“Account-based marketing” is something of a misnomer. It implies that it’s an approach reserved excessively for marketing. In fact, other divisions within a revenue team often assume that ABM has nothing to do with them. But this misunderstanding limits the vision of how sales, lead gen, and other departments stand to gain from an account-based approach, too.
If you’re trying to convince your company’s leaders that a move to an account-based experience (ABX) is right for your organization — or if you’re a leader in need of convincing — we’re here to break down the value of ABX for nearly every stakeholder on the revenue team.
ABX for Marketing Leaders
CMOs have the shortest tenure among the C-Suite. In 2016, the average CMO tenure was 4.1 years. In 2020, that had dropped to just 3.5 years. And in the tech sector, it’s even shorter, with the average tenure lasting just three years.
What’s going on here? The important role CMOs play in driving business outcomes is frequently overlooked or misunderstood. A lot of this is because marketing and sales don’t speak the same language.
Instead of focusing on the total number of MQLs, an account-based approach focuses on how marketing drives sales opportunities and grows pipeline value – the very things that matter most to the organization at large.
ABX also gets marketing and sales on the same page, working the same accounts, and looking at the same metrics. This makes it easier for an organization to recognize marketing’s worth, since its activities are tied more directly to bottom-line results.
ABX for Sales Leaders
We know the truth: Sales hates MQLs. That’s because MQLs often offer no useful information about lead quality.
Sales focus on the bottom line: How can we hit our goals? And how can we hit them faster? Sales teams spend lots of time sifting through MQLs, looking for the qualified buyers — and that’s time they’d rather spend selling.
ABX pulls markers’ obsessive focus away from the dreaded MQLs and gets them involved during earlier stages of the buyer’s journey. Armed with the right tech stack and strategies, marketing can handle more of the qualification work so sales reps can spend their time working with likely buyers.
A key feature of ABX is understanding which accounts are likely to close, and when. When marketing hands off market-qualified opportunities to sales, the chances for success are much higher.
According to the 80/20 rule, 80% of your revenue comes from just 20% of your customers. Identifying and zeroing in on that 20% helps sales generate bigger wins with shorter sales cycles.
ABX for Lead Generation
Traditional lead-gen marketing forces revenue teams to make educated guesses about customers’ needs, engage prospects in the broadest way possible, and hope your efforts generate some buyer engagmment. Sometimes the leads are good.
Most times, they’re not. In contrast, an account-based approach to lead gen is far more precise especially if you combine your approach with AI-driven intelligence that reveals which accounts are ready to buy. 6sense Revenue AI can help you see deeper into the account activity. You can understand the persona of each member of the buying team, know where they are in the buyers’ journey, and even get insights into their main interests and concerns.
This kind of intel empowers you to focus on the customer perspective and run plays that are so targeted, they feel bespoke. It’s the kind of customer experience that lets buyers know you understand their unique challenges… and are uniquely positioned to solve them.
Your plays will be reaching people when they are ready to take action. ABX is all about getting the right message to the right audience at the right time. And you’ll have the metrics to prove it, too, since an ABX approach has all departments aligned and working with the same data and analytics.
ABX for Revenue Operations
Having every part of the revenue team looking at the same datasets and dashboards simplifies revenue operations and helps keep everyone in sync and focused on hitting revenue targets.
Too often, marketing ops is supporting an infrastructure built to deal with MQLs, while sales ops is supporting sales and creating strong partner relationships. You end up with two different operations teams, two different technology ecosystems, and two wildly different sets of data, analytics, and metrics. That’s how you end up with marketing and sales fighting to prove they played the bigger role in getting a customer to closed-won.
Centralizing your operations and giving the entire revenue team one source of truth for data and metrics can help stop the marketing-sales rivalry and get everyone rallying around the same goals: building pipeline and closing sales.
Conclusion
The account-based mindset isn’t just for marketing. Sales, lead gen, and operations have something to gain from an account-based approach – as does an organization at large. ABX sets companies up for predictable, sustainable pipeline growth, and this is especially true when they use solutions designed to bring revenue teams together.
Discover how the 6sense platform can support your revenue team, or browse our Resource Library to learn more about ABX.
