The emergence of account-based marketing (ABM) was a revelation to many B2B marketers struggling to make traditional demand marketing deliver for their buyers and the sales team. ABM techniques introduced many new approaches across people, processes, and technology that have been picked up by demand marketers. And for ABM marketers, the need to scale has also meant the adoption, mainly through leveraging technology, of traditional demand techniques to bring scale to once small-sized ABM programs.

And Forrester’s research is validating this — 62% of respondents to Forrester’s 2022 State Of ABM Survey claimed that the current state of alignment between demand and ABM marketing efforts was either broadly or fully aligned, with an expected future-state alignment on the same dimensions at 82%.

Although Forrester predicted the convergence of demand and ABM several years ago, leveraging and accelerating this in APAC, where marketing teams are typically leaner, offers especially significant advantages. With the difference between demand and account-based marketing narrowing significantly, and with the need to connect more buyers across more accounts through multiple touchpoints, merging once-siloed approaches seems the logical next step.

The intersection has accelerated as companies seek to rationalize demand and ABM strategies to improve marketing team access to an expanded array of digital tools, deliver ABM experiences at scale, and develop an agile marketing team that can serve all strategies as needed. But this leaves the question: “So what’s next?”

In our session, “Smarter Demand, Scalable ABM: B2B Marketing’s Next Evolution,” at Forrester’s B2B Summit APAC on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, Malachi Threadgill and I will share four limitations that demand and ABM marketers must address today to lay the foundations for the future. Join us as we show you how to go beyond acquisition, beyond leads, beyond sourcing, and beyond technology. We’ll talk about a detailed vision for change and provide practical advice on how to go beyond convergence.