049. Account Based Experiences (ABX) and its Significance in B2B Marketing

Foreign this is Emilio Garcia. Welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. And as always, Gabby is here with me. How are you, Gabby?

Hi, Emilio. If you're fine, how are you?

I'm doing great. So awesome. We, we have a great conversation today. We are going to talk about ABX or account based experience. And we were saying backstage, Gavi, that this is a very interesting topic. That's what we said about all of them, I guess. But this is truly one that we feel very thrilled about. So yeah, I think it is important to understand what it is and what is the significance of ABX to B2B marketers.

Yeah, yeah.

So let us start right away. Obviously the first, the first section will be what is exactly that? What do we mean by account based experiences or abx? And I think the best way to share that understanding is explaining the evolution. At least from what I understand it. As some of you will already know abm, which is more a more popular term, refer to a way of doing marketing you can call it, if not a strategy, at least tactic within the whole digital marketing sphere of defining accounts and then buying committees and delivering experience. You know, marketing experiences that are tailored to those companies. Right. In the, in the purest form of abm, you are supposed to create marketing experiences for. For each account individually, right? Like you can set up a task for, if you want to call it for just Coca Cola or just American Express and be very specific about that account. Even with dedicated resources, obviously most companies don't truly do that. Most of them at least have a list and try to lump them together. But as being a has been an effort that typically is led and driven by marketing. But if you stretch it a little bit, you can think about, well, if marketing is going to do that, then sales needs to be involved and sales will tailor their experiences as well to those accounts. In theory, saying, well, I will dedicated resources, I will build collateral and have conversations that are tailored to those specific companies, that list of companies. And so you can call that account based sales, right? But again, if you stretch it a little bit and say, well, what about current customers? You might have for example, a list of a handful of customers that you consider premium customers for whatever reason, or relevant customers either because you have a lot of business going on with them because they're a very high profile. Imagine Fortune 500 companies. So those companies are very relevant to your companies and probably the customer success team will build a dedicated task force just for them, right? Where there's a different level of experience for those dedicated accounts and their name Right. Actually in some customer success departments or circles they are called exactly that. They are dedicated account or name accounts rather than all the accounts that are. You know, they use the expression name accounts to say it's not just a number, we actually cater to this particular account in a specific way. So again, trying to stretch out that idea. If you think about ways where a customer occurring, opportunity or a prospect that is of interest for a company might engage, then you can extend that experience to your website. For example, showing a specific information to a company that is visiting the website if you can identify the user as being part of that company. So you can also do account based web experience from website or pages, if you want to call it that way. So I think the evolution for the definition of account based experiences is precisely that is that every client facing piece of technology asset or department within our organization can tailor the experiences to the account that they're engaging with based on the information that they have about them. Right. So that's for me is my understanding of account based experiences.

I, I got a really comparison to this and I like parties, so I, I will, I will set this as, as a comparison to parties. So let's just say that talking about understanding accounts based experiences, let's just say that we are in a party, right? And traditional B2B marketing will be just like getting up on the stage and giving a performance, right. To the whole crowd. And it's like doing, I don't know, like a dance of a pretty popular dance like Macarena, right. Everyone sees and knows the moves. It's not something that you do. I don't really know what Macarena is. Everyone knows it. And you're hoping that, that a bunch of people would join in with you. That's, that's B2B marketing, right. And ABA ABX is more like the new dance craze. It's like finding that one person in the, in the whole crowd that really loves, I don't know, salsa. And instead of dancing on the stage, you will walk over to them, hold, hold your hand out to them and invite them to dance together. That's abx. It's about that personal connection that you have with the company, right. And in B2B it means that instead of sending the same marketing messages to every business out there, you focus on a specific company that really, that you really want to impress and you learn their, like you say, like their preferences, their needs and you tailor your moves or your marketing and sales strategies just for them. And it's like I don't know like being a DJ and play that exact song that you know that person loves and it's a guaranteed hit if you know the moves and you know the song like exactly that one. And in a nutshell, let's just say that ABX is like the dance part that, that where the personal, personalized experiences shine. And in traditional B2B marketing will be like that crowdy party and you hope that someone will just notice your moves, right? It's just like that comparison. Um, it's about building relationships and taking again the example is like dancing with that partner that knows your group, right? Knows what you want, knows everything about you. I will, I will say that about B2B traditional type of marketing and, and the ABX account or account based experience experiences.

