Sales and marketing have seen a shift over the years, with account-based selling and account-based marketing taking the world by storm. But what if we could combine both these approaches?
Enter account-based everything, a strategy that operationalizes sales and marketing efforts to target and convert high-value accounts.
This article provides a detailed overview of how to take the account-based everything route for long-term pipeline growth.
Why Shift to an Account-Based Everything Approach?
While alignment is one piece of the puzzle, the larger goal for any organization is driving revenue. Sales, marketing, and customer success must work together across the customer lifecycle to drive growth. Everyone knows about ABM, but there’s a new kid on the block: account-based everything
Account-based everything, or ABE/ABX, is a strategy that empowers sales, marketing, and customer success to collaborate and focus on high-value accounts. It personalizes engagement, aligns teams, and maximizes ROI by tailoring efforts to specific target accounts, fostering stronger customer relationships, and driving revenue growth.
Think of ABE as a refined, all-encompassing version of ABM, where your company aims for a smooth transition between all phases of the sales cycle. The core principle of ABE is that every customer touchpoint is an opportunity to convey that your product is the best fit for them.
“The approach companies take with ABM today isn’t as personalized, and the focus is not much on the buyer experience, hence the new movement for "everything .” – Dan Renyi, Founder at Klear B2B
ABE ditches the siloed approach and helps align departments, identify and sync tactics, and segment personalization efforts.
To execute ABE, you’ll need specialized assets depending on the account you target. The resources required to fuel your ABE strategy with the right content can balloon quickly, which is why it’s so important to define your ABE strategy upfront and choose your target accounts wisely.
Here's Gartner's framework for account-based everything. It's a great starting point for teams to gauge the extent of alignment and commitment required to succeed with an account-based go-to-market strategy.
Here are 5 steps you must follow to implement an account-based everything program in your organization:
1. Align target accounts across teams
When marketing and sales don’t have a common understanding of target accounts and ICP, building pipeline can get tricky Creating an ideal client profile is a foundational, company-wide decision that impacts downstream sales and marketing efforts.
You can start by identifying what a high-value account looks like and create a target account list of 100-500 such companies. You can conduct account research as per these aspects:
- Markets: Competitors, regulatory changes, regional developments
- Companies: Organizational hierarchy, financials, key initiatives and challenges
Once you have your list, you gain clarity on the accounts you need to focus on.
While it’s one thing to know who your ICP is, it’s also critical to establish who doesn’t qualify as your ICP.
Ensure you lay down proper specifications for who exactly comes under your ICP. For instance, if you’re selling a recruitment automation platform and a talent acquisition specialist reaches out to you, you’d prioritize them over someone in customer service or legal.
You can use this matrix to identify how to prioritize your inbound requests:
Marketing and sales should collaborate and agree upon the following questions:
When you answer these questions, all teams can work in sync to target the right accounts and provide a seamless buying experience.
2. Analyze Marketing’s Role in Driving Engagement
Once you have chosen which accounts to target, figure out how your marketing team will engage with each account. Should you engage with a prospect who visited your blog in the same way you would with a webinar attendee?
The level of engagement required also varies on the stage of the funnel. For instance, you can initiate a nurture sequence if someone new to your website books a demo. If they've already invested in your tool, just email them product updates to keep them engaged.
Not to mention, it also depends upon the tier of the company you’re engaging with. When a Fortune 500 company and a seed startup contact you, it's obvious to focus on the big brand because it’ll significantly impact revenue growth.
3. Focus on Engagement Quality
When marketing engages with an account, interacting with decision-makers alone doesn’t cut it. Quality engagement with end users, champions, and adjacent teams like finance, IT, etc. is equally important if you want to seal the deal.
Let’s say you’ve engaged with two or more decision-makers like the CEO and Director, your engagement quality is high, but if you’ve only been able to speak to one end user, you’d need to level up your game.
You can use engagement scoring to gauge how marketing can best engage with high-value accounts in different customer lifecycle stages.
4. Drive Awareness Across the Customer Lifecycle
Marketing creates content on various topics for every stage of the customer lifecycle, whether it’s case studies, ROI calculators, or the help docs on your website. The ultimate goal is to drive awareness with product-led content, and you can categorize your content in “topic clusters” to share it with your prospects.
While many organizations encourage prospects to schedule a demonstration, most buyers are not ready to speak to sales yet.
Instead of pushing them to talk to sales, you can create high-value plays that are likelier to incite buyer participation and engagement. Offer something of value such as a custom report or a presentation with findings relevant to that particular account or their peers.
Once they’re solution aware, you need to make them “your solution aware,”. This is where sales can share their demo call insights with the marketing team so that they can create personalized content for the account in question. Some ideas include:
- Personalized sections in landing pages based on an ICP’s company
- A chatbot that recognizes the account
- Sharing templates that streamline their workflow
5. Use Account Intelligence Tools
Leveraging an account intelligence platform (Hint: Factors.ai) can be a game changer in terms of how you engage with accounts in your pipeline and close deals. Here’s how we help marketing and sales teams implement account-based programs:
Our list-building and segmentation feature filters and segments visitors based on the type of companies or behavior you’re interested in. Plus, you also get MS Teams or Slack notifications any time an account that matches your ICP visits your site.
Sales teams can use this information to tailor email campaigns, sales calls, and other efforts to target those accounts individually and improve engagement and conversions
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You can prioritize accounts and close deals faster with our cross-channel account scoring feature that uses machine learning to qualify and target the right accounts based on website engagement, intent signals, and firmographics.
▶️Read our guide to account scoring
Factors also offers users complete visibility of the account journey across known and anonymous users so you can identify touch points that improve conversion and optimize points of friction and drop-offs.
Our platform helps you determine engagement quality thanks to the ABM analytics feature which enables custom dashboard creation that ensures reliable account-level reporting across marketing campaigns & sales activities.
Operationalise Sales and Marketing Alignment with Factors Today
Buyer expectations are at an all-time high, and it’s up to your business to refine its playbook to meet and exceed those expectations. B2B sales and marketing professionals should find a way to begin implementing ABE at their company to enable early engagement with multiple stakeholders and drive real results.
Book a demo to find out how we can help you engage and convert target accounts at scale.
