The value of account-based marketing (ABM) has often been quantified in terms of its impact on revenue generation. A report from MRP Prelytix, in fact, found that 84% of companies that use ABM have reported positive revenue gains. But ABM can affect other performance indicators, too—especially those that involve the customer experience (CX).
By enabling businesses to deliver highly personalized interactions and offers to the right prospects, ABM can help improve overall CX. This ultimately adds to the business value of ABM by creating opportunities to underscore and emphasize customer loyalty.
The CX Benefits of ABM
Account-based marketing involves delivering relevant messages to high-value prospects using the most effective channels. So with the right ABM strategy, businesses are capable of robust account selection along with precise targeting and personalization. This can lead to a dramatic improvement in the overall customer experience.
The consumer insights attained through ABM empower businesses to make informed decisions that subsequently have a positive impact on CX.
More Precise Targeting
ABM engagement data can help businesses extract actionable intelligence for targeting the right accounts. First-party data such as website visits, social listening, marketing engagement metrics, and sales intelligence are used to identify prospects showing active interest in the product or solution. ABM allows businesses to build more robust and accurate lists using a combination of multi-source intent data and technographic installs. As a result, they can target accounts that are most likely to convert, in addition to being a good fit for their products.
DemandScience’s Identify solution, for example, empowers businesses to deep filter their lists along technographic, demographic, and firmographic lines with quality verified by the DemandScience team. This enables them to home in on prospects with a high intent to buy and are displaying a recent interest, which suggests that their need is current and that they are looking to buy imminently.
By presenting accounts with highly valuable and relevant solutions precisely when they need them, businesses can ensure that the needs of prospects are promptly addressed so they can enjoy a more seamless CX.
Better Personalization
B2B prospects receive all sorts of offers and marketing messages through a variety of channels. As a result of this information exhaustion, many have become adept at filtering out offers and messages that they don’t consider relevant. Account-based marketing allows businesses to break through this noise thanks to personalized communications, campaigns, and offers.
This helps businesses to maximize their relevance with target accounts, using tailored content and interactions that exhibit exactly how their products or solutions address the unique problems faced by each prospect. In other words, ABM allows businesses to position their offerings to highlight how they are the ideal solution for target accounts and personalize CX at scale.
In addition to guiding purchase decisions, improved personalization ensures that customer touchpoints are seamless and convenient. Since everything is tailored for each account, prospects can immediately assess whether the product or solution will solve their problem and how. This will help them to decide whether to keep investing their time interacting with the business instead of being disappointed with irrelevant solutions and offers further down the line.
Improved Alignment Between Marketing and Sales
Most organizations struggle to align their sales and marketing teams since the two typically take very different approaches to engage customers and prospects. While sales focuses on direct outreach tactics to generate profitable opportunities, marketing relies more heavily on inbound and outbound strategies to generate and nurture leads.
However, regardless of these misaligned approaches to engagement, both teams still have the same end goal i.e., generating revenue. As such, better cross-team collaboration can help organizations to work more effectively towards this singular goal.
Account-based marketing helps sales and marketing teams to be in better alignment by improving transparency and advocating the unique role played by each team. Marketing will be able to generate a consistent pipeline of leads for sales to follow up while providing insights into how those leads were generated and what needs must be addressed. Meanwhile, a direct line of communication will allow sales to provide feedback that can help marketing to adjust their ABM strategy.
This alignment between sales and marketing ultimately creates a consistent and coherent experience for the prospects and the customers. For example, transparent cross-team communication ensures that sales can deliver on the promises made by the marketing team. With sales following up at the right time and marketing providing them with appropriate offers or assets at crucial moments within the buyer’s journey, customers can enjoy a more relevant and engaging experience.
Optimization Across Touchpoints
With account-based marketing, the focus is on quality rather than quantity. This allows businesses to concentrate their efforts on accounts that are high-value and highly relevant. As a result, it removes unnecessary steps in the sales cycle and frees up more time to focus on actions that bolster the bottom line.
This increased efficiency helps businesses to save time and resources. For customers, this means they get to enjoy personalized experiences consistently because of the close attention paid to them by sales associates or relationship managers.
Moreover, by implementing automation into their ABM strategies, businesses can gain even better control of the different elements involved in the customer journey. Automation workflows help to optimize follow-up and outreach processes by ensuring that timely messages and offers are delivered exactly when prospects need them.
Prospects can quickly and smoothly move along the sales pipeline, with each touchpoint as relevant as the last. This optimized experience across different customer touchpoints helps to drive conversions and garner loyalty.
Creating Memorable Experiences with ABM
A powerful ABM strategy provides value in terms of conversions and revenue generation. More importantly, the insights attained through ABM can be utilized to deliver enhanced and consistent customer experiences across multiple touchpoints. Businesses can leverage it for more precise targeting, better personalization, and improved sales and marketing alignment.
DemandScience provides businesses with data solutions that help them to collect accurate insights into prospects so they can focus on the most high-value accounts. Contact us today to request a demo.