It is a great, it is a great comparison. I completely agree. And, and therefore using that analogy is something that you cannot afford to do to everybody, right? By definition you are trading off volume by quality or you know, really tailoring to a, to a person as you are saying or in this case a handful of people. So one of the, one of the important things that to remember is that you need some criteria to define where you're going to implement this typically is the potential of impact or the current impact or the potential loss, right? So pretty much I'm defining for how you will look at different from the different lenses of the departments, right? Marketing will look at potential impact. Sales will look at the current impact. Customer success will look at the through the lens of potential losses. Because if we don't have a great experience for these high value customers then we run the risk of losing the account if that we already have. So definitely a criteria for implementing ABX will be that you need to define those high value clients. They cannot be that many. Usually the company will have enough resources to implement it. And once you have defined them is like what you're saying about the moves, right? You really need to cater to again understanding and identifying those buyers. But instead of seeing or thinking where do they engage for content in a very broad sense you really have to dive in into what is the way that this particular group of people there is going to be just hundreds of them at most engage. And definitely you can build experiences for them that are not just digital but in the real world, right. The other important thing is that if you have a very small group of people then you have the luxury of not thinking just digital thinking, not just leverage like display and social media ads and maybe pay search. You can turn that into the real world and we Are talking about inviting them through ratios, having conversations with them over dinners, creating events exclusive for them. Right. Like a customer group or a potential customer group. So you can really take a different approach. But what's important is that typically ABX is multi channel. If you, if you have a handful of companies and the only thing what you're going to do is just pick one channel for distribution, it will not have the impact that you will be looking for. So the two main differences from ABX against traditional marketing, sales and customer success experiences is that you are gonna create content that caters specifically to those buyers. But your distribution strategy, while it will lack the volume and the leverage, it will compensate with the presence. Right. You will be everywhere for these group of people in both in digital and the real world, if that makes sense. Right. So that's something important to remember when you are thinking about what are you going to do now? Some best practices, right. Once you start, what are the things that you have to pay attention to? I think that precisely because the group of people is very limited, you need to you, as you were saying, right. Gabby is you start tailoring the implementation as you get data and insights. And these are easier to get in the sense that you can just. Just talk to them, right. Ask them about the feedback or get feedback from the things that you're doing. And obviously you can look around on the behavior. One of the trickiest part is that definitely you need to measure attribution in very different ways from the traditional way. For example, you will not have for these contacts attribution on creation. Probably they're already part of the database or they are already customers. So you cannot say that the efforts brought new people or new accounts into existence, which is typically how you measure success. For experiences that are trying to bring new business. In this particular case, you will have to have a baseline of something and then measure against that one on increments. For example, if they're current customers, then you will need to look at well, how much revenue do we have right now and. And after our efforts, is our revenue, has our revenue increase right? Or if we, if there are prospect clients and we happen on the database, is our engagement improving? Right. Are they reading more of our content? Are they engaging more with the company? Are they asking more for opportunities? You know, are they're bringing on more opportunities for business and even for customer success? The question will be if I compare the churn of all the accounts in the company against the churn for these accounts that I have selected, is that number improving? Are they happier with the product or service that we offered are our NPS scores for those companies within those group of people improving as well. So you will most of the time, and this is something important to remember, will measure against a baseline rather than net new creation because do you already have identified them? This is not about bringing up new people that you don't know about, if that makes sense.

Yeah, you say something really important and I, and I think about leveraging that customer insights and data analytics as the Sherlock Holmes part of the abx, right? Like this is the part that you have to gather that information, that data and all those insights and you can actually think about it like you're, you're talking to your best friend and you're getting that information from talking in a chat with your best friend and you get those insights, the things that they love, the things that they need. And obviously when you collect that data, it's just half the fun of it because you need to obviously get the analytics of that data like that juicy data that you get. And I will say when you, when you analyze that, that information then you will be able to know when, what those touch points that they find or they prefer the things that even the time that, when they're most likely to respond to you because you know everything about them. Right. It's like a, like having a crystal ball into the whole decision making process that, that you have with the, with the companies. And I, I think that there's something that we have to remember about ABX that and, and it's about the, it's not just about knowing what they like or what they want about let's just say their favorite color. It's about that using that data like a detective to understand what drives them and you can create that content that will resonates deeply with them. And I think that's the main objective, objective of analyzing that data that you, that you get. And I think that not only you have this in, in mind, but there's obviously challenges within all of this, right. And one of them I think it's the, that actually data quality because if your data is, data is off, then you will not be able to personalize those messages in the right way. You will sound more like a comedy than a serious business. And obviously it's like, I don't know, imagine that you're, you're calling your client by the wrong name. How do you think that you're going to be a personalized company or tailored company if you don't do the steps correctly, right? And another one Is that personal? The personalization and scalability too? Because you, you don't want to burn out your marketing and your sales team and make them to do messages for every single prospect. Like you, like you said, like you have to maintain a level on that. You want a huge dinner party, but you want the dishes to be special but manageable at the same time, right? You want everything to be all right with that. I guess that there's some challenges over there with the data manageable, all the processes.

