Jon Clarke, Founder & CPO at Cyance, looks at how accurate intent can increase engagement rates and drive the evolution of account-based marketing to account-based experience.
Greater levels of accuracy, when it comes to data, provide far more insightful, relevant and meaningful account engagement from the very start of a customer’s digital journey. As a result, brands can build a stronger two-way dialogue with prospects, based on the specific needs, profile and buying criteria of each individual account.
These powerful account insights can lead to being able to target the message and content you offer to meet the exact g needs of each account. This can accelerate the discovery process and lead to a higher and quicker customer conversion rate.
By taking this principle and continuing to leverage data-driven account level insights deeper into the account lifecycle, marketers have the ability to develop stronger ongoing engagement with clients, to broaden and diversify relationships within the client organization and, ultimately, to expose more opportunities. This is where Account-based marketing (ABM) can evolve to become Account-based experience (ABX).
ABX is where the principles of data-driven engagement extend across every account touchpoint (from onboarding to renewals and account management to customer success),to create a consistent, relevant and high value experience for customers.
The next stage of account-based marketing
ABM or account-based marketing has been around for years but it only came to the forefront about five years ago. The main issue with its effectiveness in this current marketplace is right there in the name ‘marketing’ – there is no indication or link to sales. Yet, sales and marketing have always been and will always be so intrinsically linked, particularly when it comes to their primary drivers. How do we encourage engagement? How do we focus on our most important accounts? How do we define our ideal customer?
In the established ABM model, it has been the marketing team gathering the insights to disperse amongst sales teams and to tell sales where to focus their efforts. But it is always the sales teams who have more direct contact and dialogue with both potential and existing customers. As a model it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
ABX addresses this issue head on, pushing ABM to the next level, a 2.0 version if you will. It starts by acknowledging that it’s not just marketing that is important in any relationship with the customer. What matters is how the whole organisation interacts with each customer across the full customer lifecycle, taking into account the entire customer journey.
Customer journey, again though, is an outdated marketing term, which generally focuses only on the stage from initial customer interest all the way through to sale,and rarely takes into account the renewal cycles or ongoing opportunities to upsell or cross sell. Though that first deal with a new customer is important, it should only be the start of the journey, the beginning of an ongoing relationship that develops a deeper understanding of the account and delivers a lifetime of value.
That means, in order for marketers to be more effective in the longer term, they need to engage and collaborate with sales and customer success teams and, to some extent, customer services as well. These functions need to work seamlessly together to ensure a single pane of glass view on each customer, so there is consistency and continuity in every customer interaction. As many of us know from bitter experience, as a sales rep, there’s nothing worse than walking into a quarterly review to find out that there’s churn risk that was completely unexpected but totally avoidable. . This is where ABX is a real game-changer.
Account-based experience – the next step
Account-Based Experience or ABX is the next level of ABM but firstly, I’ve put together a definition to help understand what this actually means:
“Account-based experience (ABX) is a methodology that leverages marketing, sales and customer success teams to build customised customer journeys centered around individual accounts. ABX, the next generation of ABM, ensures that all brand interactions through the customer experience are focused on end-users and their needs”. ‘
It’s important to note that ABX is not a replacement for ABM; it’s more of an evolution. I’m not saying that brands should no longer do ABM but I do believe that we’ll see ABM maturing to become ABX over the next few years. Companies need to recognise this, especially those that are just starting out with ABM. They should be thinking about their approach and exploring the benefits of accelerating straight to ABX in order to future-proof their ABM and demonstrate greater ROI from their strategy.
As it has with ABM, intent data has an important role to play in ABX. Though we started looking at intent as ‘here’s a company in the market that’s interested in your products or services today’, which is important, it can also be used to identify those companies that might be interested six months or a year from now.
by Jon Clarke
Founder & CPO
Cyance