Over the past three years, we’ve embarked on an exciting journey with our customers: the journey from Account-Based Experience (ABX) to everything. With an initial focus on Account-Based Marketing (ABM) deployments, we came up with ABX and we were incredibly pleased to witness awesome ABM programs — some targeting a few accounts, others targeting thousands, some to acquire new logos, others to nurture and expand usage. Customers and partners keep creating new ideas, experimenting quickly, and breaking new records.
Then something truly remarkable happened. We saw substantial demand for design richness and flexibility — with brand compliance. Customers had a real need for a range of digital assets, such as general landing pages, live events, impressive media hubs, digital sales rooms, RFP responses, user training, and co-marketing campaigns. Even now, we find new use cases every day. But it wasn't scalable to keep customizing each one separately. We needed a new approach.
There was a clear market opportunity in leveraging the unprecedented agility and personalization scale we originally offered to expand, bringing personalized digital experiences to every corner of the organization, for every use case, without compromising brand compliance. Today, demand generation, event marketing, channel partner marketing, sales engagement, and customer engagement all have very strong use cases. As I see it, this is quite consistent with the trend of ABM becoming a best practice in B2B go-to-market strategies.
In essence, we are witnessing a disruptive wave of B2B engagement driven by:
- B2B buyers that expect a digital-first experience that feels just as personalized as those they routinely enjoy on the consumer side.
- More competitive B2B markets than ever before, mandating us to tailor our message to each individual and account in order to connect and communicate relevance that resonates.
- The fact that we cannot rely solely on sales to guide the art of tailoring the buyer experience when B2B buyers prefer to complete the entire buying process on their own, using the digital touchpoints at their fingertips.
Achieving this means orchestrating a highly personalized digital experience across the entire lifecycle, the coordination of which must be provided across all customer-facing teams. It's a really hard job — and someone needs to step up and do it. That is the new role of marketing. It’s no longer 90% focused on the top of the funnel (TOFU), but rather the entire lifecycle. Let me tell you what: Budgets are not growing — and this is further exacerbated by the turbulent markets triggered by COVID-19.
So a new operational model is required. It's time to democratize the creation of digital buyer experiences for every marketer across the entire organization, empower them to be self-served, yet on brand, and use data and insights in highly sophisticated ways. Why? Because they are closest to the markets, know their audiences the best, and it's the only way to provide that step up digital experience discussed before at great cost. To be honest, they’re doing it themselves already, using whatever tools and manual labor they can put their hands on. It's out of compliance, not on brand, and — worst of all — the corporation is missing 95% of the engagement insight. How can you coordinate a journey in that situation?
To address this need, we designed a whole new no-code experience builder so everyone can use it. It’s armed with an ever-growing design widget library and includes far deeper behavioral intelligence, collecting engagement time on every section in addition to asset engagement intelligence. Built on AI, it will automatically tag content and derive actual interest maps by account and person. You can build anything you want — and measure it all.
With this next generation, our customers can significantly simplify their martech stacks, substantially reduce costs, and finally solve the problem of various rogue operations. Now they have one platform where anyone can build any experience, one that relies on a harmonized behavioral intelligence layer across all touchpoints and collects 100x broader and deeper engagement data than ever before.
And the most critical of all: the buyer experience will become an actual well-connected journey, almost as a side effect, without impossibly complex modeling and without major organizational changes. The coming decade will revolve around the buyer experience. Only truly buyer-centric companies will survive and thrive; others will not make it, much like some B2C players fell by the wayside, replaced by modern experience-centric ones.
We promised to bring to market the easiest and most powerful buyer experience platform. Today we are making it real. Thank you to all of our customers and partners guiding us in this fascinating journey. You are the source of our inspiration. Thank you to David Brutman and the entire Folloze team, who are united on a mission to help you deliver ever-stronger experiences to your own customers.
The only question left to answer is, what will you build today?
Learn more about Folloze Buyer Experience Platform 3.0 here.
