The benefits of ABX are many, but executing on full-funnel, connected customer experiences requires significant maturity in orchestration across teams, technology, data, and customer experience delivery. In reality, many companies aren’t quite there yet. Most B2B brands are focused on generating demand using targeted account lists across their campaigns. The good news is this activity can be an important building block toward activating ABX.
Orchestrating an ABX strategy takes time, effort, and collaboration across the organization. Fortunately, each step in the process can be one that creates value. A great place to start is to assess your current ABM/ABT approach and build a roadmap for the future. This will position your business to move gradually toward ABX activation, identifying improvements in process, technology, and collaboration that need to be made to eventually activate ABX – be it six months from now or a year and a half from now.
There’s no single path to build an ABX program. What’s important is identifying the most valuable activities for your organization and executing against them. The level of effort an organization undertakes in deploying ABX can take many forms, from picking “low hanging fruit” all the way up to true transformation. Let’s see how a few different companies approached their ABX programs:
Low Effort – Partnering with sales to prioritize accounts: A leading laboratory testing company developed a better lab test for identifying myocardial infarctions, but it had less than a year to get its tests into hospitals before competitive products launched. The company created an integrated ABM program that both drove interest in the new test and supported sales in their targeted account efforts. By partnering with its sales team to prioritize accounts, creating insights reporting on key accounts, and focusing content/tactics on key account targets, the brand gained 2592 leads – 152 of which converted to a sale in six months.
