Account-Based Marketing can do wonders for your marketing team – once you understand the rules of the game.
Look, by now you’ve probably heard enough about ABM to get several MBAs. But here’s the thing: account-based marketing works. Really. Look no further than Forrester’s most recent findings:
- Most ABM programs deliver 21% to 50% higher ROI than traditional marketing approaches.
- 23% of organizations report ROI improvements of 51% to 200% with ABM.
- These impressive results are consistent across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
Hey, no surprise here. We’ve been helping our clients win the ABM game for a while, turning marketing departments into revenue-generating machines – essential when budgets are tight and every marketing dollar needs to prove its worth.
Yes, times have changed since we started – more AI-driven personalization, more privacy regulations and greater economic uncertainty – but that just means that today, precision targeting isn’t just nice to have; it’s survival.
But when you strip away all the jargon and tech stack debates, ABM is still pretty simple: Know your target accounts better than they know themselves – understand what keeps them up at night and talk about their problems instead of your awards. That’s it.
Yet somehow, plenty of companies still manage to mess it up. Here are the five most common missteps we typically see:
#1. FOMO is the main driver.
“Because everyone else is doing it” is not a good reason to get into ABM. Most marketing teams that jumped on the ABM bandwagon early on jumped off just as quickly. Why?
Because ABM is a commitment to adjusting your approach to marketing, not a one-and-done campaign. It takes a significant paradigm shift to effectively identify accounts, research contacts, determine personalized messaging, package relevant content and orchestrate it all at scale.
#2. Not playing nice with other teams, especially sales.
It’s impossible to create personalized B2B buying experiences for a set of high-value accounts if marketing is not aligned with sales, product teams, client experience and even executives. If you’re not coordinating a joint approach to engaging with each account and supporting the conversation throughout the entire decision-making process (awareness, consideration, evaluation, negotiation, close and support), you’re generating leads with no real purpose.
Successful ABM requires a new level of collaboration – one where marketing works in service to sales. Everything the marketing team does – list augmentation, contact intelligence, cold call scripts, email cadences and custom content – should help sales do what they do best even better. Period.
#3. Unwilling to take responsibility for hard numbers.
“We generated 500 new leads.”
“We created 50 new pieces of content.”
“We had a 33% open rate.”
Yawn. Vanity results don’t communicate anything to the C-suite other than the fact that the team’s been busy doing “things.” Marketing teams must hold themselves accountable to the same standards sales teams do – marketing must report on the number of conversations started, leads turned to opportunities and closed-won accounts. (The boldest marketing teams carry a quota.) Fill the funnel, accelerate the funnel, optimize the funnel and drive deals must be the mutual battle cry.
#4. Thinking AI is your silver bullet.
Look, we get it. AI is still the new shiny object in the marketing toolbox, and yes, it can do some pretty impressive things:
- Spot accounts ready to buy before your sales team has their morning coffee
- Target leads with the Hawkeye-like precision
- Deploy chatbots that don’t sound like robots … most of the time, at least.
- Cut your acquisition costs by as much as half (if you’re doing it right)
But here’s the thing: throwing AI at your marketing problems without a strategy is like giving a teenager a Ferrari. Sure, it’s powerful, but without the right driver, you’re just going to crash faster and more expensively. By 2026, Gartner says traditional search will drop by 25% as AI takes over. Great. But if you’re only using it to send the same generic message to a slightly fancier list, you’re still missing the point.
#5. Only putting whale accounts on the shortlist.
We hate to break it to you – the Amazons, Facebooks and Googles of the world won’t automatically want to do business with you just because you now have ABM in your marketing toolkit.
The accounts you target should be based on fit and intent and not just be a wish list of untouchables. At its most basic level, ABM won’t work if you’re trying to sell solutions to organizations that don’t need them, that you cannot effectively support or for which you are not a great-fit partner.
By now, you’re probably asking, “OK, smart guy. What is the right way to deploy ABM?” Glad you asked …
Four Ways to Ready Yourself for an ABM Program:
- Take the time to define a legit Ideal Client Profile (ICP). This should be a factual representation of your perfect-fit client based on concrete data, in-depth research and real feedback.
- Know why your customers need your solutions. You must thoroughly understand the underlying problems, challenges, unmet needs and potential opportunities your customers experience and how your products or services address them.
- Strike a balance between tech noob and tech nerd. No, you don’t need to become an AI whisperer overnight. Still, you should at least know enough about the new tools to separate the game-changers from the money-wasters – your budget isn’t unlimited, and the fanciest tech stack in the world won’t fix broken fundamentals.
- Become a change agent. ABM needs an organizational shift in mindset. Everyone must commit to becoming more proactive, more knowledgeable, more collaborative, more deliberate and more willing to take data-driven risks.
The future of ABM lies in balancing human ability with AI-powered capabilities. Success comes not from chasing the latest tech trend but from building a solid foundation of strategy, collaboration and customer understanding.
So, where are you in the ABM journey? Whether you’re putting your toe in the water or looking to level up, we have some tips and tricks to make account-based marketing work for you. Drop us a line to learn more.
