“Make them an offer they can’t refuse!” said the marketing team to the sales team in a B2B business.
But was the sales team able to convert the lead? No!
Why?
Sadly, most business functions live in silos with poor cross-communication and a lack of shared organizational goals. This results in missed business opportunities and customer dissatisfaction. In a competitive and challenging market like B2B, it ultimately results in lost revenue and poor customer experience.
The answer to these challenges is an Account-based Experience approach to marketing and sales, also called Account-based Everything (ABX), which is gaining substantial worldwide recognition and adoption.
Today 52% of customers expect personalization in the marketing they consume, and ABX enables a more targeted, efficient, and personalized approach to B2B marketing and selling.
While ABM has helped companies handpick the best accounts and increase revenue, it fails to provide a tremendous customer-centric experience. That’s where ABX comes in, leveling up the customer experience and ensuring each interaction has a lasting positive impact.
In this blog, we will dive into why ABX is essential for long-term success for B2B companies and explore a foolproof framework to implement ABX for your B2B business. Let’s get started:
What is ABX, and How Did it Emerge?
Account-based Experience is a marketing strategy that combines a customer-centric approach with account-based marketing and focuses on engaging multiple buyers using relevant data. ABX provides data-driven insights and account-specific messaging to deliver a personalized and seamless experience across the B2B customer buying journey.
A conventional marketing approach focuses on a lead or individual buyer who progresses through the marketing funnel until they become a ‘marketing qualified lead.’ Then, the lead is passed from marketing to sales operations.
B2B, however, works differently. There are multiple stakeholders in each buying decision, such as the CFO, the end-user, the decision-makers, the procurement team, etc. Research shows that the average buying team comprises six people, and larger tech teams may have 12 or more. Remember, “B2B” stands for “business-to-business,” not “business-to-individual.”
And guess what? Most B2B companies have realized they do business with accounts rather than individuals. Hence, they’ve adopted Account-based Marketing (ABM), which focuses on pinpointing and engaging eligible accounts, regardless of whether the time is ripe. ABM concentrates solely on generating leads and targeting accounts.
People hate it, as customer experience usually takes a big hit.
This is where ABX comes in. ABX engages business buyers and delivers the right message at the right time to build trust and long-term relationships. It combines the laser-focused targeting of Account-based Marketing with the engagement tactics of traditional marketing. There’s a keen focus on the customer at each stage, and it employs intelligent insights to decide when and how to engage prospects and what to express in the messaging.
Additionally, ABX does not limit itself to the marketing side of the equation. It offers a holistic solution where marketing, sales, and customer success teams collaborate and align around a shared understanding of target accounts.
Benefits of Account-Based Experience
ABX enables B2B companies to offer personalized experiences to their highest-value accounts. This approach leads to deeper client relationships, yielding higher retention rates and customer lifetime value.
ABX bridges the gap between teams by focusing on common goals, leading to a more streamlined effort and higher efficiency in targeting and engaging with clients. Let’s check out its key benefits:
Increase efficiency.
By focusing your efforts and time on high-value accounts, you can reduce resource waste, avoid duplicate efforts across teams, and invest more in accounts most likely to respond. This approach increases efficiency and generates better, long-term outcomes.
Close more deals.
ABX’s targeting ensures conversion rates are higher than a traditional approach. Studies suggest that 76% of marketers increased ROI in an account-based approach more than any other strategy. An account-based approach allows more targeted and personalized marketing efforts, leading to higher engagement, better conversion rates, and greater returns on investment.
Drive engagement across the user journey.
Leveraging an Account-based Experience helps align different teams by sharing performance metrics and goals, aligning on common customer personas, and understanding their unique needs. The prospects are prequalified for the sales team so they can focus on selling. Throughout the buyer’s journey, the customer success function remains engaged with the account, ensuring ongoing support and solution fit.
As a result, the buyer is engaged throughout the buy cycle, improving retention rates and customer relationships and creating a cohesive experience. ABX also ensures that the entire brand positioning and messaging are consistent.
Build long-term relationships that increase post-sales opportunities.
It costs five times more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. ABX’s approach focuses on customer engagement, wherein sales, marketing, and customer support teams understand the customer’s goals and pain points and then offer a solution that helps solve their challenges. Such a customer-centric approach enables you to increase your retention rates, expand your footprint, and grow the lifetime value of your key accounts.
Create a competitive advantage.
ABX’s focus on excellent customer experience delivers a competitive advantage by ensuring customer retention and acquisition. When you focus on creating long-term, meaningful relationships, your customers stay with you longer and become loyal brand ambassadors. With ABX, you personalize and connect all the touchpoints in the user’s journey, thus improving the user experience.
Applying the core tenets of ABX via Revegy
Account-based Experience frameworks bring together different teams to ensure a more personalized, consistent, and holistic experience for target accounts. The goal is to increase engagement, boost conversions, and reduce churn.
Revegy, the leading intelligent account-based sales execution platform, leverages ABX to help strengthen relationships within your key accounts. It also helps sales teams build business cases that convert, positioning your solutions as the obvious choice to meet your customer’s goals.
The following practices are critical to an ABX strategy and can be easily achieved with Revegy:
Targeting strategic accounts
In an ABX strategy, marketing and sales direct efforts toward an ICP (ideal customer profile). However, it takes work to decode complex accounts to win deals.
Revegy helps simplify sales by mapping key account relationships, identifying critical connections, and centralizing the data. It helps answer critical questions such as, “Do we have active and engaged relationships with the right people in the organization to enable account growth?” Revegy helps visualize the stakeholder map to understand stakeholder relationships better and increase a business’s footprint in the account.
