5 Steps to Successful ABX Adoption

Thus far, 2020 has been like the wild west for businesses, who must battle for every customer interaction. Without the advantage of in-person meetings or conferences, sales and marketing teams compete for the consumer’s attention in one place — online. Businesses need a more integrated strategy to succeed in this fast-paced and crowded arena.

Account-Based Everything (ABX) offers a holistic approach for businesses to attract and retain customers at a time when every consumer is being bombarded with emails, ads, and the like. However, ABX isn’t a quick fix for getting your 2020 sales goals back on track. It takes time, data, and communication to build a successful ABX strategy.

In “The Secrets to Executing Successful ABX Playbooks” session of Out of the Box, Outreach Vice President of Sales Development Steve Ross and Senior Director of Demand Generation Harmony Anderson discuss how to successfully adopt an ABX strategy. They also share some of the playbooks that Outreach uses for low-touch, mid-touch, and high-touch activities.

5 Secrets for a Successful ABX Strategy

1. Secure Strategic Alignment

Before you can implement ABX, it’s critical that you align strategically across your organization. But how do you make sure everyone is on the same page? First, you must get buy-in from an executive such as the chief marketing officer (CMO) or chief revenue officer (CRO). ABX requires participation from multiple departments, so that executive sponsor is essential to encourage widespread adoption.

Likewise, you need to get team leaders from marketing, sales, and revenue operations on board. Your ABX strategy will quickly fall apart if sales or other key teams aren’t aligned. Find common goals to convince department heads that ABX will benefit their team just as much as it will yours.

2. Identify Common Goals

How do you persuade other team leaders to commit to ABX? Identify goals and objectives that are mutually beneficial. “Each team has to play a role, but everybody has to feel like they can win,” Steve says.

Pipeline can be a good first objective to focus on, since marketing, sales, and revenue operations teams all care about how your revenue forecast looks.

3. Select Target Accounts

Account selection can make or break your ABX strategy. Prioritize accounts based on industry information and collected data. Then make sure everyone is aligned on which accounts are most important. Soliciting feedback from relevant groups such as sales development and account executives can help you confirm the best list of accounts to target.

4. Create Purposeful Playbooks

Decide which tactics you want to use across different target account tiers and what role each team will play. Then, create separate playbooks for the accounts you want to target with personalized outreach versus segmented content or more generic assets. Identify which accounts you want to spend extra time nurturing with one-to-one interactions, and those accounts that require less attention.

Outreach has seen great success with their hyper-personalized playbook for top-tier target accounts. By leveraging personalized ads and direct mail, they saw a 2x return on investment and $8 million in influenced pipeline.

5. Track KPIs and Account Performance

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and account performance metrics tell you if your ABX strategy is working and help you identify possible areas for improvement. You can analyze how successful your tactics have been, how active your target accounts are, and whether those activities have translated into sales opportunities.

“Track KPIs and account performance every single step of the way, from your demand gen air cover programs all the way down into accelerating your pipeline,” Harmony says. “Make sure you have that visibility.”

Beyond tracking account activities, you should also monitor team performance. This will give you the data to hold your team accountable. Tracking outreach efforts and follow-up performance can also help you pinpoint potential training or resource gaps.

Learn more about Outreach’s ABX playbooks — and how they leverage Sendoso for strategic outreach — by watching the full session from Out of the Box on-demand today.