Transcript
Hello everyone welcome to the Flow State podcast i’m Stuart P turner if you haven’t listened before please be welcome if you have listened before welcome back. What I thought I’d do today is zoom in on more of the practical day-to-day of what we’re doing here at Flow State. We’ve previously spoken about more ephemeral academic subjects, such as the morality of the tools we’re using, the risks inherent in obsessing over tools and tasks instead of outcomes, and the general impact of AI. Today, I want to discuss the concept upon which we build our thinking and our services—the conceptual foundation—and refer to my business partner Eve in the US, who has written an eloquent article explaining this, which I will share with this podcast.
If you are not familiar with Flow State itself, we are very much an account-based or account focused business. We are a hybrid of a part agency, part software solutions, and part consulting business; we blend all these things together. We go beyond just functions; we are not merely a marketing business or a sales business—we are a revenue generation business. Depending on how we are engaged and how much control we get, this directly impacts how much of that revenue we can drive or influence.
What I wanted to talk about today is Account Based Execution (ABX), which is the starting point for everything we are doing now. ABX is the real deal and is not just another buzzword. This ties together what we are doing at Flow State, my business partner Eve’s consultancy in the US, and the project we are working on together, which will be coming to market in 2026.
The reason we like ABX and why it is not a reinvention of something else is that it offers a holistic view that goes beyond functions, looking at how to target specific accounts, examine your buyer groups within those accounts, and then execute across your business rather than just in silos. It is simple and looks end to end at how you generate revenue in your business. ABX involves activating all the necessary elements and ensuring that people collaborate effectively across the entire customer journey, so everyone has a clear line of sight as to how they are actually contributing, which often doesn’t happen.
I’ve been reading articles this week about the problems inherent in the digital industry that everyone knows about but nobody addresses, such as the risks in sales where AI is pushed everywhere but “lies its way through to perform better,” or the huge wastage in marketing caused by click farms and spam trying to make ad dollars. ABX is a way to cut through all that, push it aside, and focus on things that work and connect you directly to your audience without all that nonsense happening.
ABX is how Flow State operates and how we build our solutions. It is particularly relevant in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region because people in the growth space (marketers, salespeople, etc.) often have to wear a large number of hats. The APAC region is concentrated in some respects and incredibly diverse in others. We are often forced to be multi-skilled, looking at different disciplines. While Eve in the US might work with highly specialized teams, down here, typically, fewer people cover all those bases together. This makes ABX even more useful because it cuts through the noise and allows you to focus on what is moving the needle from a revenue perspective.
There is chat about whether ABX is just a rebrand of ABM (Account-Based Marketing). We are big ABM proponents, but ABX is a completely different discipline. The challenge with ABM is that it has been “chucked into the marketing bucket,” sometimes being treated as “just marketing stuff” that won’t do anything significant. ABX, however, spans sales, marketing, brand, customer success—any team that should be involved can be involved; it is not locked away in one function.
There are four key areas that Flow State works on as part of our program, which also reflect distinctions Eve draws in her article:
- Shared Dashboards and Shared Views of Data (Not Siloed KPIs) This means creating a data layer or fabric between functions. You don’t want MQLs, SQLs, or separate marketing and sales dashboards. You need a unified view of both the leading and lagging indicators that are directly impacting your ability to create revenue movement or grow revenue. Although everyone knows they should have this, it is very rare in a business to actually achieve it. Most people will feel more satisfied knowing that their job has meaning and significance, rather than just generating a statistic like “5,000 clicks last month”. Shared goals mean shared success, and ABX offers an easy way to move beyond silos.
- Stage-Based Execution Plans We constantly ask clients, “What happens next?”. Understanding the next step, and the ultimate destination (making more money), helps people’s thinking, creates clarity, and removes the “incredibly irritating tactical siloed sort of lens” that everyone applies. Knowing what works and what is driving impact downstream helps drive thinking upstream. Stage-based execution is important to ensure everyone understands where they are in the journey and what their role is doing.
- Buyer Group Choreography Flow State actually started with this concept. Deals do not move in a straight line, despite how CRM companies like to sell nice, neat Kanban boards. You need to be able to map all your stakeholders. This is not just about a single persona or one key decision maker, but the entire active buyer group, which could be 16 to 20 people in a big company. You need to gather intelligence on them to understand their pressures and what they are trying to deliver, tying that back to their role in your deal and how you should communicate with them. Deals are non-linear and often reverse course unexpectedly (e.g., policy changes or finding out a contact has no decision-making power). If you map your buying groups correctly, you understand the “dance” and can be prepared, preempting some of these issues, leading to much better deal pipeline management. The goal is a real-time view to trigger actions based on decision-making changes, such as a compliance person returning and requiring immediate information.
- Enablement Built for Action, Not Awareness Generating awareness is easy, but it doesn’t necessarily help anyone; engagement is what gets things moving and unsticks deals. Companies often spend huge amounts of money only on awareness. The challenge is providing enough information to enable the buyer groups to do their jobs, helping them determine if you are relevant, interesting, or the right size business for them. This makes their job easier and enables them to take action on their side, which gets you faster down to consideration and deal discussion.
These four areas—shared goals/objectives, stage-based execution plans, buyer group choreography, and enablement for action—are where Flow State has delivered the most value.
There are three common areas where the operating system fails:
- No Real-Time Handoff The sales marketing gap still exists; there is no effective handoff between teams, and stuff drops into a “pit of doom,” leading to huge wastage.
- Not Supporting Signal Based Orchestration CRMs and AI try to sell “buyer signals” and “buyer intent,” but a lot of the intent data currently available is “scraped non-realtime garbage” from publicly available sites. Buyer intent is often based on lazy categorization and loosely tied together data (like IP addresses linked to thematic stuff). The tools’ data is often intentionally opaque. To generate really valuable intent-based signals, you must track effectively, tying things back to individuals, or use their new product being released next year. You must sift through the data and interrogate it closely (the “garbage in garbage out conundrum”).
- Ownership of Revenue Not Just Activity You need to give people a view of or ownership of revenue-driving activity that isn’t solely bucketed into sales. This is the “pointiest” and most common point of failure because revenue is typically just tied to sales closing deals in the B2B world.
To perform a mini audit of your own team or business based on ABX principles:
- Chat to your sales team and find out what information would be helpful for them to be more informed and move deals faster.
- Talk to your marketing team about how activities can be tied more closely to the accounts sales are working on, and how to utilize insights from sales conversations and recordings.
- Do not just rely on AI to do this stuff for you. AI will often tell you what you want to hear and provide non-factual information if it thinks that is the desired response, as these tools are built to “build engagement and look successful”.
I wanted to give a quick rundown of how to start addressing these issues and why ABX is so important in this region. I will drop the link to Eve’s article below this podcast. Thank you for joining.