The Data to Deliver: Account Based Experiences
Decision makers increasingly demand personalised experiences in a B2B context. Yet, marketers often lack the data to deliver them - until now.
Amid an avalanche of content, decision makers have become harder to reach. Leads are qualifying later. Sales cycles are taking longer. To solve this problem, marketers are increasingly looking to better and deeper personalisation in order to drive new revenue. Getting results requires putting the right message in front of the right prospects. Yet, effective personalisation is only possible if there is the underlying data quality to support it.
If you don't know who your prospects are, how can you hope to personalise your content to their needs? Marketers need a more comprehensive view of their target market than ever before. Bad data leads to bad ABM. Gartner studies show that bad personalisation is one of the quickest ways to lose customers. That's why data quality has been such a hot topic in recent years.
The AI Approach
It's no longer enough just to have a loosely defined ICP; you need to know all the accounts that fit that profile. Increasingly, marketers are using AI solutions to identify the best fit for their solutions. AI driven propensity modelling is far from a new technique. It's the same concept as predictive scoring, which has been around for a long time. However, the Generative AI boom has driven a renewed interest in the concept of propensity and predictive scoring.
Taken together, a well defined account propensity model and strong intent framework allow for much deeper personalisation than was ever previously possible in B2B. The basic idea is that account tiering should be data driven based on an analysis of previously won opportunities. Using the resulting insights, it should be possible to predict the accounts that will most likely become customers. A comprehensive account database is key. Mapping the total addressable market then enables an AI powered scoring model to select the most relevant tier 1 and tier 2 accounts for each solution. Those are the best accounts that most businesses want to target with their ABM programs.
Experience First
The account is the most important element of any B2B relationship. It's what the wider business is interested in after all. Yet, before the rise of ABM, data management focused much more on contact attributes than on the account. That historical focus on contact completeness over account completeness made personalisation much harder. B2C marketers are able to drive detailed personalisation strategies based on the vast amounts of consumer data available both within and outside the business. B2B marketers know very little about the individual contacts in their database, largely because of routine employee turnover and the difficulty of properly tracking people across roles.
Aggregating all targeting and activity data to the account level overcomes this problem. With the right data sources, marketers can learn a lot about their target accounts. That enables the type of highly targeted account-based experiences that everyone wants to see. People have been talking about replicating consumer style personalised experiences for years. Yet B2B marketers have lacked the data to deliver them - until now.
In Brief
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