I am excited to share the launch of the Total Customer Growth book, or How to Win and Grow Customers for Life with ABM and ABX, a book Ben Person and I wrote together.
Why We Wrote Total Customer Growth
Ben, like me, is a long-time sales and marketing leader. If you are on the hook for driving growth at your firm, we have been in your shoes and wrote this book for you.
In 2012, I founded a healthcare technology firm, the most challenging thing I have ever done. We had a great product, and while we were very good at increasing revenues from existing customers, acquiring new ones was especially tough for us. We grew 25X over six years, but our investors expected a much faster win rate.
We used traditional B2B marketing but found it frustrating and wasteful to acquire new customers. I knew that our marketing worked some of the time, but we struggled to create a model where marketing was measurably contributing to the firm’s growth.
It was only after selling the firm that I learned about ABM. The light switched on, and I realized what he had missed out on by not knowing about and embracing ABM.
About Ben
Ben led the marketing transformation of Nuvolo, a fast-growing venture-backed enterprise technology firm where he was the head of global marketing. He did so by fully embracing account-based marketing (ABM). During his tenure, the firm grew 500-fold over seven years. It was rewarding but very difficult to get that level of growth so quickly. According to Ben:
“The move to ABM became a no-brainer when the data proved the value in such a short amount of time. When we saw the direct correlation from intent to pipeline creation over the course of just a couple of months, we knew we were onto something that we could scale up across sales development representatives (SDRs), sales, and customer success,”
Ben and I believe that ABM is fundamentally changing how B2B companies market.
Challenges The Book Addresses
In our work, Ben and I have hundreds of conversations with sales and marketing leaders every year. One of the issues that come up most often is account-based marketing. In particular, we keep hearing these questions:
- I have learned about ABM, but is it right for us?
- I want to do ABM, but how do I get started?
- We have tried ABM, but we have struggled to scale it. How do we do that
- How can ABM help us keep and grow our current customers?
- How do we win and grow a more profitable customer base?
- How do we convince our executive team that ABM can create a competitive advantage?
Sound familiar? Then this book is for you.
ABM is Becoming ABC – Account-Based Confusion
ABM is far from perfect. In our view, it has become very confusing.
It originally started by focusing on growth from existing customers but has become mostly about acquiring new customers. To get it back to its origins, some bright spark came up with ABX, Account-based Experience.
The problem is that to some, ABX is about the whole customer lifetime but to others, it’s what happens after the sale.
On top of this, ABM has become a festival of three-latter acronyms. There’s ABE which means either Account-based Experience, Account-based Engagement, or Account-based Everything.
There’s even ABGTM, a new twist on ABM.
It’s also become too much about expensive technology. Don’t get me wrong, ABM technology rocks, but it’s only part of the story.
We want to simplify things and get back to what’s most important: The Customer Journey and, more to the point, The Total Customer Journey.
Growth Based On The Total Customer Journey
In short, Total Customer Growth is a system involving sales, marketing, and customer success (or whatever you call this team in your organization) to find, engage, convert, and grow profitable customers for life. It is a holistic approach to building a sustainable, long-term business model.
How This Book Can Help You
We wrote this book as a comprehensive practical guide to ABM, ABX, and Total Customer Growth. The book includes how-tos, strategic rationales, examples, and references to resources to help in your journey.
It is divided into four parts
- Part 1 reviews the concepts of the Total Customer Growth Model, including the strategic foundations of ABM.
- Part 2 gives you a practical guide for getting started with ABM as a first major step toward Total Customer Growth.
- Part 3 explains how to evolve from simply using ABM as an acquisition tool into the concepts of ABX and strategies to grow your existing customers.
- Part 4 paints a picture of how to steer your organization toward Total Customer Growth, the steps you should take, and how to get there.
It will help you in many ways
- If you are starting your ABM journey, we provide a comprehensive view of ABM and ABX and introduce to a new concept called “Total Customer Growth.”
- If you have been implementing ABM for some time, we hope this book gives you new ideas about where to take and better utilize this strategy.
- Lastly, if you or anyone on your team needs an instruction guide on any of the many areas of ABM and ABX, the book is designed so that you can dip into any chapter at any time to get a good foundation on topics like intent data, targeting, buyer journeys, etc.
We have endeavored to make this book applicable to your real world, using examples of the concepts put into practice with case studies and stories.
We have also created an online resource for you at https://learn.totalcustomergrowth.com. It is full of examples, templates, and tools you can use to put this book’s theories and tips into action.
Every journey, no matter how big or small, starts with a first step. We hope this book will help you take an initial step, or your next step, toward Total Customer Growth.
