Account-Based Marketing (ABM): The Complete Guide for Named Accounts

Account-based marketing means choosing your customers before you market to them. Most marketing starts with a message and waits to see who responds. ABM starts with a list of companies you have decided you want, then builds the research, content and outreach each one needs.

In simple words: you stop asking "who might be interested?" and start asking "which companies do we want, and who inside them has to agree?"

The term is credited to ITSMA, the IT services marketing association, in 2003. The practice is older. Any firm that has run a campaign for one large customer has done a form of it. You will also see it called key account marketing.

Three things make a programme account-based, whatever tools are used:

1. A named list. Companies, not a description of companies.
2. Several people per account. Large purchases are approved by a buying committee, not one contact.
3. Sales and marketing on one plan. The same list, the same tiers and the same definition of progress.

If one of the three is missing, it is a targeted campaign, not ABM.

ABM counts accounts. The other three count people. That one difference changes the list, the message and the report.

None of these is wrong. Many companies run demand generation for the wider market and ABM for the 50 accounts that matter most. The mistake is running one and reporting it as another: a lead campaign pointed at a list of logos is still a lead campaign.

ABM is usually split into three types by how much work each account gets. The names are standard. The account counts are rules of thumb and differ from source to source, so set your own.

Most teams run all three at once. The skill is in deciding who belongs where. Fit alone does not earn Tier 1: an account also needs a reason to act now and more than one known person. The free account tiering worksheet walks through that decision.

An ABM strategy is seven decisions, taken in order. Each one has a written output. If you cannot produce the output, the step is not finished.

1. Agree the goal with sales

Decide what the programme is for: new accounts, a new market or more business from existing customers. Marketing and sales sign the same sentence. Output: one goal and one owner on each side.

2. Write the ideal customer profile

Describe the companies that buy, stay and pay well, using your own closed deals. Add knock-out rules for the ones that never will. Output: a profile that ends in names, not adjectives. The free ICP builder does this in the browser.

3. Build and tier the account list

Score every candidate on fit, timing and access, then sort into Tier 1, 2 and 3. Keep the list as long as the team can research properly, and no longer. Output: a tiered list with the reason for each tier. Use the target account selection scorecard.

4. Map the buying committee

For each Tier 1 account, name the people who must agree: the budget owner, the user, the technical evaluator, procurement and whoever can block. Output: a map with a name or a gap against each role. The buying committee map gives the layout.

5. Find the reason to talk now

Research what changed at the account this quarter: a new site, a new leader, a regulation, a result. That trigger is the message. Output: one true sentence per account that a stranger there would recognise.

6. Choose the plays

A play is a sequence of touches for one tier: which channels, in what order, with what content. Tier 1 gets a play written for the account. Tier 3 gets a play written for the segment. Output: one play per tier.

7. Measure in accounts and hand over to selling

Agree what counts as progress before launch and who picks up an account once someone responds. Output: a one-page dashboard and a written handover rule.

The whole strategy fits on one page. The ABM plan template in the Academy lays it out.

An ABM campaign is one play run against one tier. Here is a one-to-one example.

Illustrative, not a real company. Quaywise sells warehouse software. Northfield Logistics is on its Tier 1 list because it announced a second site in March.

• Week 1. Marketing builds a two-page brief on what a second site does to stock accuracy, using Northfield's own announcement. Sam Carter, who owns the account, reviews it.
• Week 2. Northfield's supply chain and IT teams see the brief as sponsored posts on LinkedIn. Nobody is asked for anything.
• Week 3. Sam writes to Dana Whitfield, VP Supply Chain, about the second site, with the brief attached. A different note goes to Marcus Lee, Head of IT Applications, about integration.
• Week 4. Dana replies. Sam asks who else should be in the first conversation.

Notice where the campaign changes hands. Weeks one and two are marketing: the account is being warmed. Weeks three and four are selling: named people are approached and a conversation starts. A campaign that stops after week two has raised awareness and opened nothing.

The tactic matters less than the tier it is used on. These are the common ones, with an honest note on each.

