Your marketing team excels at targeting desirable accounts. Your sales team maintains strong relationships with key decision-makers. Your customer success team consistently delivers value.

Yet somehow, your accounts aren't growing as quickly as you'd expect. 

For many in professional services, this is a familiar story. The challenge often isn't with any single team's performance. It's with how their efforts connect to create a coherent customer experience.

For B2B leaders tired of seeing promising accounts stall despite significant investment in account-based approaches, Account-Based Experience (ABX) could offer a solution. By orchestrating customer interactions around a unified strategy, ABX can turn fragmented touchpoints into coordinated customer journeys that drive measurable growth.

But before exploring ABX, it's worth examining why traditional account-based approaches sometimes fall short of their promise.

The ABM Reality Check

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) represented a valuable shift from broad-based demand generation to focused engagement of high-value accounts. And for many organisations, it has driven meaningful improvements in pipeline quality and deal size. However, it was never meant to be a silver bullet. 

The "M" in ABM hints at its fundamental limitation. 

While marketing teams have developed sophisticated targeting and personalisation capabilities, the broader customer experience often remains siloed:

• Marketing creates sophisticated campaigns but, without full visibility into sales’ conversations with individual accounts, they fail to support conversion.

• Sales pursues opportunities that may not align with the account's current priorities or sales readiness as indicated by marketing’s engagement data.

• Customer success works to drive adoption without insight into the broader account strategy or the original business case that won the deal.

The result? Disconnected experiences that can undermine the very relationships you're trying to build. A CFO might receive thoughtful insights from marketing about one service line one week, only to field unrelated calls from sales about another the following week. Or valuable feedback from one office's engagement never reaches the team nurturing opportunities in another region.

The costs are obvious. Mixed messages erode trust. And opportunities for expansion are missed because insights don't flow between teams.

This isn't a failure of ABM as a concept. Rather, it reflects the inherent difficulty of building complex B2B relationships across organisational boundaries. To address these challenges, forward-thinking organisations are embracing a more holistic approach.

Enter Account-Based Experience (ABX)

Account-Based Experience (ABX) is a strategic approach that coordinates all customer-facing activities - from marketing and sales to customer success - to deliver a unified, consistent experience for high-value accounts. Unlike ABM which focuses primarily on marketing activities, ABX orchestrates every touchpoint in the customer journey to build deeper relationships and drive account growth.

ABX addresses ABM’s limitations by recognising a fundamental truth: B2B buyers don't experience your company through organisational silos. They experience it as a single entity. And every interaction, from early research to post-sale support, shapes their perception of your value as a partner.

This shift takes more than just rebranding your existing ABM program. It requires rethinking how your firm orchestrates every client interaction to deliver consistent, meaningful value.

When an account shows increased interest in a particular topic, every team should know about it and understand their role in the collective response. Marketing needs to adjust its campaigns to align with the client's focus, sales needs to modify their outreach, and customer service needs to align their insights and recommendations based on the expertise and value the client is interested in. 

The result? No more mixed messages or confused clients. Just a coherent experience that builds trust and drives growth.

Making Account Based Experience (ABX) Work in Practice

Successful ABX implementation requires:

• Unified account intelligence shared across all customer-facing teams

• Coordinated engagement strategies that align marketing and sales with customer success efforts

• Consistent measurement frameworks that evaluate the entire customer relationship, not just departmental metrics

• Technology and processes that enable quick, collaborative responses to account signals

Unified Account Intelligence

Forget surface-level firmographics. Real account intelligence means understanding not just who the client is, but how they operate, what challenges they face, and where they're heading. 

This isn't about buying more data – it's about mining the intelligence you already have across your organisation.

Your sales team knows what keeps decision-makers up at night. Your customer success team understands how accounts actually use your expertise and solutions. Marketing tracks how accounts engage with your content. Bringing these insights together creates a rich picture of each account's needs and opportunities that enables a data-driven approach to engagement.

Coordinated Engagement Strategies

This is where most account-based programs fall apart. It's not enough to have great insights – you need to act on them in a coordinated way. 

This means breaking down the walls between teams and creating processes that enable quick, collaborative responses to account signals.

However, breaking down those long-established organisational barriers can be hard. ABX means challenging established ways of working, realigning incentives, and getting people to think beyond their departmental silos. 

The good news? You don't have to transform your entire organisation overnight. 

Start with a small group of strategic accounts where you can prove the concept. Create a tiger team that brings together marketing, sales, and service delivery. Give them the freedom to experiment with new approaches to client engagement. Focus on delivering consistent, valuable experiences across every touchpoint.

When they succeed – and they will – you'll have a compelling case and momentum for broader change.

Relentless Optimisation

Here's an uncomfortable truth: you won't get it right the first time. Or even the second. Success in ABX comes from constantly measuring, learning, and adjusting your approach based on what actually works for each client relationship. 

