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An ABM Primer for Elphas New to ABM Marketing

How can you optimize your customer satisfaction while also honing your focus to a fine edge regarding your brand messaging? As it turns out, the answer may lie in Account-Based Marketing, or ABM, which is the idea of bringing together the views and experience of different teams to ensure that clients have an extraordinary experience with your company at every stage. Specifically, ABM provides tight integration across marketing, sales, and customer success teams.By collaborating closely, these three teams can organize and coordinate an end-to-end user experience masterplan, starting with marketing, going through sales, and finally, customer success and retention. If two heads are better than one, then ABM, with three leaders or rather, three departments working together, makes it possible to organize a coherent experience that drives user engagements and conversion rates up to at the same time. Little surprise, then, that you might hear some call ABM ABX' account-based everything'!Chalk and Cheese: Or, Why Historical Rivalry Isn't Always a Good ThingOn paper, marketing and sales sound like a great pair – after all, both work toward finding and converting customers. However, the reality is somewhat different: less fine wine and mature cheese than chalk and cheese. Salespeople might dismiss marketers as out-of-touch with genuine market needs while marketers pull no punches either, viewing their sales colleagues as a short-sighted lot focused only on the next dollar.But that's not all – there is even room for a little professional vanity, with marketers viewing their role as the noble messenger, communicating with a compelling message that delivers over the long term. Compare that to a salesperson's traditional short-term focus on one person (or organization) to close the deal.It's easy to see why these two complementary roles can jostle with each other. Still, both groups make a mistake if they don't value the other's contribution. After all, both are working to achieve the same goal, just working at different customer journeys.Customer Success Teams & Their Overlooked ContributionsCustomer success leaders and teams are often overlooked when crafting acquisition and sales strategies. Customer success teams have the most profound insights into the highest-revenue accounts and are equally close to at-risk accounts. Nonetheless, there is often a serious disconnect between their knowledge and their ability to use that data to inform and shape sales and marketing strategy. ABM/ABX provides a way to bridge the bridge between these three teams and their disparate data sources – and benefits the entire organization while delivering a better user experience to customers. It forces teams to ensure that the customer's information is democratized, readily available, and actionable across the company's entire strategic and revenue pipeline. This isn't a new idea, even if it's the king of revenue trends today.A Potted History of the Meteoric Rise of ABXIn fact, ABM has been around since 1993, when Pepper and Rogers foresaw the future importance of account-based marketing. They pointed out that the marketer's ability to glean intelligence on customers would become even more vital to organizational success:"When two marketers are competing for the same customer's business, all other things being equal, the marketer with the greatest scope of information about that particular customer will be the more efficient competitor."Around 2000, when the internet was taking its first steps toward becoming the global phenomenon today, many online companies were struck with a critical revelation. It's hard to underplay this, as this revelation would change the internet and turn it into the hyper-targeted commercial space we see today.The revelation seems obvious today: the data collected by sales teams was a significant and untapped gold mine and a critical resource for finely-tuned marketing. Not just marketing, either. Once organized, this data could be used to improve organizational performance and improvements based on data intelligence.Retargeting and analysis were just two nuggets of gold data had to offer in the quest for improved customer success. Now, marketing departments could use data to create pinpoint PR strategies and laser-focused landing pages. Brand rehauls, and advertising campaigns could reshape images to match an actual target audience, not an imagined one, and so on.As the 21st century advanced, the rewards of ABM's integrated approach saw its popularity explode. Today, just 20 years after that first stunning realization, ABM, along with revenue and customer data, has emerged as a key driver of growth for B2B companies. Got 99 Business Problems? Account-Based Experience Makes Them NoneIt's easy to see why so many organizations have fallen in love with ABM/ABX; it has proven to be a great problem solver. Here are just a few examples of how ABX can help any organization to boost its performance.Choosing Target Accounts Becomes a Seamless ProcessIt's a business nightmare: you can spend months or even years building an effective service and integrating everything into a beautiful package. This comes with a big but – if all this hard work misses your most opportune market segment, then the wrong kind of change will come.That means repeating this process, this time identifying your perfect customers so that your efforts pay off. Ideally, organizations want to skip this costly process of trial and error altogether. That's where ABX steps in.Let's say your company is already leveraging inbound marketing. With ABX strategies, you can quickly find and select the best leads and opportunities. The result is effective outreach. You'll ensure that your teams focus and nurture high-priority accounts rather than time-wasting tire-kickers.Knowing – and Creating – the Right Content for Your AudienceFor twenty years, content has been the undisputed king of the online marketing world. However, this strategy only