Events are really just one moment in time, but you have to really think about the journey of the customer, of the prospect, and have an integrated strategy.Bethany Murphy, Head of Events for 6Sense
Account-based marketing (ABM) has been around for (what feels like) forever. A tried-and-true strategy in which marketing touchpoints are tailored to each prospective account, ABM helps sales and marketing teams move high-potential customers into the funnel.
But is ‘into the funnel’ far enough?
After all, according to Salesforce, 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is just as important as its products and services.
Enter account-based experiences, or ABX. ABX takes ABM a step further and involves the entire go-to-market team—marketing, sales, CX, and events. An ABX strategy generates optimized, feel-good moments for a high-value account from the first time the prospect sees an ad, through their journey as a customer, right to churn (and beyond, sometimes). Which kind of makes ABX the perfect strategy for events teams to support: if there’s a team that knows about creating feel-good moments for prospects and customers, it’s you folks.
As Mark Kilens, CEO & Co-founder of TACK, puts it, “[ABX is] really about creating experiences that put people at the center of them.”
Not every events team has the opportunity to drive an ABX strategy across the wider organization. But even if your GTM org isn’t doing ABX (yet), understanding the principles of ABX can bring a lot of value to event leaders. In this article, we’ll dig into the following:
First, let’s set the record straight on all the jargon.
GTM, ABM, ABX…There are a lot of marketing acronyms flying about right now. Here are the definitions that the Swoogo demand gen team uses to stay aligned:
ABM is a strategy for creating highly targeted marketing collateral to nurture leads in the build-up to a sale or conversion event. By treating each account as a market of one, ABM ensures that interactions are highly relevant and engaging, increasing the likelihood of conversion, and fostering stronger relationships with potential clients.
ABX extends the strategy of personalized service, content, and campaigns beyond the initial sale, through the customer lifecycle, and even beyond churn. ABX differs from ABM in that it doesn’t just target an “account,” it targets all the individuals on a buying team. ABX ensures that all customers continue to receive value and support tailored to their specific needs, which helps in nurturing long-term relationships and encouraging customer loyalty.
ABM and ABX are not to be confused with an integrated revenue campaign (IRC), which is a defined marketing campaign that aligns marketing, sales, and customer success efforts to drive revenue growth. It integrates various channels and tactics to create a cohesive series of offerings. An IRC has a fixed target audience and aims to achieve a specific revenue goal within a limited timeframe.
In contrast, ABX specifically targets the ongoing customer experience, ensuring that each interaction is personalized and meaningful, regardless of where the customer is in their journey. While both ABX and IRC share the goal of fostering deeper connections and driving growth, ABX is broader in scope and thus more of a driving strategy than a one-off campaign.
As an event marketer, you might not be the person choosing the overall marketing and sales strategy, be it ABM, ABX, or something else. But even so, event marketers are truly pivotal in the success of ABX. And we’re not just saying that because we’re event people!
We’re saying that because events create more opportunities for personalization than traditional digital marketing channels can, and personalization is the essence of great account-based experiences. Beyond that, intent signals gathered from events feed into marketing, sales, and customer success efforts, building bridges between these departments and paving the way for more holistic, customer-centric experiences. Whether your events team is curating niche webinar topics for a single buying team or setting up coffee chats for customers at your flagship conference, events play a significant role in a 360º ABX motion.
So, it makes sense for event leaders to be fully aware of—and involved in—the ABX approach. But fear not— you won’t have to introduce fancy new or untested event types into your strategy. Buckle up while we explain how.
Let’s be real—most events teams are already super busy. You probably don’t want to spend time introducing net-new event categories into your playbook right now, or at least not without compelling evidence that they’re going to support revenue generation.
If that resonates with you, then we’ve got good news. You’re likely already running the type of events that support an ABX strategy. We’ve highlighted five common event types and how you can make small tweaks to have them support a wider ABX motion in your organization.
Roadshows, unlike static event types, can meet target accounts where they are. And we mean that literally: a roadshow can travel to the locations where your most important accounts are clustered. This opens up great opportunities for meeting prospects and customers on their home turf, understanding their context, and creating account-based experiences to match.
Not all roadshows take advantage of those ABX opportunities. Traditionally, B2B roadshows tended to follow a repeatable format regardless of specific location: a B2B roadshow looked the same in Montana as in Louisiana. But if you’re supporting an ABX strategy, the format can be localized to better fit the target accounts in each geo.
For example, you could make tweaks to the catering to bring local produce to each event iteration, if you want to keep ABX efforts modest. Or, you could go bigger and source speakers to address challenges or opportunities faced by one or two specific target accounts in each region.
How far you lean into ABX depends on factors such as resourcing and investment. But the takeaway here is that target accounts in different geographies often have commonalities that you can leverage to create impactful account-based experiences during a roadshow.
Dinners, with their reduced headcount and invite-only access, allow events teams to create highly personalized experiences for their highest potential accounts.
