Account-based marketing (ABM) has been misunderstood to death—it died, even. This guide is the best, jargon-free explanation we've written to date. It's a great refresher if you need to explain it to your team, need graphics for a presentation, or just want real case studies.

And let us be clear up front: Account-based marketing is not the only type of marketing. Most teams practice it as part of a broader demand generation strategy and very few cut over from MQLs to MQAs completely. It's one approach of many—though a very useful one.

So what is ABM? Let us begin this guide withthe simplest possible definition: ABM means focusing.

It means putting more energy and budget into a small number of well-chosen accounts that have a high chance of converting. How you go about doing that—and especially choosing accounts—is complex. But the idea is simple.

Throughout this guide, we'll share exact examples of how this narrowing can actually lead to more—and more sustainable—revenue. Like it did for the construction software company Procore, which drove 75% of its outbound pipeline from one ABM program. Or the analytics software startup Sysdig, which increased average contract size 36%.

The people who contributed to this guide have been helping companies like Salesforce, Meta, and Thomson Reuters launch ABM pilots and scale-ups for more than a decade. Inverta helps implement all the top ABM tech and in fact wrote Demandbase’s ABM certification. This guide shares the best of what we know.

Get help launching your ABM program → 

‍

What ABM is and why it matters

To understand why everyone’s talking about ABM, you have to go back to the days of early email marketing. In the 1990s/2000s, marketers faced a problem: A business doesn’t have an email address the way a person does. Businesses also rarely exist in just one location. Businesses are indistinct and lack personal preferences. Which means that B2B marketers still found it easier to target and market to individuals. So they sent mass emails to lists of people.

Those marketers knew that this wasn’t a great reflection of how buyers bought, but information was limited, tracking was poor, and statistically speaking, if you bothered enough “leads,” some were bound to buy. This was perhaps a more naive time when spam wasn’t as prevalent. The internet was still new and many people were still clicking ads just to see what the heck would happen.

Today, sending mass emails to uncurated lists is a terrible idea. Here’s what has changed:

• Buyers are hardened. No one is excited to see an ad. They know the game.
• Spam filters got much better. And yet people still receive 100+ emails and texts per day.
• Channels are fractured. There are more information sources, but also more private channels.
• Data and research are better. Marketers can buy live updated feeds of technographic, firmographic, and behavioral data. (Bombora, Demandbase, 6Sense, Clay, others.)
• The tools for acting on insights are better. There are platforms to coordinate outreach so multiple sales reps aren’t chasing the same lead, or different leads that are actually the same account. 

All this new data and understanding reveals something we always knew: It’s groups of people who buy, not individuals. Just because a procurement person fills out a form doesn’t mean they’re your decision-maker. They’re acting on behalf of a group of five, eight, or 13 people. Research by 6sense finds that the average buying journey takes eleven months and more than 4,300 interactions between the buying team and their vendors. 

Account-based marketing is about us marketers finally having the technology to target entire accounts, and know who works at what company and in what role. That was no easy thing, given that CRMs like Salesforce and Dynamics as well as marketing systems like Marketo and Pardot were built in those early days around the “lead” object—meaning, uncurated lists of names. “Lead” was always a placeholder stage, meant to convert into a “contact” and be attached to an “account.”

You can see the problem there, right? The way these systems were built literally follows the old email marketing model: Gather a big list of names, treat them all the same, and if some show interest, pay more attention to them. Exactly the kind of marketing that doesn’t work anymore.

This artifact of the mass email era holds many marketers back. For example, do you score contacts or accounts? Can lead scores roll up to an account score? There are no perfect answers, but to launch ABM, you will want marketing operations help.

Even in the time we’ve been practicing ABM, it has evolved substantially. There was a movement to rename it “ABX” in recognition of the fact that it’s not just marketing. Your account-based approach is about delivering a better buyer experience—nobody wants to fill out a form to wait days to hear back from a junior seller who knows nothing of their work and who presses them on topics like “Will your boss join the call?” and “What’s your budget?”

The great challenge, and why not everyone has an ABM program is, how exactly do you coordinate your creative team and software to speak to individual accounts? How can you feel so confident in your target list that you ignore all others? And how do you convince your CFO on the return on investment? We cover all that next.

‍

Key benefits of ABM marketing

ABM done right tends to earn a higher return on the same marketing spend. Take for example, a company we worked with that’s the world’s largest cloud provider—let’s call them Nile. Nile carved out a portion of its marketing budget to focus on 50 well-chosen enterprise accounts in the manufacturing industry. Compared to unpersonalized messages they were sending to other accounts, the personalized messages—content hubs full of articles, white papers, and research chosen for this group—saw the following:

• +70% engagement rate
• +190% increase in responses when their sales team reached out

Would your team want to earn 3x as many meetings for the same effort? That’s the ABM draw. When ABM works, it is proof that focusing more attention on fewer accounts can produce more revenue.

