After a long weekend of celebrations with my loved ones, I finally sat down and got the chance to reflect on the year that’s passed. 2016 was my first year as a CMO, and I was absorbing everything and anything that I could about what people were talking about.

The thing that every company is focused on improving right now is the customer experience; I’ve been reading a lot about it. But one thing I’ve realized is that MRP doesn’t think of the customer experience the same way that everyone else does.

I spent the week in Miami at the Forrester B2B Conference and I got to see several of our competitors in the predictive analytics space talk about their solutions. I had recently discussed with the analyst at Forrester how all of the different definitions of account-based marketing are confusing the marketplace, and at this event I noticed there’s a similar effect happening in the predictive analytics sphere.

As we work on applying ABM principles throughout our internal pipeline, a big challenge is finding the right mix of tactics to continue engaging a prospect organization’s buying center without overstepping the boundary.

In conversations about our predictive solution, one of the topics that tends to come up is how we leverage it internally. The uncomplicated answer is that we’re tracking the behaviors of our target accounts and when they trip a certain threshold that lets us know they’ve entered the pre-purchase research phase, we have a whole set of programmed online and offline tactics that execute, automatically, based on buyer journey.

When the ABM Consortium decided to host a webinar on the topic of “what’s around the corner” for ABM, I was actually surprised at how quickly the idea of BANT – budget, authority, needs, and timeline – came to my mind.

The persistent focus on ABM in the B2B marketing industry today is so pervasive, it’s impossible for me not to think about the other ways that the industry might be shifting or how ABM might be infiltrating the practices we’ve grown so comfortable with. The whole concept of ABM is that you have a finite universe and that that’s a good thing.

Back in our interview with Mark Ogne, we touched on an important truth about account based marketing that many other thought leaders in the industry tend to overlook: some people aren’t getting what they felt was promised out of ABM.

E-mail marketing is a bit of a double-edged sword. It’s one of the most widely-used marketing channels, so those who use best practices will win. That said, it’s also one of the channels that has the most noise to cut through. Full inboxes tend to leave both marketers and consumers fatigued.