Account based marketing

Last quarter, a SaaS company I know called a campaign “account based marketing” because every email included the recipient’s company name. The campaign still targeted one contact at a time, with no account list, no buying-group plan, and no reason for those companies to act.

That’s not ABM. Account based marketing starts with a defined set of companies, then coordinates sales and marketing around the people and business problem inside each one. The account is the unit of work, not the form fill.

The mistake teams keep making

Personalization isn’t the same thing as account focus.

Adding a company name to an email isn’t ABM. Neither is sending display ads to people with a particular job title, or building a landing page for “manufacturing leaders.” Those can be useful tactics. They don’t become account based marketing until someone has decided why those accounts matter and how the team will work them.

Here’s a more credible example. A 500-person compliance software company could email every security director in fintech with an industry report. That’s broad demand generation.

An ABM version might select 25 fintech companies that recently raised funding, are hiring security staff, and have a visible SOC 2 deadline. Marketing builds around that situation. Sales maps the relevant people. Reporting tracks activity and pipeline at those 25 companies, not just at the individual-contact level.

The difference is operational, not cosmetic.

ABM also doesn’t replace inbound. Inbound can attract and educate buyers. ABM tells the team where to spend extra effort when the potential deal is large, the sales cycle is long, or the market is small enough to work by name.

What account based marketing requires

Before anyone writes a “personalized” sequence, answer four questions:

Who is worth focused effort? Why might they change now? Which people can influence the purchase? What will sales and marketing do together?

The first answer should come from your ideal customer profile, not a list of impressive logos. Study your best customers. Look for the traits tied to revenue, retention, expansion, and a sales process you can actually support. Company size may matter. So might a particular technology stack, compliance requirement, processor, or operating model.

The second answer is the trigger. A company can fit your profile perfectly and still have no reason to buy this quarter. Funding, an acquisition, a new CFO, an audit finding, a regional expansion, or a major executive hire can change that.

The third answer is the buying group. A complex purchase rarely belongs to one senior contact. You may need the economic buyer, technical evaluator, daily user, procurement lead, and the person who can quietly block the deal.

The fourth answer is the working plan. This is where most programs get sloppy. Sales receives a spreadsheet and marketing assumes the reps will figure out the rest. They won’t. My view is blunt: if sales can’t see the trigger, the message, the people to contact, and the next action, you don’t have an ABM strategy. You have a campaign with extra paperwork.

A useful account plan might say:

Target the VP of Finance, controller, and head of operations at 15 US payments companies with more than $50 million in annual processing volume. Lead with reconciliation risk after a processor change. Use a finance case study, an SDR-led account-specific email sequence, and an executive conversation within 30 days.

“Personalize the nurture campaign” is not an account plan.

Three ways to run an ABM program

The label covers different levels of effort. Don’t treat every target like a Fortune 50 prospect. A small team will burn out fast.

For strategic, one-to-one ABM, choose a handful of accounts with unusually high potential. The work might include custom research, an executive event, account-specific content, or a senior marketer who owns the plan. This makes sense for one account worth $500,000 in annual contract value. It probably doesn’t make sense for 200 accounts worth $8,000 each.

One-to-few ABM groups companies with the same business problem. A cybersecurity vendor could target 10 regional banks preparing for the same regulatory review. The campaign speaks to the shared problem, but sales still adapts the details for each bank.

Programmatic, or one-to-many ABM, uses data and automation across a larger account set. Industry pages, account-level advertising, intent signals, and coordinated email can all play a role. It’s more scalable, but the underlying message still needs a real reason to exist. Replacing “your company” with the prospect’s company name is mail merge wearing a blazer.

How to build the account list

Start with a list the team can work properly. A 20-person B2B sales team might handle 50 to 150 named accounts. A founder-led company with two sellers might handle 15. The right number depends on deal value and research time, not on what your marketing platform can import.

Score accounts using evidence. Consider fit with the ICP, revenue potential, profitability, current triggers, access to stakeholders, and your actual chance of winning. Brand recognition should barely enter the discussion. A famous company with no urgency is often a worse target than a less recognizable company that just created the problem you solve.

Then research the account at both company and buying-group level. Read hiring pages, earnings reports, product announcements, security documentation, leadership changes, and customer stories. You don’t need a 40-page dossier. You need enough context to avoid making a claim that could have been sent to anyone.

For example, suppose a 120-person fintech sells reconciliation software to payment businesses. One target has just acquired a smaller processor and is consolidating billing systems. “Reduce operational complexity” is weak. “Give finance one reconciliation view while two billing systems are being consolidated” is a useful starting hypothesis.

The SDR should research three to five stakeholders, not just find the most senior email address. The first note to the new CFO could ask whether reconciliation is being handled centrally or by region after the acquisition. That’s a specific question based on a public trigger. It’s not a disguised request for a 30-minute demo.

Coordinate channels in a sequence that makes sense. A rep might follow up after the account downloads a relevant report, an executive posts about the acquisition, or several people return to a product page. Marketing should share what it learns from the account. Sales should share replies and objections back.

This changes the SDR job, too. The rep isn’t blindly working a contact list. They’re mapping stakeholders, recording the trigger, testing a business hypothesis, and keeping the account plan current. If one contact leaves, the work shouldn’t disappear with them.

What to measure in account based marketing

Lead volume is usually a distraction. If the program targets 30 accounts, 4,000 new contacts in the database tells you almost nothing.

Track whether the named accounts are moving:

• Account coverage: Have you identified and reached the relevant stakeholders?
• Account engagement: Are people from the company replying, attending, returning to key pages, or asking useful questions?
• Meetings and opportunities: Did activity produce conversations with the right buying group?
• Stage progression: Are target accounts moving from meeting to opportunity faster than comparable accounts?
• Win rate, deal size, expansion, and retention: Are you winning more often, landing larger contracts, or growing existing accounts?

Don’t overvalue engagement scores. A target account can generate hundreds of ad clicks without an active buying process. One reply from a controller explaining that a processor migration is creating manual reconciliation work may be worth more than a month of anonymous website activity.

Use a control group when you can. If named accounts move from first meeting to opportunity in 45 days while similar non-ABM accounts take 80, that’s a useful result. Impressions aren’t.

And if the account list is wrong, the trigger is imaginary, or sales can’t act on the insight, better software won’t fix the program. It will just help you send irrelevant messages to more companies.