Well, that was interesting! We just published our “The Forrester New Wave™: ABM Platforms, Q2 2018” report, which profiles the 14 most significant vendors in this market: 6sense, Demandbase, Engagio, Jabmo (formerly Azalead), Lattice Engines, Madison Logic, MRP, Radius, RollWorks, TechTarget, Terminus, Triblio, True Influence, and ZenIQ.

Based on our comprehensive criteria, Forrester’s take is that Demandbase, Jabmo, and MRP lead the pack today. Forrester’s clients can read the entire report here and register for my June 7, 2018 webinar on lessons learned here.

This New Wave is a follow-on to the “Vendor Landscape: Account-Based Marketing, Q4 2016” report that I co-authored with Allison Snow back in October 2016. A lot has happened over the past 19 months, and the positive results that the vendors in the account-based marketing (ABM) platform New Wave are delivering for their customers have accelerated ABM adoption and overall market development.

But this is still an emerging market: When we recently surveyed B2B marketers for an upcoming report on the state of ABM by my colleague Laura Ramos, 61% said they have at least a year’s experience with ABM, which means more than a third are still experimenting or only plan to roll out their first programs in 2018.

Today’s market for ABM platforms is characterized by a wide variety of solutions and approaches, offered by numerous entrants from adjacent markets, and a high volume of merger-and-acquisition activity. Most of the vendors in the ABM platform New Wave have strong core competencies in one or two key areas, but the Leaders are starting to tick all the boxes.

At the same time, ABM platforms are coalescing around a common set of capabilities and use cases. All the vendors we evaluated support multiple steps in the ABM process, offer strong native capabilities, and complement marketing automation platforms.

The ABM platform New Wave is an important tool to help you evaluate and select technology vendors. But define your ABM strategy first, and then choose a platform. Only after you have defined your ABM strategy can you properly prioritize and evaluate the capabilities each vendor offers based on the criteria most important to you.

Stay tuned to this space as we continue to cover the rapidly evolving practice of account-based marketing and the technologies that enable it!

 

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)