At the SiriusDecisions 2019 Summit on May 5–8 in Austin, Texas, I will join two of my new colleagues from SiriusDecisions, Service Director Matt Senatore and Senior Research Director Bob Peterson, in presenting our POV on the future of account-based marketing (ABM).

I have to say that, prior to Forrester’s acquisition of Sirius, I was pretty focused on my own knitting, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect regarding alignment when we started on this project. But it was clear from our first conversations just how similar our perspectives are on this topic.

And I don’t want to give away too many punch lines before our speech — so instead, let me ask what your answer would be to the question posed in the headline for this post. Is ABM here to stay because it’s a new and effective strategy that complements your existing lead-gen efforts? Or do you think ABM is mostly vendor-speak that has co-opted traditional B2B marketing best practices and will quickly fade into the woodwork? Or somewhere in between? I think you may be surprised by our take.

Because just as ABM is evolving, your buyers are, as well. To help you understand how that evolution will progress and what you need to do to take advantage of these developments, we’re planning to explore three key trends on stage in Austin:

  • Atomization. Customers expect meaningful experiences in every channel they use at every stage of their journeys, so companies must support niche audiences and hyper-personalization, both pre- and post-sale.
  • Authenticity. Customers want to be confident that they’re doing business with companies that reflect their values and demonstrate ethical behavior and purpose.
  • Artificial intelligence. Ever-smarter tools and machines making more decisions means customers expect businesses to balance technology use with creativity and humanity.

I’m really looking forward to exploring this topic with Matt and Bob, and I hope to see you at the SiriusDecisions 2019 Summit.