Instead of siloed metrics that drive siloed behaviours, focus on indicators that reflect overall relationship health:

• Relationship depth: Are you reaching more stakeholders at different levels?

• Service expansion: How effectively are accounts moving through their buying and adoption journey?

• Relationship value: Are accounts expanding their relationship with you over time?

• Experience consistency: Do accounts receive consistent experiences across business functions?

Measuring what matters might be harder than tracking vanity metrics and traditional KPIs, but they'll tell you far more about the real impact of your client strategy and where to direct your resources

Strong Technological Foundations

When starting their ABX journey, many companies immediately turn to technological solutions. However, you cannot simply buy your way to ABX success.

Yes, technology is revolutionising marketing. But if you're expecting a new platform to solve all of your account engagement challenges you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Technology without strategy just helps you make the same mistakes faster.

The right approach? Start with your client strategy and processes. Get your teams aligned on what great customer experience looks like. Then investigate how you can use technology to scale your processes and amplify your team’s expertise, not replace them.

The Potential Blindspots of ABX

While ABX addresses many of ABM's limitations, we need to acknowledge its potential challenges too. Like any approach, it has its blindspots. Understanding them is crucial for developing mitigation strategies and ensuring long-term success.

The Over-Experience Trap

With its emphasis on orchestrated experiences, ABX might blind us to the fact that sometimes the best experience is no experience at all. 

Think about the times you’ve been frustrated by companies trying too hard to 'manage your experience' when all you wanted was for them to complete a simple task quickly. Sometimes you just want tedious business necessities to run in the background, efficiently and without any drama, not another thought leadership piece or check-in call. 

The Scale and Consistency Challenge

ABX demands significant resources to orchestrate hyper-personalised experiences. While this works beautifully for your top clients, what about the next tier down? Or the ambitious mid-market company that could become tomorrow's key account? There's a real risk of creating an experience gap between your top accounts and everyone else.

The other danger is that the pursuit of perfectly coordinated experiences could actually stifle agility and innovation.

When every interaction is carefully orchestrated, you can lose the spontaneous, unexpected encounters that often lead to breakthrough insights. Sometimes the most valuable innovations come from unscripted conversations and experimental approaches.

Market conditions change rapidly. Customer needs evolve. New competitors emerge. The infrastructure we create to deliver consistent experiences also needs to allow us to pivot quickly when circumstances demand it.

Looking Beyond Experience

Perhaps the biggest blindspot is assuming that experience alone will be enough. Yes, consistent, coordinated experiences matter enormously. But what about the next frontier? Maybe it's not just about orchestrating experiences, but about co-creating value in entirely new ways. 

What if the future lies in building genuine strategic partnerships with key clients, where the boundaries between advisor and advised become more fluid? Where your firm's expertise becomes so embedded in their business that you're not just delivering experiences and services, but actively shaping their future?

Staying Ahead of the Curve

The point isn't that these potential limitations make ABX any less valuable. They don't. Just as ABM’s limitations haven’t made account-based marketing strategies redundant. However, acknowledging our blindspots helps us think more critically.

Smart organisations will:

• Regularly audit their client interactions to identify unnecessary complexity and make experiences more human.

• Look for opportunities to simplify and remove friction, rather than always seeking to add engagement.

• Trust their clients to know when they need support and when they need space.

• Build flexibility into their client strategy frameworks to accommodate unexpected changes.

• Maintain room for spontaneous and experimental approaches alongside orchestrated experiences.

• Actively look for signs of emerging needs that don't fit current models.

• Keep asking what comes after ABX.

The key is to avoid the trap of becoming so invested in our current approach that we miss the signs of what's next.

The Future of Account-Based Strategy

ABX isn't just an evolution of account-based marketing. It's about rethinking how professional services firms engage with their most valuable prospects and clients and creating an organisation truly capable of delivering exceptional client experiences at scale.

The choice facing firms is becoming clearer: continue with fragmented client engagement, or recognise that in today's market the experience you deliver is inseparable from your reputation.

A more coordinated approach can help you expand relationships more naturally, spot opportunities earlier, and turn customers into loyal clients and even advocates.

But as we've seen, success requires more than just adopting a new framework or buying into a new technology. It demands a willingness to challenge established ways of working, to rethink how we measure success, and to put experience at the centre of everything we do. It also requires staying vigilant about the potential pitfalls we've discussed – from over-orchestration to maintaining agility.

The path forward is clear: Start with a small group of strategic accounts. Build your account intelligence capabilities. Create processes for coordinated engagement. Measure what matters. Then expand methodically, learning and adapting as you go.

Because ultimately, the firms that thrive won't be those with the most sophisticated technology or the largest marketing budgets. They'll be the ones that can turn their deep client understanding into coordinated action and deliver seamless experiences that strike the right balance between structure and spontaneity and process and personality.

Ready to transform your account-based strategy? Get in touch to discuss how our marketing strategy, content, advertising, and automation expertise can help you deliver exceptional experiences that drive measurable growth for your most valuable accounts.