005 Operationalize standardized account and buyer taxonomies, and first party-cookie support. A key challenge for marketers today is the lack of standardized account and buyer taxonomies across the 10s to 100s of marketing, sales and customer success platforms, applications and tools that are in use across B2B companies, whether early stage venture-funded startups, unicorns or more mature mid-market and large enterprise customers. Buyer taxonomies (e.g. personas, seniorities, departments, job functions, and more) often vary by data provider. Account identification varies across sales systems (e.g. CRM, Sales Engagement) and third party data (e.g. Intent and Audience data providers). Typical account identification approaches today do not support account hierarchies, tracking corporate entities versus the line-of-business, tracking engagement or demand at a site location level. Marketers must ask the hard questions of their GTM and ABM platform providers as to how they are addressing these urgent marketer challenges. Leaving them unaddressed can lead to significant disconnects in reports delivered to Sales teams (SDRs, Sales Reps, Account Managers, others). That can additionally translate into lost Sales productivity, and wasted media and marketing program spend. Finally, it is essential that your GTM and ABM platform partners are actively developing solutions, and can advise you on a clear strategy and roadmap for managing all of your account-based audiences, using first-party cookies. They must be able to explain how their platform can help you run omni-channel marketing programs that are designed to track all accounts and individual buyer engagement, using first- party cookies that are owned by your Company, and not any third party technology, data or services provider. Today’s leading marketers are delivering powerful 1-to-1 contextual engagement, including campaigns personalized to topics customers care about most, products/solutions of interest, or content assets that speak to their specific persona. They additionally plan for suppression of ads that don’t apply to certain accounts or target buyers — all based on a unified view of each target account and buyer’s engagement history with the brand. Consider your next steps. Remember, personalized advertising and target account and buyer engagement isn’t just about single moments of connection. It’s really about creating experiences across their buyer journey that shifts, moves, and evolves based on who the account is, the relevant personas at that account, the content they interact with, and what they’re interested in. To truly drive growth with data-driven advertising, you need to have a clear plan for what your next steps are right from the very first buyer interaction at any of your ideal account profile (IAP) accounts. Consider how that first engagement can be a jumping-off point for future interactions and an overall journey personalized to each target persona and buyer. Kwanzoo