ABM Best-Practice: Aligning Account Experience to Non-Linear Buying Journeys

A key principle of Smarter GTM? is aligning every aspect of your go-to-market to the right account experience for every stage of its journey.

So what does the account journey even mean?

The account journey isn’t linear

Gartner’s research identified six B2B buying “jobs” that customers must complete to their satisfaction to finalize a purchase:

• Problem identification. “We need to do something.”
• Solution exploration. “What’s out there to solve our problem?”
• Requirements building. “What exactly do we need the purchase to do?”
• Supplier selection. “Does this do what we want it to do?”
• Validation. “We think we know the right answer, but we need to be sure.”
• Consensus creation. “We need to get everyone on board.”

But these jobs aren’t completed in a linear fashion. Buyers engage in “looping,” revisiting each of those six buying jobs several times over the course of a purchase process.

This makes the traditional baton handoff between marketing and sales ineffective in serving today’s highly complex B2B buying journey. Smart marketing and sales teams operate more like a football team, working together to move the ball down the field. The path is rarely straight, but it’s always directed.

Your framework for a non-linear process

The account journey is not linear, but that doesn’t mean you can’t put a framework on top of it to help understand and manage it.

It’s like lines on an American football field.

In a typical match, the ball moves up and down the field as the game progresses with each play. The ball itself takes a very non-linear path towards either end zone.

And yet, the lines on the field play a useful role.

1. They tell us how likely we are to score. If we’re on our 5-yard line, we have a much higher chance of scoring than if we’re on our opponent’s 40.
2. They guide us on what plays to run. If we know we just need a yard or two, maybe the running back takes the ball. But if we know we need a significant gain, then a long pass to a wide receiver is the right call.

By mapping the non-linear account journey to a linear set of buying stages, we can achieve similar benefits, helping us measure our progress and guiding our marketing and sales plays.

The key insight is that an account will move forwards AND backward through the stages — throughout their nonlinear process — and your go-to-market must adapt accordingly.

Mapping account journeys

Though account journey stages vary across different businesses, this simple framework is a starting point.

One stage to focus on is the Marketing Qualified Account, or MQA, which represents the subset of your qualified targets that are showing signs of being in-market and ready for sales outreach.?

Companies can and should adjust these stages to map to the nuances of their business. Some companies add a Meeting stage between Marketing Qualified and Opportunity, for example.

Others break up Opportunity into more than one stage. Many companies create journeys focused on their post-sale experience, expanding and retaining their customers. The key is to customize the account journey so it works for you.

Align interactions to the specific account journey

Once you’ve defined your account journey, you are ready to create the right experience for each account based on where it is in the journey.

Knowing where the account is in its journey gives you clues about what jobs the buyers are trying to accomplish and how you should engage.

• Aware: Is a qualified account aware of your category but not engaged with you? Build awareness and trust in your brand, leveraging social proof and avoiding anything salesy or aggressive. Account-based advertising can play a big role here.
• Engaged: Is an account engaging with you but not yet showing buying intent? Nurture your budding relationship with thought leadership that educates and reinforces your brand value, ideally helping them to identify solution criteria and prioritize trade-offs.
• Marketing Qualified Account: Is an account showing signs of being in-market? This is the magic moment when sales should reach out to multiple personas in a deeply relevant and helpful manner, supported by marketing air cover (personalized content, ads, direct mail, trials, etc.).
• Opportunity: Is the account already engaging with your sales team? Help the account complete the B2B buying jobs with tools to compare vendors, validate their thinking, and build consensus with the broader committee. Third-party validation like case studies, reviews, and analyst reports work well here. Marketing is uniquely qualified to engage the broader committee in a scalable way, including account-based advertising.
• Customer: Now’s the time to deepen your relationship by showing your appreciation and offering how-to or best-practice content, driving adoption and helping the account see additional opportunities to use your solutions.

Get your copy of my book, The Definitive Guide to Smarter GTM? with Account Intelligence and ABM/ABX. You can download it here .