Account-Based Sales (ABS) in B2B selling is becoming more prevalent. Sellers focus on their largest potential target accounts and utilize messaging, experiences, and outreach via dedicated marketing and sales teams for those acquisitions. Thus, reliance on the ability to get stakeholders the proper information, from the proper source, at the perfect moment in their buying journey. Yet this expectation creates a high-pressure, high-stakes situation for content operations to provide content and access to information, on-demand, expeditiously, without error and at scale. The technology solution needed to support these demands is a headless CMS. An API-first, composable solution empowers teams to create, curate, manage and deliver customized account-based content experiences at every interaction while maintaining consistency, compliance and speed. Here’s how headless CMS technology supports and bolsters account-based sales efforts at scale.
All the Content You’ll Ever Need for Account-Based Personalization
Personalization isn’t a perk for account-based selling; it’s the standard. Decision-makers expect information relevant to their industry, challenges and projected results. A headless CMS fulfills this requirement by enabling content to be chunked, stored in single modules for reuse and dynamically compiled for the specific account. Build fast with Storyblok’s API-first CMS to ensure these personalized experiences can be deployed rapidly and at scale. Whether digital landing page, email drip campaigns, microsites for potential deals, content teams can access the pieces of approved modules to personalize without starting from scratch. This inclusion keeps on-brand, quality, and customized-feeling content available in a fraction of the time without hindrances.
Custom Experiences Across Every Channel
Account-Based Selling campaigns need customization on multiple levels across multiple channels in email, online, apps, personalized videos, direct mail portals, etc. A headless CMS guarantees that any content delivered to any channel comes from the same location so that redundancy doesn’t run rampant but messaging consistency does. For instance, if the sales team needs to promote a product comparison in a sponsored LinkedIn ad or a business case in a custom web experience, the content comes from the same repository of truth. This alignment across digital channels provides a better experience for the buyer and simultaneously helps build trust in the brand through access to the levels of personalization that ABS requires.
Sales Team Access to Modular Content Resources on Demand
One of the biggest obstacles to account-based selling is giving the sellers access to modular content they need immediately to ensure goal-oriented outreach. A headless CMS can integrate with sales solutions and CRMs to become part of their toolkit where they can search for modular content like case studies specific to their industry, product overviews, and pricing structures and assemble them into outreach efforts. When structured content is available via API, sales teams can quickly pull together custom proposals or pitch decks without waiting on marketing to produce something specialized. This access reduces turnaround time and empowers sellers to make an impression rapidly on high-value clients with all the right data.
Content Variants Enable Multi-Stakeholder Communication
Enterprise buys are not often made one-and-done by a single person. ABS usually targets more than one stakeholder-each with their own job, concerns, and desires. A headless CMS supports this content-first approach to ensure role-based variants can be created like ROI-driven content for the CFO, security details for the IT department, and high-level overviews for executives. While all this can be communicated as part of one campaign or page experience, it can also be dynamically personalized based on stakeholder personas. This level of personalization means teams can craft compelling, relevant communications for every buyer on the buying committee, ultimately helping deals move forward by addressing the needs of each buyer’s unique outlook.
Ability to Adjust in Real-Time Based on Engagement Signals
Engagement is the best way to figure out how to move forward with your account-based outreach. Whether someone saw a specific page or downloaded a specific asset, ABS can pivot in real-time based on the engagement signals received via email or on-site engagement. A headless CMS makes this seamless since content elements can be changed or updated in the moment. For example, this happens often when one particular account visits a pricing page. Follow-up content should focus on ROI messaging but with a headless CMS, it doesn’t have to happen manually. Since the CMS integrates with ABS delivery APIs, it can automatically occur across websites, landing pages, and chatbots. Therefore, campaigns can be fluid based on engagement signals.
Easier Localization for Global Account-Based Efforts
Many account-based sales efforts focus on enterprises that operate across the globe and need localized messaging. A headless CMS provides a simpler way to execute global campaigns as it can provide multilingual and regionally accurate content through the structured fields and localization workflows. Marketers can localize for language variants of each content block to ensure consistent messaging but compliant with regional law and custom. Thus, ABS efforts for global endeavors can effectively operate out of one structure rather than having to create separate campaigns from scratch to acknowledge nuance. Sales teams can approach international accounts with contextualized resources appropriate for their culture.
Better Campaign Governance and Compliance
When you have super high-value clients in regulated industries anything financial, healthcare, or legal and you’re running an ABS play; compliance is critical. Working with a headless solution ensures content governance. A headless CMS allows for granular user permissions, approval workflows, and version history to ensure all content and any used for an ABS campaign is approved, documented, and compliant. Teams have the permissions settings to clearly outline what’s allowed and what’s not, how assets can change (or not) without jeopardizing compliance, and more, without sacrificing turnaround time to create all this content. Thus, the organization protects itself from compliance failures and difficulties while still maintaining the nimbleness needed for successful account-based marketing.