works when organizations are pumping out the content that their audience wants to see. The type of content that gets their eyeballs locks them in place and guides them through to purchasing and beyond.In other words, killer content.Of course, to create killer content that does this, data is a necessity. How else can an organization know what will get the attention of their target market? It's also often forgotten that it's not just the content – it's also providing a resonating experience throughout this journey.Sounds tough? Once again, ABX comes to the rescue with customized account content delivered based on specific touchpoints to provide the smooth, deeply personalized, and sequential content experience that consumers today expect.If you've ever been on a website and noticed that the site remembers what you're looking at, your choices, and even what stage of the customer journey you're at by modifying its content delivery to you, then you already know just how powerful ABX can be.Connecting Historically Siloed Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success TeamsAs we have already explored, sales and marketing have long had a chalk and cheese relationship. One of ABX's most powerful features is how it crushes this disconnect, replacing poor communication with good to drive more efficient cross-organizational workflows.Historically, this disconnect has turned a sales process that was historically linear into a more logical and profitable cycle. The typical ABX journey sees marketing teams acquire leads and forward them to sales, who then act on the leads, collect data, and then feedback to marketing.To give a real-world example of ABM in practice, a sales team may work on a lead, only to discover that the customer isn't ready to purchase just yet. By feeding this information back to marketing with this new information, marketing can then fine-tune its approach to push the lead closer to the point of purchase. It's a minor tweak, but its impact can seem like magic to those who have just started with ABX!ABX Works: Here's How You Can Start Using it At Your OrganizationABX is a valuable tool for organizations of all sizes in just about every industry and niche out there today. The good news is that you can implement ABX with a bit of technological know-how and five simple steps.1. Start Selecting the Best AccountsOnline, digital footprints are everywhere, leaving behind little gold nuggets of user data. Using this data is the best way to get into your customers' heads – and make attractive messaging for them.ABX tools take this data and score individual accounts against an organization's profile of the ideal customer. In other words, it is continually learning from the actions of each customer, profiling them to gauge opportunities.More than just tracking customer behavior and organizing it, ABX also provides profound insights into individual customer journeys, noting what buying stage they might be at, their interests, and much more besides.2. Learn Everything About Your CustomersKnowledge isn't just power – it's also incredibly profitable. This step is a natural progression from the last and acts primarily as a fact-gathering mission. ABX tools seek to get all known information on a lead from as many different sources as possible. Those sources can include your CRM, application data, analytics tools, sales prospecting technology, customer success records, and much more. The more sources you can glean information from, the more knowledge your teams have when it comes to approaching leads in a way that they will respond to positively. While once this would have involved a costly PI (and a fatal business error)[1], now it can all be done with the magic of ABX technology.3. Engage with Your Customers EffectivelyAt this point of the process, you should have a ton of data about your prospect. Now, it's time to use that data and its insights to decide your organization's messaging. While this might have required a team of copywriters, now you can use your ABX technology stack and ABM leaders to apply powerful insights to deliver customized and personalized content.It's not only the messaging that ABX can fine-tune: it's also the timing of those messages and even which of many channels to deliver it!The content of the messages to be conveyed to the respective accounts is created at this stage. ABX technology stack and ABM leaders will apply the insights, using AI technology to choose who gets to see which message at what time and through which channel.4. Build a Dream Team with SalesStep 4 is where the sales team comes in. As ABX technology stack and ABM leaders route lead notifications to this team, alerting them to critical account activities, sales teams can easily see what happened, which marketing message triggered the action – and exactly how engaged that lead is.This is vital information delivered in real-time. After all, a lead will be clicking around and doing things, constantly changing their assessment. As leads do something meaningful, sales team members are pinged and encouraged to act while the fire is still hot.More than just acting on the 'now,' sales team members can also see what marketing and customer success actions happened to lead the prospect to this point, giving them rich historical data to boost their message and efforts.5. Eliminate the 'Blame Game' by Tracking Real ResultsThe final step is, in many ways, the most natural and obvious one: to take all of the shared data collected from tracking and metric reports from both the sales and marketing teams and analyze that data.Relying on metrics to align incentives might not seem like a big deal, at least until you remember that historically, there is tension amongst the revenue teams. When things go wrong, many departments are quick to point a beady finger of blame at the other! A robust ABM/ABX program that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success eliminates this traditional tension. [1]This is a joke – hence the 'fatal business error.' Stalking the customer IRL is not a good idea. 😊