Depending on the size of the guest list, these events can be designed to create individual experiences for each attendee (such as personalized gifts based on event registration data), or experiences for the whole group, such as having a facilitator ready to guide peer-group discussion throughout the event.
One real-life example of account-based personalization was when an event host learned from the Swoogo registration form that a CEO attendee, Justin, loved sriracha; so they had a bottle waiting for him when he arrived at the event. That’s the essence of ABX done right.
Roadshows and dinners open up a lot of opportunities to integrate with an ABX strategy. But they’re also pretty expensive event types to run and aren’t super scalable. This is where webinars and other digital events come in.
Webinars allow you to provide personalized content based on vertical, job title, department, or any other niche category meaningful to your GTM org. For example, you can run a differentiated version of the same webinar for each job title in a target account’s buying team. You could also curate on-demand content from past events into a tailored video playlist for each small grouping, to create low-commitment ways for target accounts to engage with the brand.
Because webinars and digital events are cheap to scale, you can segment much more deeply and run a higher number of niche events without burning the folks on the event team out.
Tradeshows may feel like the antithesis of account-based experiences: they’re big, sprawling, and can sometimes feel a little soulless (although events like SXSW prove that’s not inevitable). But they actually open up some great opportunities to create account-based experiences, specifically through ancillary activation.
Start by finding out what tradeshows your target list is attending—the sales team probably already has this information in the CRM, and may even have a booth or be running sponsorship. You can then plan ancillary events such as dinners, excursions, happy hours, or other micro-events before, during, or after the main tradeshow. You may even be able to run satellite events with speakers, although that depends on the norms set out by each tradeshow.
We mentioned micro-events in the previous section, but it’s worth zooming in on their potential as an ABX activity.
Small workshops, product launches, roundtable discussions, and other types of micro-event are a great way to meet target accounts where they’re located and create some fun for the individuals on that account’s buying team. You can tailor the content of the events based on the specific information you have on an account—for example, issues they’ve brought up to your Customer Support team in the past—or you can keep it a little broader by designing the event around specific product or service features that might appeal to a certain segment of accounts.
We’ve now covered some common event types that can support a wider ABX motion. But given that we said at the top that ABX supports target accounts throughout the customer lifecycle, from prospect to churn (and sometimes beyond), you might still be asking yourself how all this maps onto the customer journey. We dive into that below.
ABX aims to create many different experiences for target accounts from pre-sale, to the sales funnel, to the customer experience, to their interests outside of your business and product(s). That means there are a bunch of key touchpoints where input from the event team is crucial. After all, as Bethany Murphy, Head of Events for 6Sense, explained to us in a webinar:
Events are really just one moment in time, but you have to really think about the journey of the customer, of the prospect, and have an integrated strategy.Bethany Murphy, Head of Events for 6Sense
Below, we’ve mapped the main touchpoints where event teams can add value to a wider ABX strategy:
If your organization hasn’t solidified an ideal customer profile to generate priority account lists from, this is where to start. Events teams can contribute here by bringing registrant data to the discussion.
Note how the sales team believes your product will benefit these accounts, and what pain points might be for each organization based on their industry, size, and offering. Collate that data to uncover conversations that may be relevant to multiple accounts on the list, without getting so broad those ideas feel generic.
Gather deep event data from attendees, such as which sessions they attended and who they networked with, and use that to personalize outreach. Consider how the event experience differs based on intent signals and past attendance data. You’ll be able to transform the actions of your leads and prospects into parsable data, and vice-versa.
Once a customer is onboarded, they’re entering into a new learning phase. Be ready with small-group training webinars, or consider a roadshow of in-person training workshops to create positive and memorable experiences.
Stay connected with customer success to keep close tabs on customer pains, especially when it comes to accounts that correlate directly to your ICP. Ensure those pains are addressed through training, workshops, or other support at in-person events geared toward customers.
The customer journey is highly individual and always changing. Events create new touchpoints, new relationships, and new data. Events data feeds into your CRM and helps you to better predict and interpret buyer intent signals.
Even after an account has purchased your software, they may experience related challenges that your platform can’t address. Continue developing webinars, digital events, and in-person event content that addresses those pains.
Like with any new strategy or method, ABX won’t come naturally to everyone, and you may encounter resistance across the organization when advocating for an ABX approach. For instance, leaders may say they don’t have the budget to expand personalization, or the customer success team may struggle to see how event data can support their post-sale goals.
But by identifying and rallying around the above touchpoints, you and the rest of the events team can increase the impact of account-based experiences and pave the way for using an ABX approach in the future.
Even if your organization may not be ready to go all-in on ABX just yet, your events team can be pioneers of and champions for ABX internally. If you start small by defining your ICP, doing pain point research, and organizing micro-events, you can test out ABX without expending too many resources. Then, once you’ve gathered enough data on the effectiveness of those experiences, you can bring your findings to decision-makers, making a strong, data-backed case for ABX.
With Swoogo, you can capture the event data you need to prove the value of ABX over time.