- The company is familiar with these customers but not currently doing business with them.
- The customers are aware of the company and its products, as well as the other primary competitors and their products.
- The company has a solid value proposition and differentiation.
- The company knows that on average there are five people involved in the buying process. They know the roles within the organization associated with the process but not the specific steps in the process, nor the specific people in the roles at each prospective customer.
- There have been some random initial conversations with some of the people inside the customer base, but these conversations have stalled out.
Perhaps this feels similar to your own scenario. As we huddled in the working session, we discussed the team’s need to map the customer journey to gain greater clarity about the buying process and the idea of leveraging Account-Based Marketing. Some of the team members were unsure about the differences between these two ideas and questioned whether both were necessary. Here’s a quick recap of how we articulated the differences and explained why both are needed to maximize revenue.
There’s a Destination and Process to Customer Engagement
With so many different people from the company in the room, we wanted a relatively easy way to explain these two ideas. We settled on these explanations:
Account-based marketing is a strategic approach the Marketing team employs to support strategic and named accounts that are critical to the company’s success and therefore receive extra special care by the Sales team. These accounts represent a limited number of key customers with whom the organization wants to develop long-term, sustained, significant, and measurable business relationships. It is as close to 1:1 Marketing and Sales that many companies can achieve. In account-based marketing, the Marketing and Sales teams work together at a granular level to devise an appropriate customer engagement strategy for each opportunity. Ideally, they also collaborate to map the buying journey for each account.
Customer buying journey mapping is a way to capture the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and/or maintaining loyalty to a product or service. If you serve more than one market or region, and your product requires a consultative approach, it’s very likely that the different personas and segments you serve will have different journeys.
Ah ha – the working session team came to a realization: Mapping the customer buying journey is a process that can be incorporated into account-based marketing. But account-based marketing is more than mapping the customer buying journey, and the customer buying journey is its own process that can be used by marketing outside of account-based marketing. Exactly!
The Processes: Similarities and Differences
Now that we understand what each of these are, the chart below captures what’s the same and what’s different. Notice that a successful account-based marketing effort incorporates the buying process. The customer buying journey mapping is focused on synchronizing engagement efforts to ensure that your content investments are not wasted and that you deploy them in the right channels and touchpoints at the right time.
Understand the Interplay and Increase Customer Engagement
When you’re given the task to create your Marketing plan and supporting strategies and tactics, it is crucial to understand how they relate and what sets them apart. As marketers, you must understand BOTH the customer buying journey and the characteristics of a compelling account-based marketing initiative. Both are designed to increase customer engagement and conversations. The tactical elements you deploy for each should reflect your customers’ content and channel preferences all with one aim in mind, to increase engagements that convert to buying conversations. When you combine them to support specific strategic named accounts, you can develop a powerful approach.
Now that you understand the merits of combining these efforts, the real value lies in putting this knowledge into practice. Discover how to get started with our white paper Don’t Waste Your Bullets. Or better yet, tap our expertise and take off with our Customer Journey Mapping Workshop.
The original version of this article was first published on VisionEdge Marketing.
Laura Patterson is known for her practical, no-nonsense approach to proving and improving the value of marketing. Inventive and engaging, she quickly gets to the heart of the matter to provide actionable recommendations and solutions. Because her 20-year career began in sales and now spans customer relationship management and Marketing with a capital “M”, her recommendations are always cross-functional friendly. Laura is a strategic marketer, data and metrics master. Her company, VisionEdge Marketing has helped hundreds of companies, in a variety of industries, fulfill their marketing potential and achieve competitive advantage. An early pioneer on the science side of marketing, Laura is recognized as one of the leading authorities in marketing measurement and performance, content management, operations, and data and analytics.