Marketing and Sales Aligned on One Content Canvas
ABS is not a siloed operation. Marketing needs to work with sales and vice versa. A headless CMS fosters this relationship by becoming a central content canvas of sorts. Marketing can build modular, reusable assets that sales naturally have access to, and both departments have clear visibility into what’s being developed and used, what’s successful, and what’s missing content creation to ease this process across verticals minimizes conflict and increases operational effectiveness while ensuring that both teams are executing their strategies against the same vision and priorities for their accounts.
Understanding How Content Affects Account Progression
Knowing what content helps win the deal will allow all future ABS plays to be more focused, quicker and more effective. Many of today’s headless CMS content management systems automatically pair with attribution and analytics software. This integration gives sales and marketing unprecedented access to understand what one piece of content does for the buyer’s journey. No longer are companies relegated to vanity metrics, but instead find out which white papers, case studies and videos help contribute to pipeline creation and closed-won. Even better, this information can be tied to lead-scoring to assess if a piece of content helps/hinders qualification and how it helps (or hinders) long-term nurturing efforts.
When companies gain insight to this access, they can get rid of unnecessary content creation, avoid duplication of failed attempts and hone in on formats and messaging that resonate with key decision-makers for their target accounts. When connected to pipeline growth and opportunity stages, the CMS can suggest pieces of content most likely to help move opportunities along at any stage of the deal process. Therefore, instead of having to guess what creative to send when and how best to position the content for greatest success, the natural opportunities will emerge to show what gets accounts moving faster and why. This increases win rates and helps marketing and sales align better with factual findings powering every ABS effort.
Accelerating Campaign Launch for Key Accounts
Speed is critical when engaging with key accounts. Opportunities emerge through budget allocations, new hires, or new regulations; missing a golden opportunity could mean a delayed partnership or operating several steps behind your desired key accounts. With a headless CMS, marketers can launch personalized microsites, nurture journeys, and campaign collateral quickly since already approved and formatted modular content can merely be repurposed. Instead of creating from scratch, teams can assemble and publish tailored content experiences in mere hours instead of days. Such flexibility gives companies the opportunity to engage with key accounts through relevant channels when the time is right.
Creating Account-Focused Microsites and Digital Experiences
Accordant microsites and digital experiences are powerful weapons for any ABS arsenal. A headless CMS allows for these experiences to be created on demand and customized with structured content blocks, customer success stories, competitive advantages of this specific product, localized case studies. They can be toggled on per account or automatically pulled due to segmentation rules. Moreover, with content and delivery channels being separate, there are more design options for teams to explore and improve efficiencies across the board. These account-based experiences are customized access points that provide relevant, credible displays for crucial audiences.
Future-Proofing ABS Content for Emerging Sales Channels
New methods of engagement as well as delivery will be created through sales via chat on an interactive portal, purchases through a mobile app, even voice-activated sales channels. A headless CMS ensures content neutrality and availability, already configured for presentation and sent to new channels via integrated application interfaces. Companies can experiment with yet-to-be-discovered engagement opportunities without having to start the content creation process from square one. As buyer trends emerge and new digital sales channels enter the marketplace, the headless CMS is the stable foundation, able to adapt easily with technological changes, yet simultaneously, still home to the targeted, customized approach of account-based sales content.
Conclusion: Scaling Personalization Without Losing Control
Account-based sales (ABS) require incredible personalization, collaboration and speed. There’s no other solution that can provide all three like a headless CMS. Legacy content systems that would drive an agile selling strategy are siloed, bound to specific channels and take far too long to create and deploy. A headless CMS, however, is modular and API-driven with a structure meant to support all the nuances of an ABS campaign. It allows for all assets to become consistent, compliant and contextually relevant on the account level even if they are created one time and used many times over.
For instance, a sentence pulled from an executive brief can be expanded as a content block quickly inserted into a sales deck; a feature perimeter pushed by your account’s industry partner can become a graphic for an email. Your case studies can be reworked to align with organizational industry and pain points while the responses within chat interfaces can call out specific directors with value propositions that speak to their internal operating needs.
Therefore, the more content can be sliced and diced into meaningful morsels, the quicker teams can create entire campaigns for integrated accounts including microsites, sales decks, white glove demos and videos. This removes much of the manual labor from the equation to eliminate production bottlenecks to facilitate shortened timelines getting sales-ready collateral to the marketplace before a campaign goes cold.
Since headless CMS relies on APIs and not a single front-end user interface, strict version control can be maintained across multichannel deployments. As long as permissions are granted, audit trails are established and integrated workflows within the system are followed, compliance can be maintained across the board it’s vital for pharmaceuticals that versions are correct at all times.
In addition, a headless CMS supports the alignment of marketing and sales teams because everyone has access to the same content infrastructure from a system of record. All information comes together for easy revisions and efforts to respond as well as performance analytics to understand what’s working and what’s not.
When time is of the essence and personalization isn’t working or scaling but generic information falls flat for above-average buyers/clients, a headless CMS allows you to personalize without sacrificing authority. It transforms your organization into one that can build relationships with better accounts through relevant content and offers upsell opportunities through engagement that translates to improved revenue. A headless CMS takes ABS from a last-minute forgotten thought to a natural approach to success and champions revenue growth.