But why does it work? Just imagine being one of Nile’s buyers. Pretend you’re a CTO. Every day, you mark at least 5-10 emails you receive as spam, but one comes through asking if you’ve considered the security risks of your teams using AI. That intrigues you. It offers a link to a white paper by The Economist on this topic. You love The Economist. This email seems well-researched and speaks to a present pain you’re feeling. You don’t mark it as spam. When they email again, you read it. When a salesperson from that company calls, you know where they’re from and you are willing to take it.

So what are all the benefits you as a marketer might expect from ABM?

→ Higher ROI through targeted campaigns

Less of your advertising is wasted when it’s focused on accounts that you have thoroughly qualified. Say you’re going after manufacturing companies and only serve ones with overseas operations. Without ABM, your sales team has to talk to those companies to learn which ones don’t work overseas—and as a result, very few calls convert to a demo. With ABM, you’ve done the research. Your messages get a higher open rate (the pain matches), you’re focusing the same advertising budget on just that buying committee, and if your sales team gets a call with an account, it has a high chance of moving forward.

→ Stronger sales and marketing alignment

Sales and marketing have always clashed because they were measured on different things. Marketers generated lists of leads and sales complained that the leads were weak. Marketing focused on volume, sales on quality. Account-based resolves that because marketing and sales agree on the list in advance. If marketers get a meeting with an account, it’s sure to be one the salesperson wants. 

In account-based marketing, the three primary go-to-market teams run coordinated “plays” where everyone reaches out to the account with useful offers.

→ Personalized buyer journeys

The greatest pain of buying these days is the overwhelming amount of information, reports Gartner. It’s all noise, no signal—every vendor is sending white papers, but they’re fluffy and lack enough detail to be useful. Said one buyer we talked to, of request for proposals, “Every vendor says they can do everything. I had to ask our procurement team, did any of them say no to any of these questions?”

In account-based marketing, you start with a rich research report on that specific account or group of accounts. You know what initiatives they have, what metrics they measure, and what each person on the committee may be interested in. That allows your outreach and content to feel like genuine education and help.

Plus, with ABM software, you can listen to signals and respond. So rather than bombard everyone with the same set “nurture,” you can send messages that meet them where they are.

→ Better long-term customer value

Lots of companies obsess over winning new customers. But most of the value of the relationship is ahead of them—when they’re a customer. Account-based considers that entire equation and encourages you to measure net recurring revenue (NRR) and customer lifetime value (LTV). When you pull a spreadsheet to look at your territory opportunity through that lens, you see the field very differently. 

For example, the analytics platform Sysdig asked Inverta’s help analyzing their buyer and running campaigns. Inverta asked this question: Why not look at NRR? This completely changed the accounts that Sysdig chose to target, and as a result, their average contract size increased by more than one-third—36%.

‍

How ABM marketing works

If you’re convinced ABM is worth trying, just know that you’ll have to make some changes. “ABM cannot be a standalone tactic—it affects everything you do as a marketer,” says Kathy Macchi, Co-Founder at Inverta. We’ve seen far too many instances of companies trying “ABM lite” and failing, because their organization wasn’t ready. Salespeople didn’t trust the change, the finance team was too used to measuring marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and marketing didn’t have the experience to know what “personalized” should feel like to the buyer.

If you want the output, these are the steps you must follow:

1. Figure out your ideal buyer profile

This is the first and most important exercise: Know precisely who your ideal buyer is and the signals they send. This requires research. Consider working with a company like AlignICP, which can analyze your CRM data and market data to produce a useful profile.

2. Build a target list of high-value accounts

This is a whole-team exercise: The sales and marketing teams must agree. Using your ideal customer profile, pull segments where the metrics such as NRR and CLV are higher—indicating those customers are worth the most. Create a prioritized list that both teams can agree to.

When targeting, consider: 

• Fit–would they be a good, profitable customer?
• Signals—are they showing the intent to buy what you sell?
• Relationship—do you have a preexisting relationship? I.e., are they a customer or is a buyer a former customer?

3. Understand the buyer’s journey

Build a deck that outlines the buyer’s journey from their perspective. Buyers don’t think in funnels. They think in problems and solutions, high points and low points, internal approvals and purchase orders. To make your buyer’s journey: 

• Analyze closed-won deals and the steps they went through (ask the salesperson).
• Create a generalized version of that journey—usually 8-12 steps.
• At each step, indicate what questions each person on the committee was asking and where they looked for information.

