Account based marketing: coverage, not volume.
Coordinated campaigns aimed at a named list of accounts, with the whole buying committee mapped rather than one contact in it. Measured per account, never on lead volume.
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● What account based marketing is
Account based marketing treats a named company as the unit of work, rather than a lead or a market.
A short list of accounts is chosen deliberately, the buying committee inside each one is mapped, and marketing and sales run against that same list together. It is the right model where deals are large and the committee is wide, and the wrong one where you need volume.
Most ABM is a longer list.
Three failures, and almost every program that disappointed has at least one of them.
The list grew. It starts at fifty accounts and ends at two thousand, because excluding a company feels like leaving money on the table. At that size the personalisation thins out to a merge field and you are running demand generation with extra steps and a higher cost per account.
Sales and marketing kept separate lists. Marketing runs campaigns at one set of accounts, sales works another, and both report progress against their own. Nobody can say whether a single account has been covered.
One contact was treated as the account. A committee of eight decides, one of them replied, and the account went into the engaged column. That is a contact, not coverage, and it is why the pipeline number arrives later than promised.
All three come from the same place: ABM is an operating discipline before it is a campaign, and it is usually bought as a campaign.
Who actually decides.
A purchase of any size is decided by a group, and the group is always wider than the org chart suggests.
Naming one contact "the decision maker" is how a deal stalls in month four. Somebody nobody had spoken to raises an objection nobody had answered, and the cycle restarts with a different question.
The roles that matter are functional, not titular. The same job title behaves differently in two companies, which is exactly why this gets mapped per account rather than per persona. A persona document tells you what a VP of Operations usually cares about. It does not tell you that in this account the real blocker is an IT security review nobody mentioned.
Mapping it changes what gets sent. A finance blocker and a technical evaluator do not need the same case, and sending both the same one-pager is how a committee concludes you have not understood their business.
● Roles we map per account
- The economic buyer, who releases the budget
- The champion, who wants it to happen
- The technical evaluator, who can veto on detail
- The blocker, usually finance, legal or IT security
- The end users, who decide whether it gets adopted
- The incumbent supplier’s internal advocate, where there is one
Three tiers, and the list gets shorter.
The tier decides how much personalisation an account can carry. Deal size decides the tier, not enthusiasm.
| One to many | One to few | One to one | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accounts on the list | Hundreds | Tens to a couple of hundred | A handful |
| Grouped by | Industry or segment | A shared trigger or use case | Nothing. Each is its own plan |
| Personalised to | The segment | The cluster | The account and the named people in it |
| Channels | Paid, content, retargeting | Paid, plus targeted LinkedIn and email | All of it, plus executive-to-executive outreach |
| What sales does | Follows up on engagement | Works the account alongside the campaign | A named rep owns the account plan from day one |
| Worth it when | You can name the market but not the accounts | Accounts share the same problem | The deal is one you cannot afford to lose |
Most programs run two of the three at once, with the top tier small enough to be genuinely one to one and a wider tier underneath it carrying the accounts that do not yet justify the cost. The tier an account sits in is a budget decision, and it gets revisited. An account that engages moves up; one that has gone quiet for two quarters moves down or comes off.
What we run.
The list comes first and it comes from evidence: which accounts already closed, at what size, and what they had in common. Not the org chart of who sales wishes they sold to.
Then the account gets a tier, because tiering is what keeps the budget honest. A one-to-one program for the top tier costs real money per account, and it is only worth it where the deal can carry it.
Everything after that is execution against the committee: LinkedIn, paid, email and phone in one plan rather than four, with outbound working the account once it warms.
● What you get
- Target account selection, with the criteria written down
- Account tiering, so spend follows deal size
- Buying committee mapping per account
- Account intelligence and trigger monitoring
- Messaging per committee role, not per company
- Personalised campaigns by tier
- Executive-to-executive outreach
- Paid, LinkedIn, email and phone in one plan
- Account coverage reporting
- Agreed exit criteria per account
How the work runs.
Pick the list, and keep it short
Chosen from closed-won patterns and deal size rather than aspiration, tiered, and signed off by sales before anything is built. A list nobody in sales agreed to is the most common way this fails.
Map the committees
Who signs, who blocks, who has to be convinced first. Per account, not per persona, because the same job title behaves differently in two companies.
Build per tier
One-to-one for the top tier, one-to-few for the rest. The tier decides how much personalisation the account can carry, which keeps the budget honest.
Run it as one team
A weekly cadence with sales in the room, against the same list and the same coverage number. Marketing reporting separately from sales is the second most common way this fails.
What we report.
Per account, against a list you chose. None of it is impressions or reach.
Account coverage
How much of each buying committee you have actually reached, per account. The number ABM lives on, and the one activity reporting hides.
Engaged accounts against the list
Accounts showing real engagement as a share of the named list. A percentage of a list you chose, not a count of strangers.
Meetings and opportunities
From the list only. Meetings from outside it are useful and are reported separately, because counting them here would flatter the program.
Pipeline created per tier
Split by tier, so it is visible whether the expensive top tier is paying for itself.
Who this suits.
- Deals are large and the committee is wide
- You can name the accounts you need to win
- Sales will commit to the same list, weekly
- There is enough budget per account to personalise
- You need volume of meetings this quarter
- The list runs past a few hundred accounts
- Sales and marketing will not meet on it
- Nobody internally owns the account plan
Fair questions.
What is account based marketing?
Account based marketing treats a named company as the unit of work rather than a lead or a market. A short list of accounts is chosen deliberately, the buying committee inside each one is mapped, and marketing and sales run against that same list together rather than against separate targets.
Should we do ABM or demand generation?
Demand generation reaches a market before it starts looking, at scale, and it is measured on the market. ABM reaches a list you have already named, and it is measured per account. If you cannot write down the companies you need to win, you want demand generation first. Most programs eventually run both, with ABM on the top tier and demand generation underneath it.
How many accounts should we target?
Fewer than you want to. The number is set by how much personalisation you can actually fund per account, not by how many accounts would be nice to have. A tiered list of fifty to two hundred is normal for a one-to-few program; past a few hundred the personalisation thins out and you are running demand generation with a longer list.
Is ABM worth it?
It is worth it where the deal is large, the committee is wide and the list is nameable. It is not worth it where you need volume, where the deal size cannot carry the cost per account, or where sales will not commit to working the same list. We will tell you which of those you are on the audit call rather than after you sign.