You are mentioning something very important, right, that kind of like move us into the closing of the topic, which is what is the future of ABX in general? And I think, as you said, is that even when you are just working with a handful of people, still there's a lot of data points that you need to have and use to tailor the experience. And so very brief examples are like every channel of communication that you have available. You know, technology is allowing us to use that information to tailor experiences. For example, very simple ones. When someone pick up the phone and call you, you have the phone ID of that person. You can in advance know who is calling and therefore maybe direct that to the account manager, to the person that is in charge of the account. The same happens when someone fills a form or starts a chart conversation. If you have integrated your CRM, you are capable of knowing who is the owner and bring in the history of the previous engagements that that person has had. And as you said, maybe you can even address them by name because you already know who they are. You can tailor that experience on the website itself, right? Recognizing at least the company, ideally the person, so that you can, you can show them something specific. And even on your sales outreach, the impact that technology is having is that there are more and more things that you can know about the company and the person that you can use as touch points for personalizing the outreach. Saying you have more insight nowadays into growing events, right? New founding rounds, company hiring, more employees, departments are growing, even you know, people getting promoted, opening, expanding, and even you know, obviously the negative ones. So you can, you can tailor your conversation to that as well. So I think the future ABX will, will come hand in hand with all the information that we can gather from people, either from direct conversation, but especially from technology that will allow us to, to personalize more and more the experience and bring more value without investing more human resources into it, right? So I think that's, that's what we need to be in the lookout.

I, I, I like to think about the things that are coming or coming for abx as a tri trader. Like just when you're seeing a movie, right? What's coming next? And for me it's like, it's like you said, those messages are going to be tailored even though we know all the information about people. I guess that abx, it's heading to a state of. Let's just say that during a restaurant and you're. And there's a menu, right? And that menu knows exactly what you want even before you open it. That's where ABX is heading. Like they analyze your past orders or the food that you already order in the past, even, even your dietary restrictions. That, that's the thing that the point. Point and pay points that you will analyze on that time. And it's like a psychic, right? It will be, it will turn like into a psychic. Yeah. And that's where's where I think AVX is heading. And not just about sending emails or tailor ads. I guess it's more about the. That personalized predictive or personalization that ABX is heading. You wouldn't have to search for anything. It'll find you that information, that person, that company will find you. And it will help businesses to aim for the correct clients. Right. I guess that's where ABX is heading. And I also learned something really fun for me that it was like, even in virtual events it will be like attending concerts in your pajamas, right? It will be just like. You know what, don't worry, you have personalization. Personalization even in virtual events. And you like. I don't know a topic. Just imagine a certain topic like cybersecurity, there's a session for you or you don't like coffee. Don't worry, there's a launch just for the topic that you want. And even, even in those stages, right. There's going to be some implementations or upgrades to abx. Obviously not everything is sunshine and rainbows as we imagine. There's security matters that we have to take care about. And obviously yes, the customers will expect their data will be just like handled securely. So even with great personalizations come great responsibility to this matter. So we will have to manage that in the future. We don't have to worry right now but because we are not, we're not there. But it's something that we will have in mind for the next steps.

About abx, I completely agree. Well, Gabby has been fantastic to have this conversation. I hope everybody found value in it. If you want to know more, obviously search around ABX again. I think it's an extension of account based marketing. It's a great starting point and we will continue to explore these and more topics. As always, don't miss out the next one. Subscribe to Demand Gen Studio. Listen over the podcast and let us know if there's anything that you want us to discuss and we'll be more happy to explore it together. And yeah, until then, have a great, great day.

Have a great day, Emilio. Have a great day everyone.

Thank you. Gabby.