When account-based marketing (ABM) came along in the early 2000s, I was really excited and hopeful. I thought it would finally get B2B sales and marketing teams working together.
I also knew that we marketers needed to move off our maniacal obsession with new-account lead gen and invest in adding value across the entire customer relationship.
Key accounts have been the source of most B2B profits forever, but they have traditionally been sales’ province. ABM promised to involve marketing in key account management, where we can do much good.
Alas, these promises are yet to materialize to their fullest potential. I have a couple of theories about why and what we can still possibly do to turn things around.
Theory 1: It was all software hype
Have you ever noticed how new strategies seem to take off only when software arrives to enable (and promote) them? That famously happened with CRM decades ago. Customer relationship management as a B2B business function was the province of account management until SFA (Salesforce Automation) software arrived and rebranded itself as CRM.
Now, the term CRM simply means a sophisticated marketing database. The concept of managing your customer base like an asset and optimizing its value doesn’t really have a name anymore. No wonder it’s so often suboptimized.
Dig deeper: How to find your next, best customers with ABM
Theory 2: Culture eats strategy for lunch
“Sales is from Mars, and marketing is from Venus.” Different backgrounds, vocabularies, training, incentives — can we ever get along? Maybe we’re destined to live in our silos forever. Or at least as long as revenue responsibility lies exclusively with sales.
Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma’s just-released 2025 Martech Landscape shows an overall +9% increase in martech solutions since 2024, but ABM technology reports the largest subcategory decline, falling -10% in the year. Is the bloom off the ABM rose? Maybe, but it’s more likely we finally understand that ABM is strategy, not software.
I’m still hopeful. ABM, is showing some strong financial results. Look at these data points collected by Cognism: 30% revenue growth, larger deal sizes and an 84% rise in reputation scores.
Dig deeper: Is your ABM strategy keeping up with the times?
What’s going right with ABM? What still needs work?
I talked to several experts in the field. Bev Burgess, author of the new “Account-Based Marketing: The Definitive Handbook for B2B Marketers,” said companies “using strategic ABM to deliver hyper-personalized, high-touch experiences that deliver real value for their most important clients ” are doing well.
What’s not working is data accuracy and completeness.
“It is a real problem for anyone thinking of using generative AI tools and agents to improve the productivity and creativity of their ABM-ers. The risks of doing a bad job due to poor data are high!”
Keith Turco, CEO of ABM data platform company Madison Logic, said companies are finally beginning to understand “true ABM” means going beyond lead generation into the full funnel.
What’s not working are familiar, longtime challenges of B2B marketing: Not understanding the buyer journey and the buying group members and ignoring the consumer side of the business buyer.
Scott Stedman, founder of the B2B content agency The Imaginarium, is pleased ABM has introduced an important “strategic mindset” encouraging companies to move beyond strictly key accounts and “unify ALL marketing so that sales and marketing work together in the service of growth.”
But marketers are still too focused on the technology without doing the strategic work upfront.
“The biggest problem is that CMOs want to use ABM, but they don’t implement it at a strategic level,” he said. “They rely on technology too much without implementing the change management necessary. Account-based marketing needs to begin with a serious strategy that addresses the five pillars of ABM (CRM, marketing automation technology, identity and enrichment, channels and measurement) – and then a clear sense of how their team can implement and measure success. Only then should they look at technology as a tool to execute their strategy.”
Scott Gillum, founder of the B2B agency Carbon Design and author of the brilliantly titled article, “What the Hell Happened to ABM?“, agrees.
He credits Demandbase, 6Sense and others for helping us execute ABM at the buyer-group level, a refinement long in coming. However, the accuracy of these buying-group member data sources is limited. The ABM reps will still need a lot of handwork to confirm the data.
Gillum recommends gathering account-related data from multiple systems and sources — engagement data from Hubspot and sales data from Salesforce, for example — to generate a richer portrait of what’s going on in our target accounts.
All these points are spot on. What most resonates with me is Burgess’s point about data quality and completeness, a topic I’ve preached about for years. And as to the point that “full-funnel” responsibility for marketing is a political problem that keeps us marketers fenced off from sales… Grrr. Can you sales and marketing leaders get on the same page, please?
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