AI in their hands will worsen it to the point of ecosystem collapse. AI offers the promise of infinite content generation. And many content marketers find that appealing.
Aside from the grotesque prospects infinite content sets out for our attention, it also continues to lower the odds of reaching anyone, let alone senior decision makers. It multiplies the “message in a bottle” problem exponentially, even given the precision of ABM or other forms of narrowcasting. Content collapse turns any strategy into noise.
“Walked out this morning, I don’t believe what I saw
A hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
Seems I’m not alone in being alone
Hundred billion castaways looking for a home”
How to Change Course
Is there hope for overcoming the bad infinity of the content industry? Some, yes.
Most senior decision makers operate in their own sphere of attention. In other words, they aren’t sitting around using Google or even ChatGPT to answer their questions. They trust their colleagues. That pattern of trust demands going beyond even the ABM model.
The hope for escape, paradoxically, lies in remaining inside those spheres, insulated from an infinity that never arrives at its destination.
