Silos suck. They have a tendency to hold businesses back from success, because they create departments that are isolated, proprietary, and competitive, and which can have a negative impact on customer experience.

Between sales and marketing, more and more leaders are no longer talking about Account Based Marketing or Account Based Selling as independent disciplines. They’re talking about Account Based Everything.

Account Based Everything is a strategic go-to-market approach that orchestrates personalized marketing, sales, and success efforts to drive engagement and conversion at named accounts. This isn’t a specialized strategy to keep in a box in the corner. It’s a strategic initiative that addresses the three most important revenue objectives of any B2B company:

  • New customer acquisition Helps acquire new customers, particularly high value targets
  • Pipeline velocity Accelerates velocity of existing opportunities at target accounts
  • Account expansion Drives expansion (upsell + cross-sell) at existing accounts

“Adopters of an Account Based Everything strategy are seeing significant lift in engagement rates, pipeline per account, and upsell/cross-sell numbers.” – Craig Rosenberg, Co-founder and Chief Analyst, TOPO

But these revenue objectives are only part of the impact ABE can have on a business. At Engagio, we’ve helped many organizations realize success with ABE, and have seen many of them feel distinct benefits that span far beyond revenue.

These unexpected effects include:

  1. Morale rises as you escape the discouraging ‘hamster wheel’ of high-volume, low- engagement tactics.
  2. Performance improves as it takes far fewer leads to secure an appointment.
  3. The voracious need for net new leads decreases as you waste less time on low-potential situations and invest more time in relevant interactions.
  4. Mutual respect grows as everyone in sales and marketing recognizes the value and contribution of their colleagues.
  5. You learn faster as more of your team gets direct engagement with the people who matter most.
  6. You grow faster taking the big revenue steps that only big deals can deliver.
  7. You scale up based on success, with your costs rising directly with your pipeline.

In short, the transformation to an ABE approach is essentially the culture change that sales and marketing have been waiting for.

Quantifying the Impact

When sales and marketing teams work together, companies see 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates, according to Altify. When it comes to ABM, the High-Performance ABM Capabilities Benchmark Report reported that over two-thirds of study participants report that ABM is favorably impacting their revenue. The same study found that for those using ABM, over 80 percent state that it is one of the most important revenue generating strategies in use.

But perhaps the best quote comes from ITSMA, who coined the phrase Account Based Marketing. They report:

ABM delivers the highest Return on Investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic. Period.

In an age when we are searching for marketing and sales tactics that drive real gains (like the guy in the photo), the proof is hard to ignore.

What other effects are you seeing?

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