• LinkedIn. The default ABM channel, because people state their own employer and role. It works without an advertising budget: posts from your own leaders, comments on the account's news and direct messages reach the same people. Paid targeting by company list adds reach, not relevance.
• Email. Still where senior buyers answer. In ABM it is written to one person about their company, not merged from a template.
• Account-specific content. A brief, a benchmark or a short teardown made for one account or one cluster. Costly, so reserve it for Tier 1 and Tier 2.
• Events and dinners. Small rooms work better than large stands, because the list is short.
• Direct mail and gifts. Useful for Tier 1 if the item says something about the account. A generic gift is a generic email in a box.
• Phone, voice notes and video. Selling tactics more than marketing ones, and often what turns a warm account into a conversation.
• Advertising and website personalisation. Helpful at scale. Neither creates a conversation by itself.

As a guide to effort, the cadence we use for account-based selling is 10 to 14 touches across up to six channels for a Tier 1 account, 8 to 10 touches across four channels for Tier 2 and five to seven touches across two channels for Tier 3.

You need less than vendors suggest. A first programme runs on a CRM, a spreadsheet and LinkedIn. Add tools when a step is proven and slow.

The names people search for under "ABM platform" include 6sense, Demandbase, Terminus, ZoomInfo and HubSpot. They are built for one-to-many programmes with hundreds or thousands of accounts. With 50 accounts, the constraint is research and writing, and software does neither for you.

Track accounts, not leads. A good ABM report has a handful of lines, all countable, and no line for emails sent.

Two cautions. First, define "engaged" before you start. Many reports count a website visit or an advert click as engagement, which makes every programme look healthy. A reply or a conversation is a safer line. Second, give it time: pipeline and revenue lines mean little until deals have had a full sales cycle to move.

The ABM metrics dashboard in the Academy is this table as a spreadsheet.

ABM warms the account. Account-based selling opens it.

ABM is the marketing half of an account-based programme: choosing the accounts, tiering them, mapping the committee and making sure the account knows who you are. Account-based selling is the other half: a named person approaches named people, with a reason that is true for that company, and stays with the account when the first contact goes quiet.

The two share one list, one set of tiers and one committee map. They differ in what they produce. ABM produces awareness and engagement inside the account. Account-based selling produces conversations, and from those, pipeline.

This matters because many ABM programmes stall in the middle. The account has seen the adverts and read the brief, and nobody has asked for the conversation. Warm accounts cool again.

You will also meet ABX, account-based experience. Demandbase introduced the term to extend ABM across the whole customer relationship, including customers you already have. For the difference between all three, see account-based selling vs account-based marketing.

Yes, if the deals are large enough to justify the research. The size of your company matters less than the shape of your sale.

• SaaS. ABM fits enterprise plans with security reviews, procurement and several teams involved. It does not fit self-serve plans bought on a card.
• IT services and professional services. A natural fit. The market is often a few hundred companies, every deal has several approvers, and one new client changes the year. The term itself came out of IT services marketing.
• Small B2B companies. Two people can run ABM on 30 to 50 accounts with no platform. One-to-one work on a short list is the affordable version, not the expensive one.

ABM is the wrong choice when one person can buy from you in a week. Use demand generation or lead generation if:

• The deal is small and one person approves it
• The market holds thousands of similar buyers
• You cannot yet say which companies buy and why
• Sales will not commit to working the same list

The last point is the common one. ABM without sales is advertising to a list.

1. A list that is too long. If nobody can say what changed at an account this quarter, it is not being worked.
2. One contact per account. When that person leaves or goes quiet, the account is lost.
3. Counting leads. Lead targets pull the team back to the easiest person to reach, not the right one.
4. Buying the platform first. Tools scale a method. They do not supply one.
5. Stopping at warm. Engagement is not a result. Someone has to ask for the conversation.

Intandemly is an account-based selling company, and has been since April 2017, almost ten years. We work the half of the programme that starts where ABM hands over. You get a platform plus a dedicated account-based selling consultant, supported by researchers, working a named account list agreed with you.

We are not an ABM agency. We do not promise a number of meetings. If you have an ABM programme, we work the accounts it has warmed. If you do not, the list, the tiers and the committee map in this guide are where we start too. We report on five KPIs: outreach accounts, coverage rate, active buying committees, active conversations and the value of pipeline generated.