What Is Account-Based Marketing ABM? Definition and Guide 2025

Your organisation sells solutions in the cybersecurity space, and your research shows that cyber-attacks on financial services firms are a key industry pain point. The results of your pilot should be identifying what works best for you in terms of audiences, channels, actions and tools. For instance, there’s no point in selecting accounts from an industry where your organisation has had no success.

I want to receive the latest B2B resources Do you want to speak to an ABM Strategist? No, ABM is not inbound or outbound marketing, but they can be used as sub-strategies or tactics in a larger ABM program. Depending on the type of ABM strategy, you should set an expectation to your senior leadership that they would be able to see some tangible results in 6-9 months. ABM is a B2B marketing approach for an enterprise-level organisation having more than 1,000 employees trying to sell their products and services in similar B2B or B2C companies. Account-Based Marketing can be used by organisations selling to companies in both B2B and B2C space. These are the people who are most likely to buy what you're selling.

“Account-based marketing is not a tactic, it’s not a technology, and it’s not a one-off program,” Matt explains. Others fail to identify a designated ABM leader, instead loading the duties onto everyone’s already-full plates and creating a lack of clarity, focus and discipline. For example, some mistakenly believe that buying a single tool that touts itself as “the must-have ABM technology” means all their account-based marketing needs are met.

Yes, I’d like to receive Forrester’s Insights At Work newsletter and receive occasional survey invitations and marketing communications. For all steps and foundational elements, keep in mind that each may vary slightly depending on the type of ABM being deployed. Marketing alignment, content availability and sales processes, and budgetary and people resources represent just what is an abm a few of the necessities.

There’s also account measurement, so you know what works best when the time comes to make decisions about your future marketing strategy. These tools, however, will make your journey smoother, easier, faster and scalable. Tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator allow you to see which team members are connected with people at these targets. The connections other employees have within your target accounts could be a potential source of information and insight.

Identify target accounts

We will again re-emphasise our disclaimer here that you don’t necessarily need these platforms to launch your ABM program. Apart from the core ABM platforms that we talked about in the previous section; you can also think of including the following tools in your ABM tech stack. With all these amazing features, the organisation is on the path to becoming a leading player in the ABM space. Marketers can use RollWorks for account identification, multi-channel audience engagement and ABM's impact measurement. As a part of its product roadmap, Demandbase plans to launch predictive intelligence capabilities for forecasting a potential “product purchase” action from the buyer and making recommendations on what marketers should do with that information.

Remember, your metrics will only make sense if they are being captured for your target account list! For instance, a CRM company would want to ensure they are at par with the best-of-breed solution because that’s what the marketing team might be looking for; they also need to ensure that they are competitively priced to remove any objections from procurement. We would also like to know the metrics they care about and by whom they are influenced. So, if you have ten target accounts, you will ideally want 10 of theseThe following items will be captured for each account. This template will be used to capture the key data points on each of your target accounts. Speak to an Account-Based Marketing expert for advice on MarTech

Account-based marketing framework

Named-account marketing focuses on accounts assigned to sales reps – typically a mix of existing customers and prospect accounts. Possible approaches range from a one-to-one approach with highly customized treatment of a small number of high-value accounts to more scaled approaches. The sales, product, customer success and executive teams must demonstrate commitment and discipline to help drive efficiency and growth with accounts that matter most. When we do that, it helps provide a better buying and customer experience, and tighter alignment with sales.” “It’s a change in mindset, and it’s a strategic discipline that allows us to take a prescriptive approach to the accounts that matter most in a way that increases relevance and specificity in our engagements.

• It requires marketing and sales teams to collaborate on identifying key accounts, understanding their needs and challenges, and building closer relationships through custom content and personal interaction.
• Finally, account-based marketing programs effectively give sales and marketing teams shared goals and alignment.
• Additionally, because these prospects have been vetted and have received personalized messaging, sales qualification and follow-up are typically much easier.
• Gartner typically advises clients who are new to ABM to run a pilot with accounts that have a common use case or industry, Pun said.
• Brands waste fewer marketing and sales resources attracting unqualified clients, and they put more of their time and effort towards attracting attention from the best-fit accounts.

Communication and People Skills

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a growth strategy that flips the traditional marketing funnel upside down. Instead of putting out campaigns with the hope that interested buyers will find their own way into your funnel, ABM starts with identifying your most promising leads—then designing outreach specifically for them. Unlike traditional marketing, which prioritizes outreach to a broad audience, ABM targets a narrow group of highly qualified accounts.

Step 4: Create Tailored Campaigns

In this setup, each marketer or salesperson is responsible for a very small number of accounts and creates a personalized experience for each one. ABM allows you to speak directly to your customers with messaging that targets their unique pain points, at the moments they need to hear it. By proactively identifying your best candidates and anticipating their needs, you not only save valuable time, you also make the buying process that much smoother for them. For instance, using a tool like Uberflip Analytics, you can track each visitor’s content consumption journey, as well as understand the individual performance of each piece of content—helping you link content to revenue. You can then take the lessons learned from these experiments and apply them to other content and campaigns to better educate accounts during the buying process.

With ABM, you could solve this by curating a selection of content for each audience, so sales knows precisely what pieces to share with which types of buyers. In the grand scheme of things, sales and marketing are really just two parts of the same go-to-market team. Instead of looking at metrics that are less indicative of buying intent, such as views, email open rates, click-through rates, and so on, teams practicing ABM tie their efforts directly to pipeline and close rates. And if you’re a marketing team who has ever struggled to show the impact of your activities on pipeline, this collaboration can make the value of your work much clearer. With ABM, you begin by identifying a small number of target accounts who fit your ideal customer persona. Rather than trying to reach a broad audience with generic messaging, sales and marketing collaborate together on a small number of high-value accounts to target with highly personalized outreach.

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Then, when these people visit other websites, they will see ads for your product. Retargeting means showing ads to people who have already visited your website or seen your ad. That's why there are vendors who specialise in creating lists based on role or responsibility. Strong market research capabilities are key to identifying your target accounts’ pain points. Keep in mind; it’s not just about personalising content; personalisation could mean creating a completely custom website experience or creating very personalised SOW, proposals and offers.

2Define your objectives and set expectations on results and timelines With that said, let’s go into a step-by-step process for launching and executing your ABM pilot. These can be used to get their buy-in before making it an organisation-wide practice. A pilot will serve as proof of concept for your executive leadership.