The resulting deck should offer useful guidance when setting up your ABM plays.

4. Create a personalized 1:1 or 1:few strategy

Create your coordinated play for each account—emails, account-based ads, sales emails, sales calls, syndication, executive dinner invites, and more. Implement those workflows in the software, quality check it, and start running it with your accounts, while monitoring closely.

5. Align sales and marketing

Bring both teams together to agree on one dashboard and one common set of metrics you’ll both track. Set meetings, either at the account or segment level. This really won’t work unless you’ve involved the sales and success teams from the start. 

Very important: Take a baseline measure of your metrics as they stand today—marketing’s contribution to pipeline, the sales-accepted lead rate, all of that. This way, you can compare later whether the ABM program was successful.

6. Run personalized campaigns

Launch it all and adapt. Nothing ever goes precisely according to plan, and very often, it will take long weeks and months for the program to prove its worth. Buyers need to receive a number of messages and ads before they become aware. Keep everyone calm while this happens, and reassure them of the purpose—to prove whether account-based works for this specific scenario.

7. Measure ABM ROI

ABM is particularly difficult to measure because by being focused, you don’t have as many good short-term metrics. When you’re running a lead generation program, you get the constant validation of new names coming in. With ABM, the buying committee could meet without you ever knowing. And you might not know they exhibit a higher customer value until years after.

To measure ABM ROI, look at:

• Customer lifetime value (LTV)
• Net revenue retention (NRR)
• Number of marketing qualified accounts (MQA)
• People engaged per account
• Historical number of people engaged per opportunity
• Anonymous web traffic
• Engagement effectiveness

Read more about the new metrics to measure → 

ABM marketing strategies that drive ROI

So what do you actually send to people? What counts as “personalized”? That’s the difficulty of ABM. It has to be specific to that account or that group of accounts. Sending someone tickets to their favorite sports team could feel personal. Or sending someone a transparent lockbox full of treats requiring them to call you might feel personal—if you know they’ll take it the right way.

High-value offers might include:

• Dinners and curated gatherings—Your buyers want to meet other buyers. Give them the mic. Your best customers will do all the selling for you. 
• Publish unique insights—From your in-person gatherings, summarize the insights and takeaways and publish those.
• Company-specific webinars—Have your advocate in one business unit at a large enterprise present to the rest of their company.
• Create a course—Is your advocate struggling to enable their company? Create an online course their teams can take, specific to that company.
• Personalized items—Give magnetic phone chargers, sneakers, blankets, etc.
• Create a council—Gather prospects and customers together to discuss issues.

If you send downloadable PDFs, they’d better be good. Early email marketers ruined that play for everyone, as most people expect those PDFs to be light on substance.

We’d encourage you to do the fun, unscalable thing—if your rep figures out someone’s an Oasis fan and wants to send tickets for them and their daughter, do it. This is about cracking that account, never mind that it’ll only work once.

‍

Challenges of ABM and how to overcome them

The MQL to MQA transition is not for the faint of heart. It’s a change management issue, and it will exhume all the ill will and ire latent in a demand machine not quite working; you’ll have to convince execs and the CFO who’ve long thought of MQLs as a revenue gumball machine.

Common challenges include:

→ Getting CFO/executive buy-in

Finance teams like a sure thing. And MQLs feel certain. Whereas ABM is a long-term play and investment. But tell them this: 87% of marketers who measured ROI said that ABM outperformed other marketing investments. It’s a leap, but it’s often worth it.

→ The “what campaign should I run?” fallacy

“When marketing teams decide to start doing account-based marketing (ABM), they often ask, ‘What campaigns should I run?’ or ‘How does ABM fit into my overall demand generation strategy?’ These are the wrong questions,” says Kathy. Instead, your ABM program should extend from your top-level marketing strategy, where you built a Revenue Continuum schematic and decided where you wanted revenue to come from. 

‍Learn how to use the Revenue Continuum → 

→ Launching “ABM-ish”

Most ABM programs fall short because it is difficult and because marketers face internal obstacles. But that’s why it can be helpful to have an ABM agency help. They’ll bring tools and tactics and help convince your executives so you don’t launch a halfway program that’s sure to fail and look bad.

“What differentiates an account-based marketing strategy from an account-centric strategy is customer insight. Customer insight is the heavy research, mapping, and monitoring that is necessary to establish yourself as a trusted advisor and potential solution provider to an account,” says Kathy.

Don’t launch ABM-ish → 

Is ABM right for your business? 

We had to answer this question for SEO but it is, we assure you, the wrong question. A better question is, where do you want your revenue coming from? ABM is the answer to that question. If account-based presents a higher likelihood opportunity of helping you earn sustainable revenue, then it’s a good fit for your business.