PUTTING YOUR CUSTOMER AT THE HEART OF YOUR PRODUCT
This month, I welcome Emma Acton, an award-winning B2B marketing leader with nearly 30 years of experience in the technology industry, to share her insights on the benefits of keeping the customer front and centre in your strategic thinking and aligning sales and marketing in the process. Emma and her team have even won the prestigious Forrester award for ROI by aligning sales and marketing around vertical industry use cases.
Emma is also an experienced hand at Account-Based Marketing, having brought its benefits to multiple technology businesses over her career. She explains the process of implementing account-based marketing, emphasising the need for stakeholder buy-in, peer collaboration, and a willingness to iterate and adapt.
Join us as we discuss the importance of understanding your customers' use cases and packaging solutions accordingly to resonate better with prospects, putting the customer's real-world applications, challenges and perspectives at the centre of product messaging, marketing campaigns, and overall strategy - not just leading with the product capabilities alone—a how-to on taking an accurate customer-centric, outside-in approach.
EPISODE OUTLINE AND HIGHLIGHTS
[00:10] Introduction
[02:30] Sales and Marketing Alignment
[04:10] Customer Use Cases
[12:30] Account-Based Marketing
[22:11] Advice for Account-Based Marketing
[24:44] Driving Account Wins with Account-Based Marketing
[30:59] Data-Driven Decision-Making and Marketing Goals
[30:51] Navigating Economic Challenges in Marketing
TAKING A CUSTOMER CENTRIC APPROACH
Technology businesses have multiple options for their approach: are you sales-led, marketing-led, product-led, or customer-led?
Emma strongly advocates being customer-led in your strategic vision to create a better product-to-market fit. By deeply understanding how customers use your products to solve their challenges, you can refine and position your offerings to meet real-world needs better.
This means that your marketing approach has more resonant messaging and drives higher engagement, improving your demand generation efforts. Sales teams are then able to have more insightful conversations about solving customers' specific challenges, improving their effectiveness. According to Emma, being customer-led does not only benefit you in winning new business but also in terms of retention and expansion. When customers see you as a partner focused on their outcome, they'll be more satisfied and likely to remain loyal and expand their relationship with your solutions over time.
In essence, put your customers' real-world applications, challenges, and perspectives at the centre of product messaging, marketing campaigns, and overall strategy—not just lead with the product capabilities alone. Take a true customer-centric, outside-in approach.
NOT JUST ACCOUNT BASED MARKETING… BUT ACCOUNT BASED EVERYTHING
Emma describes a key factor in her "Account-Based Everything" or "ABX" framework for implementing account-based marketing as getting buy-in and alignment across all customer-facing teams, not just marketing.
The core idea is to get full organisational alignment around the most strategic accounts, with consistent communication across teams about those accounts. Marketing can't do ABM effectively in a silo.
But why implement this way?
Karen and Emma discussed the shared the benefits to implementing an "Account-Based Everything" (ABX) approach.
Improved customer experience: By ensuring all customer-facing functions understand the account's objectives and challenges, the organization can provide a more seamless, valuable experience that addresses the account's core needs.
Better sales enablement: The shared account knowledge allows marketing, value engineers, pre-sales and others to better enable and equip the sales team to have more relevant, insightful conversations with the accounts.
Increased deal velocity: With tighter coordination and the full weight of the organization behind strategic accounts, it can help accelerate deals and reduce sales cycle times.
So in essence, ABX allows marketing's account-based approach to permeate throughout the company for more effective land-and-expand motions with key accounts.
ADVICE FOR STARTING WITH ABM
Start small with a pilot: Don't try to boil the ocean right away. First run a contained pilot program first to test out ABM tactics and get some initial results.
Focus on the customer's challenges: Flip the perspective from selling your products to understanding the key challenges the customer is trying to solve.
Don't be afraid to fail and iterate: You likely won't get it perfectly right with the first iteration. Expect to adjust your accounts, messaging, and tactics based on what resonates. Use data to analyse what's working and what's not, and evolve your approach.
Get stakeholder buy-in: Build a business case showing your objectives and proposed pilot approach. Get buy-in from marketing leadership as well as sales leaders who will need to partner with you.
Partner with responsive sales teams: Identify the sales reps most open to collaborating with marketing. Having invested partners on the sales side is critical for an effective ABM pilot.
The key is to start focused, put the customer first, expect to iterate, get stakeholders aligned, and partner closely with sales. Don't write off ABM if initial attempts don't work - keep refining based on results.
Emma's point was that while there are common foundational elements of ABM, how organisations actually implement and "flavour" their programs can vary significantly, just like how families put their own spins on a bolognese sauce recipe.
So there isn't a one-size-fits-all ABM framework, but rather a spectrum of strategies organizations can tailor to their needs, accounts, and industries.
TODAY’S GUEST
Emma has close to 30 years of experience in the technology industry having held multiple marketing and leadership roles in the B2B space.
Respected as a marketing thought leader, Emma has honed her skills and knowledge at organisation such as Iron Mountain, TIBCO, Showpad, Manhattan Associates, SumTotal Systems and Acquia. Emma is in demand for her views on next-generation account-based marketing strategies and how to demonstrate and measure true sales and marketing alignment.
You can connect with Emma on LinkedIn
OUR HOST
Karen Lloyd is a passionate marketing headhunter and recruitment expert specialising in marketing and C-suite in the technology sector. With over 25 years of experience in the recruitment industry, Karen brings a unique depth of expertise that sets her apart from most recruiters.
Over her career, Karen has accumulated a wealth of experience that includes serving as a Board Director and being actively involved in growing a business for 13 years. Karen has been a part of five start-ups, giving her first-hand knowledge of the critical importance of hiring the right people.
Currently, Karen is the founder and Director of Armstrong Lloyd. She leads a very special team that partners with businesses and empowers them to build industry-leading marketing teams for some of the most exciting B2B technology brands - from small agile and disruptive start-ups to global giants providing a wealth of product and service offerings.
