Six ABX Marketing Challenges For B2B SaaS And Their Solutions

Forbes

21-03-2025

Salman Shahid, CEO at OXO Packaging.
With advancements in technology, most B2B buyers look for personalized solutions that can help their business grow exponentially. There are different strategies your business can implement to offer customized services, and one highly effective strategy is account-based experience (ABX) marketing.
ABX marketing allows B2B SaaS companies to offer highly tailored strategies to engage high-value accounts and maximize ROI. However, your business can encounter several challenges when implementing this strategy. Read on to explore six of these challenges and ways to solve them.
As a B2B SaaS company, audience analysis is crucial for your business when implementing an ABX marketing strategy. It is important to stay ahead of the curve and outrank your competitors when landing clients. You can identify the gaps within audience research and offer experiences that your competitors are failing to provide.
There are different automated tools to help you perform a reliable audience analysis. Using these tools, you can find the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and implement strategies in accordance to offer more value to your customers.
For example, you can use solutions such as Kantar Marketplace or System1 Group to get data-driven audience insights. The more relevant data you have, the easier you'll find it to craft and implement your ABX marketing strategy and get the results you want.
As a business, you should take into consideration the resources, budget, time and staff required before defining the approach to your ABX marketing strategy. Generally, there are three approaches your business can implement to provide tailored marketing experiences to your accounts:
• 1:1 Approach: This offers hyper-personalized experiences to high-value clients from the list of ICPs.
• 1:Few Approach: This focuses on tailored experiences to more than one account.
• 1:Many Approach: This provides an all-inclusive experience to all accounts on the ICP list.
The best approach is to start with a 1:Few or 1:Many approach, as these two are more time and resource-efficient.
Data discrepancies can occur within the different departments of your business. For example, there can be a disagreement between your sales and marketing teams about lead qualification, defining metrics and utilizing different tools.
Disagreements like these can result in a mismatch of goals and blur the goalposts to stop you from getting the desired outcomes. And you can eventually lose accounts and run into data compliance challenges if discrepancies aren't avoided.
Using an integrated CRM for ABX marketing can minimize data discrepancies and ensure smooth and accurate results for your campaigns. For example, you can choose from popular options like HubSpot, Typeform and Zoho to save the data accurately.
You can also use FOSS solutions like SuiteCRM for your ABX marketing campaigns. Before finalizing your CRM, ensure you get all your teams on the same page to avoid data discrepancies and get desired results faster.
ABX marketing demands highly customized content, which requires more marketing resources. This can ultimately cause a strain on the budget your finance team has allocated. Creating personalized content for accounts, without automation, can slow down the efficiency of your business model.
Using AI automation can help your business create a comprehensive and detailed content library that can cater to every account.
Leveraging AI can help your business model tailor the content specifically to the individual account's needs. AI tools can analyze heaps of data to understand the needs of every account and can group similar ones. This automation can help your business create personalized marketing collateral more accurately and efficiently.
For example, you can use solutions like Watson Campaign Automation or Salesforce Marketing Cloud to automate your ABX marketing campaigns. You can also use these types of tools to send personalized messages in bulk or track the performance of your campaigns more easily.
Results in B2B SaaS often take time, and it can be hard to measure immediate success when implementing your ABX marketing strategy. This is why employing KPIs is crucial to evaluate account-based experience success.
Implement AI within your business model, or use tools such as Simple Analytics, ClickUp and Turtl to measure engagement metrics and pipeline velocity. Real-time data tracking can help you to take result-driven actions and adjust your KPIs according to your needs.
KPIs powered by detailed analytics can help your business optimize your ABX marketing strategies and offer better experiences to your accounts. More reliable data will also help you make informed future ABX marketing decisions.
Scalability in an ABX marketing strategy becomes an issue as you have to offer personalization to each account individually. A 1:1 strategy is not as scalable as the other two because it requires more resources for personalized experiences for your accounts.
To achieve scalability, you can prioritize high-value ICPs and offer personalized resources to these accounts. Once these valued customers are nurtured, gradually introduce more accounts to these personalized changes.
Microsoft's strategy of 1:Few for making Copilot a household GenAI solution for enterprises is a great example of making ABX marketing scalable in the long run.
In May 2023, Microsoft introduced the Early Access Copilot Program for 600 enterprise customers. After initial success, the program was made available for enterprise accounts worldwide. Microsoft's 1:Few approach eventually got scaled into 1:Many as it provided results that Microsoft had expected.
In August 2024, Microsoft published the success story of Insight Enterprises. This report showed how Insight Enterprises was able to streamline business operations using Microsoft Copilot—a testament to Microsoft's ABX marketing success.
With the right ABX marketing strategy, your business can improve its marketing and achieve sales success faster. Test ABX marketing strategies to offer personalized solutions to high-value accounts. If you can overcome the challenges faced in ABX marketing by implementing the solutions discussed above, you can win goals faster in the long run.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?