Account-based marketing
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Marketing aimed at specific target accounts rather than broad audiences. Sales and marketing collaborate to win named companies.
ABM flips the funnel. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping the right fish swim in, you identify the exact accounts you want, research them deeply, and create marketing programs tailored to each one.
ABM works best for enterprise sales with large deal sizes, small TAMs, and long sales cycles. If your TAM is 500 companies and average deal size is $200k, spending $5k on personalized marketing to each account makes perfect sense. The ROI of winning even a few is enormous.
There are three tiers of ABM. One-to-one: fully custom campaigns for individual accounts (enterprise). One-to-few: personalized campaigns for clusters of similar accounts (mid-market). One-to-many: targeted campaigns for larger account lists using shared characteristics (scaled ABM). The tier depends on deal size and sales capacity.
Examples
A one-to-one ABM campaign.
Target: a Fortune 500 financial services company. The marketing team builds a custom landing page, creates a whitepaper addressing their specific compliance challenges, and sponsors an event they attend. The AE delivers personalized content at each stage. After 9 months, the deal closes at $800k.
Scaled ABM for mid-market.
The team identifies 200 mid-market fintech companies. They create a campaign: a fintech-specific webinar, a fintech ROI calculator, and LinkedIn ads targeting engineering leaders at those 200 companies. Pipeline from the campaign: $2M from 15 opportunities.
ABM alignment between sales and marketing.
Marketing and sales agree on a target account list of 100 companies. Marketing creates custom content and advertising for each tier. Sales provides account intelligence. They meet weekly to review engagement signals and adjust tactics. Pipeline from ABM accounts is 3x the win rate of non-ABM accounts.
In practice
Read more on the blog
Frequently asked questions
When should a company use ABM?
When your TAM is small (under 5,000 accounts), your deal size is large ($50k+ ACV), and your sales cycle is long (3+ months). ABM also works when you need to penetrate specific accounts that are not responding to broad marketing. The more you know about a specific target, the better ABM works.
How do you measure ABM success?
Engagement from target accounts (website visits, content downloads, event attendance). Pipeline generated from ABM accounts. Win rates for ABM accounts versus non-ABM accounts. Average deal size for ABM-influenced deals. The ultimate metric is revenue from target accounts.
Related terms
A description of the company (not person) most likely to buy, succeed, and expand with your product. Your best-fit customer.
Marketing and sales that reaches out to prospects directly. Cold calls, cold emails, and targeted ads aimed at specific accounts.
The marketing function that creates awareness and interest in your product. Fills the top and middle of the funnel with qualified prospects.
Signals that indicate a company is actively researching or planning to buy a solution in your category. Third-party buying signals.
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