Every business knows that creating a better customer experience should be a priority. And oftentimes, a business will see the benefits right away. The issue, however, is scaling. There’s no time to grind away with every individual. Yes, you’re creating an advanced customer experience, but at the cost of a lot of time.
Our guests today, Lisa Sharapata, CMO at BoostUp.ai, and James Kessinger, Chief Marketing Officer at Hushly, walk us through the ways of scaling your customer’s buying experience with ABM.
Scaling the customer journey with company investment & technology
The days of cold calls and email spam have been dead for a while now. And to keep up with the times, buyers are looking to boost the customer experience to keep revenue flowing. For Lisa, she realized it was time to research how exactly to do it.
“We just need a way to create this always-on experience that will really sync with the buyers’ needs.” — Lisa Sharapata
Once she began, however, she noticed sweeping claims such as: being more prescriptive increases customer purchase ease by 86%. The data was nice to see but didn’t give constructive ways on how exactly to be more prescriptive.
Lisa describes the steps they took to find the customer data they needed — all compiled within a matrix chart:
- Customer goals
- The channels involved
- How the customer feels going into the journey
- What the customer should feel & experience
- What is the content and messaging at that point?
- How to measure the information
Combined with a persona matrix and a content matrix, Lisa was able to really understand the customer and their pain points along the buyer’s journey. But at a cost.
Putting the results in motion
With a deeper understanding of the customer journey, Lisa started one-off account based motions. The results spoke for themselves: 9% to 40% conversion rate at top-of-funnel but with one big drawback — it took too much time. The strategy needed to be scaled if they wanted to use it in a profitable way. To do this required investment.
It didn’t take long to get internal support once the 9% to 40% conversion rate was known. Scaling with ABM technology, Lisa got rid of her lead scoring funnel in exchange for an account based funnel. Now, as leads come in, Lisa can map them to accounts.
”If a lead came in and it did not map to an account that was in-market and met our ICP fit that was showing intent, it wasn’t getting passed on.” — Lisa Sharapata
Working with your sales team to get the most out of your accounts
While the scaling and technology provides the ability to build an account based system, it’s not enough if your sales team isn’t on board. The only way to succeed with an account based motion transition is to have everyone on the same page.
To better understand how to bring your sales team into the ABM process, Lisa shares some steps to take:
- Building a dashboard: Provide an inventory where the sales team can search accounts, know which accounts have not been contacted, and know which have been contacted but are still in a decision purchase stage.
- Alignment: Take the marketing qualified account and align it with the sales stages.
- Don’t throw stones: Focus on getting your company together at the top-of-funnel and look for new opportunities rather than try to fix everything right away.
”You should always be tweaking, you should always be tracking, you should always be looking at what’s working and what’s not.” — Lisa Sharapata
A Key Takeaway
If you’re trying to create a better customer experience, you have to look for ways to take leads and organize them quickly. For Lisa, that solution was ABM. While it may take some research and evidence to get your company on board, it’s worth it for the substantial increase in customer conversion rate.
While ABM is powerful on its own, without the support of the sales team, you’re missing out on the full advantage ABM can offer. Make sure to remove pain points within your organization when you can and always be on the lookout for new opportunities. Implementing ABM may take time, but it’s time well invested.
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