Over the last 5 years, most leading B2B Marketers and Sales professionals stepped away from their “Spray and Pray” tactics to a more focused “Account-Based Marketing” approach. Account-Based Marketing is defined as a strategic approach to B2B marketing in which marketing and sales teams partner to target best-fit accounts that have the biggest revenue potential and turn them into customers.
Best in class account-based marketing is spread across multiple channels and thrives on efficient partnership between an organization’s marketing, sales, product and customer experience teams.
Account-Based Marketing helps brands optimize customer journeys, reduce costs, convert better, and focus on “things that matter”.
In its early days, ABM was misinterpreted as an Advertising and lead generation strategy, however, the industry has matured enough to acknowledge that ABM is much more than that.
Back in 2016, ABM Visionary Sangram Vajre, Co-Founder Terminus introduced the concept of “Flipping your B2B Funnel”. This new approach challenged the idea of the traditional funnel which was about filtering through leads to find potential customers rather than starting with a focus on the best-fit prospects.
Sangram was challenging the need to pour 10,000 leads at the top of a funnel only to get a handful of customers. Instead, he wanted the world to think about Quality over Quantity. He simply flipped the funnel on its head and called it the Customer Experience Funnel. This Flipped Funnel set the foundation for what we call as Account-Based Marketing today.
In fact, if done right, Strategic Account-Based Marketing helps you focus on a specific set of customers and enhance their experience which in turn helps increase sales, boost retention, stimulate advocacy and grow market share. This is where Experience Management comes to the forefront and becomes a vital enabler to your engagement strategy and helps you move up the maturity curve.
In fact, I can confidently say that an Experience Management platform such as Qualtrics acts as the “Secret Sauce” that complements your ABM Tech Stack recipe and connects the dots between customer expectations, engagement & experience.
What is Account-Based Experience Management (ABXM)?
I say ABXM is the intentional and focused optimization of customer interactions to develop deeper relationships, fuel engagement, and catalyze advocacy. ABXM requires a healthy mix of human creativity, business sense and consent driven connections. Traditional ABM models would talk about integration between an ABM platform (such as Terminus), CRM Systems (Such as Salesforce) and Marketing Automation providers (Such as HubSpot or Marketo), however a mature Customer focused organization would move towards ABXM wherein an Experience Management Eco-System (Such as Qualtrics) acts as the institutional memory & interpeter of all conversations & transactions.
Organizations with embedded and mature ABXM practices enjoy experience-driven differentiation and self-sustaining growth.
If you got to reading until here, I encourage you to reach out to your ABM teams and discuss Account Based Experience Management. Design your ABXM Stack to drive dynamic relationships, democratize actionable insights and pre-empt+prevent churn.