Customize Journey Stages For Your Next (Best) ABM Action

If you’re just tracking accounts from when they’ve engaged with you, I hate to break the news, but you’re only capturing 5% of your buyers. So what about the other 95%? This is known as the 95-5 rule, which states that 95% of your potential buyers aren’t ready to buy today. Even though that same 95% are “out-market” today, they will be “in-market” in the future. The challenge here is how to get visibility into the entire buying journey of that 95%.  

Hello Journey Stages!

Journey stages not only gives you greater visibility into the entire buying journey ( including that 95% who are “out-of-market”) but it also helps you discover and track where your accounts fall in the funnel. This gives you precious time to focus on planning new strategies on segmenting your account lists by stage and easily create staged-based audiences that you can target with customized, relevant messaging and outreach. 

What is Journey Stages?

Journey Stages is a tool that identifies where your target accounts are along their buying journey and tracks their progression from unaware to closed-won.  It breaks the buying journey into meaningful, actionable sections that can be turned into audiences at the click of a button. You then have crystal clear insight into the journey of the entire account. And it's not just about seeing the buying journey. Journey Stages can pull in activity information from your existing MarTech stack to help you define AND understand your entire buying journey.

What Makes Journey Stages an ABM Game-Changer

Within just a few steps you can identify, and create buying stages of your accounts that illuminate both “in-market’ and “out-market'' accounts that are demonstrating buying signals that could have gone missed.

Here are 5 unique ways Journey Stages allows you to have hyper relevancy at scale: 

1. Brings together separate data sources into a single view: Between Google Analytics, your CRM, and any other tools you may use, you are referring to separate sources of data.  They are not a single view, leaving room for reporting errors. 
2. Combines sales and marketing-generated actions: Similar to how it brings data sources into a single view, Journey Stages also does the same for both email and ad performance data in one single view. 
3. Identifies accounts for both known and unknown contact activity: Similar tools only provide contact activity to those that have to be opted-in. With Journey Stages there is no limitation and brings contact activity to an account-level view.
4. Ties together both 1st-party and 3rd-party data: While similar tools may provide this type of data, they once again are separate, only adding to your workload. With this single view Journey stages gives you and your team more time to focus on strategy.   
5. Is highly customizable to your tech stack: Journey Stages can be customized to your specific sales goals. You can easily create views on what matters to your business as signs of progression or readiness.

Customize For Your Funnel

Journey Stages makes it easy for your Sales team to know which accounts are ready for outreach and which ones are more highly engaged so they can prioritize. But customizing your Journey Stages allows sales teams to track accounts through your specific definition of your buying journey and funnel. Not to mention, it gives you the ability to see when accounts go from out-of-market to in-market to sales-ready so you’re reaching them with the right type of outreach and a relevant message at the right time. 

Customizing your stage definitions also gives you an opportunity to collaborate with sales and come up with shared definitions for account progression and thresholds for handoff to Sales. Marketing can then provide an accurate picture of which programs are working and where they need further refinement. Go beyond page views and see what programs are actually working and driving high-value content.  

Define your own stages and criteria with the data and engagement definitions that matter most to YOU.  Download our D.I.Y. Account Journey Template to learn more on how to progress accounts through your unique journey.       

About the Author

Alysha Parker, Content Marketing Manager

Alysha is a Content Marketer at RollWorks

Follow on Linkedin More Content by Alysha Parker, Content Marketing Manager
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