For some time now, industry analysts like Gartner and TOPO (now owned by Gartner) have been championing the concept of “Account-Based Everything”, or ABE. These analysts believe ABE builds on the success of account-based campaigns, with a comprehensive approach.
According to Gartner, while Account-based campaigns have long been crucial to the success of many B2B sales strategies, organizations have struggled to unlock the full value of the strategy. The reason for these issues, Gartner believes, comes down to a lack of enterprise alignment.
TOPO designed the “Account Based Everything” framework to help businesses understand the benefits of connecting multiple business groups in a go-to-market strategy. The core focus of the framework is on driving connections through the revenue chain, starting with marketing, to sales, and customer success.
The question is, is ABE really the future of selling? How exactly does it differ from Account Based Marketing (ABM), and what can it offer evolving brands?
The Account-Based Everything framework is a spin-off ABM (account based marketing). Gartner says account-based go-to-market methods have proven successful in recent years, because they allow companies to focus on high-value accounts, and adapt to changing marketing dynamics.
An ABE strategy involves coordinating personalized marketing, sales development, and customer success strategies to drive audience engagement and conversion. It’s not unlike ABM, but it does take a broader approach to end-to-end synchronization and personalization.
With ABE, account-based alignment extends through the entire organization, pulling in insights and support from finance, engineering, product development, and even executive teams.
TOPO’s concept of account-based marketing hinges on five key elements:
• Targeted, high-value accounts: In Account-Based Everything, teams focus on a limited number of carefully selected accounts, moving them through the buying process. This moves companies away from the “BANT” methodology as a key measurement for handover between sales development teams, and sales reps.
• Intelligence-driven campaigns: Successful ABE campaigns leverage account intelligence, such as pre-account discovery and research. This isn’t much different to the tactics used in an ABM strategy. Marketing and sales teams work together to use valuable data to personalize and enhance sales plays.
• Orchestration: Like Account Based Marketing, ABE requires alignment between various teams in the business landscape. Marketing and sales teams work together, alongside finance experts, and customer success teams, to lower sales cycle times and increase revenue.
• Personalized Experiences: ABE requires all interactions with a target account to be as unique and personalized as possible. However, it’s not just the sales experience that companies should be customizing, but the marketing and customer success experiences too.
• High-effort, high-frequency outreach: In Account Based Everything, there’s a focus on dedicating high levels of commitment to reaching out to target accounts throughout their purchasing journey.
Gartner and other analysts present ABE is the next generation of account-based selling. However, in our opinion, the concept doesn’t really differ much from Account Based Marketing. When ABM is done correctly, alignment throughout the entire business is a natural side effect.
The main reason ABM programs fail is that organizations haven’t invested enough time and effort into aligning their teams, and taking a comprehensive approach to managing the customer journey. The “ABE” framework simply encourages companies to abandon already problematic ABM strategies, to focus on greater synergy between teams.
Ultimately, Account Based Everything is a framework designed to remind companies that they should be spreading their account-based strategies across the entire business. ABM already combines marketing and sales activities under the same strategy, but ABE tells us we should ensure we’re looping in other members of the business too.
It’s all about a shift in mindset for companies. Rather than seeing each department as their own entities, you consider each department as a team member in a group, working together to achieve business goals.
Since ABE is essentially “ABM” done right, it has the pretty much the same pros and cons as account based marketing. ABE helps companies to enhance personalization and deliver more valuable experiences to customers throughout the sales lifecycle. This simultaneously paves the way for greater brand loyalty, higher average order values, and improved lifetime value.
Additionally, ABE and ABM both deliver:
• Improved business synergy: By aligning all of your sales, marketing, and customer success teams, you benefit from greater synergy, knowledge sharing and collaboration. Bringing multiple teams together reduces data silos and knowledge gaps that can harm interactions with customers, and lead to lost revenue.
• Better ROI: Account based marketing has been proven to deliver higher ROI results to businesses. 76% of marketers say they benefit from a better ROI when leveraging ABM strategies. This indicates that ABE could deliver higher ROI too. By focusing on specific target accounts, companies ensure they’re focusing on their most valuable assets.
• Clear reporting and tracking: Aligning teams and data for account based everything ensures companies can benefit from increased visibility into the performance of their growth strategies. Just like an ABM strategy, ABE can offer businesses more data to work with when developing sales, marketing, and customer success initiatives.
Of course, there are downsides to both ABM and ABE too. Account Based Everything, like ABM, is resource intensive. It requires companies to invest heavily in synchronizing their teams and promoting consistent collaboration. It’s also time-consuming. Creating personalized marketing and sales solutions for every account requires significant planning, research, and production time.
On top of all that, ABE can be difficult to implement, particularly in larger business environments. As mentioned above, one of the reasons ABM strategies fail is that teams aren’t as aligned as they should be. If you struggle to bring everyone together effectively, you won’t see the right results.
While ABM focuses on aligning sales, marketing, and key stakeholders, ABE encourages businesses to involve more teams and groups in the sales process, which can be extremely complex.
Account Based Everything is a concept that has driven a lot of hype in the sales and marketing landscape, but in our opinion, it’s not as game changing as it appears. The intent behind “ABE” is right, as companies do accomplish more when they align and synergize their internal teams.
What’s more, ABE frameworks have the potential to create significant barriers to successful account-based strategies. By widening the scope for “team synchronization” to so many teams from day one, the concept delivers new challenges for businesses to overcome. The ABE framework doesn’t include any practical strategies for achieving full alignment, which means companies need to figure out how they’re going to unify everything themselves.
The ABM pilot remains the best route to delivering on account-based objectives when it’s implemented correctly. It promotes multi-stakeholder buy-in, just like ABE, and provides companies with the tangible metrics and insights they need to grow. Unlike ABE, ABM strategies also don’t require a seismic initial shift in organizational strategy, but lay the path for a more incremental change. This ensures businesses can start accessing the results of their campaigns faster.
The Account Based Everything framework seems to be a laudable attempt to reframe the business mindset companies need to adopt to harness the benefits of account-based methodologies. However, the framework doesn’t really provide any practical solutions or guidance. It’s a good idea, but it probably won’t be the game changer companies are looking for.
.png)
.png)
.png)