Data-driven strategy execution
Data and intelligence fuels ABX and improves sales forecasting accuracy. Revegy extracts real-time account intelligence to help sales reps spot new players, grasp recent trends, and identify cross-sell opportunities. With these advanced account insights, sales teams can deploy a buyer-focused sales methodology. It also assesses opportunity age and deal risk, providing reps with a clear view of which opportunities are high-value and likely to close so they can be more strategic about account prioritization. It keeps teams on track and ensures a faster-converting pipeline.
Aligning marketing, sales development, and customer success teams
Coordination between multiple departments is a crucial attribute of ABX. Revegy provides a single source of truth, thus unifying your sales, marketing, and CX teams. All groups have a complete view of account activity, performance, and opportunities, increasing the teams’ efficiency and collaboration.
Prioritizing customer experiences
In ABX, the focus is on improving the customer experience and, in return, improving your footprint in existing key accounts. The first step to improving the customer experience is understanding the customer’s goals, strategies, and challenges. For example, what is the customer trying to accomplish this fiscal year? Revegy helps map your customer’s objectives, processes, and initiatives. You can then better position your solution and build a stronger business case.
Similarities and Differences Between ABX and ABM
As an established ABX company, we know it’s crucial to understand the similarities and differences between ABM and ABX. While both take an account-based approach and ABX is an evolution of ABM, some key differences set ABX apart.
A Foolproof Framework for Delivering ABX Success with Revegy
This section will provide a robust ABX framework to help you streamline your sales process, improve pipeline predictability, and optimize revenue. Let’s start.
Craft an account database.
- Link account data: Collect data from relevant sources, such as ABX campaigns, CRM data, email communications, marketing automation, advertising campaigns, website traffic, and user intent, and centralize it in one place. This will enable you to see the big picture and make data-driven decisions.
- Match the data: Arrange the data under respective accounts to get a clear view of each account’s unique preferences and needs.
- Segment data: Divide the data into segments to understand your target group better and craft more personalized campaigns.
- Manage data: Maintain a clean and updated database. Train the team to update new data regularly to avoid wasting efforts and resources.
Revegy integrates with your CRM solution for a seamless and efficient experience.
Filter accounts that matter.
Qualify key accounts using a well-defined selection strategy that includes qualitative analyses, sales input, and account insights. It also considers the account’s current budget, future potential, and strategic fit.
Find Whitespace Opportunities.
To begin new sales opportunity planning, you must analyze account data to identify unmet needs. Use relationship maps, like Revegy’s White Space Mapping, which extracts account intelligence to help you visualize your current footprint in an account, identify ripe cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and see where your competition’s solution is currently in place.
Identify Key Stakeholders and Win them Over.
Leverage Revegy’s Relationship Map to quickly visualize how to expand your account footprint and mitigate potential risks. By identifying the influencers and decision-makers, sales teams can deploy targeted sales tactics and use messaging that perfectly aligns with stakeholders’ goals, initiatives, and priorities.
Include these top stakeholder attributes when building a Relationship Map:
- Buying role
- Influence in vendor selection
- Vendor preference, if any
- Strength of relationship
This helps sales reps build stronger relationships with stakeholders and improve their chances of success.
Align with customer objectives
One of the critical principles of ABX is prioritizing the customer experience by aligning your customers’ goalswith your products and services to establish your business as a trusted partner and position your solutions as the obvious choice.
Account planning
With the evaluation complete, it’s time to execute. Devise a clear strategy with a task list and action owners. Revegy lets you visually organize sales account planning to boost your team’s effectiveness. It enables you to create winning playbooks and provides a consistent way to share information, improve collaboration, and ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
Quantify Account Progress to Craft Better Strategies.
The final step in ABX is to measure progress. You need to know you’re moving the needle forward.
Traditional marketing metrics are based on lead generation volume. However, ABX is about quality over quantity. When measuring ABX success or ROI, ask three key questions:
- Are we creating deeper, more meaningful relationships with targeted accounts?
Use Revegy’s Relationship Maps and Scorecards to determine the strength of your relationship with the accounts.
- How is the pipeline moving?
Define the milestones you want to hit. For example, track your success by measuring:
- The number of accounts that moved into a specific pipeline stage
- The number of engaged target accounts
- Conversion rates
- The average time between pipeline stages
- What is your ROI?
ABX may involve multiple budgets, so you must choose what to analyze to measure ROI.
Pro tip – Revegy enables you to analyze performance with robust reporting and analytics. It helps you measure win rates, identify successful sales rhythms, pinpoint critical negotiation factors, and more. Our powerful dashboard ensures predictable growth with a repeatable, scalable, and collaborative process.
Unlocking Long-Term Success with Revegy
ABX requires a fundamental mindset shift and an effective action plan to target specific accounts. It can help you procure recurring returns, boost engagement, and ensure a reliable database of loyal customers.
At Revegy, we offer a comprehensive account-based planning and execution platform that helps you drive revenue through deep, lasting customer relationships. Whether you’re looking to break into new markets or grow your existing accounts, we can help you achieve your goals.
Contact Revegy today to learn more and take the first step toward ABX success.
Now On Demand!
“Sales on the Move: Embracing Agility for a Changing Sales Journey.”
Watch our on-demand webinar, where we delve into the key elements of an agile sales approach from start to finish, featuring Luiz Martins, CMO of Revegy, along with esteemed guest speakers Donald C Kelly, Founder and The Sales Evangelist, and Doug Inda, SVP of Enterprise Client Development at Syndigo. Discover how to adapt to tighter budgets without compromising sales performance, leverage technology to streamline processes and close more deals, provide meaningful value to buyers amidst abundant data, succeed in a remote sales environment with effective communication and virtual presentations, and position yourself as a trusted advisor in today’s ever-changing sales landscape. This is your chance to increase your pipeline and propel your success forward. Watch on-demand here!
