Account-based marketing: What it is, why to do it, and how to do it right

This means really leaning into individual pain points to directly speak to your leads’ needs. That means wasted time trying to market to unqualified leads who aren’t the right fit for your business. This matters because it directly impacts pipeline generation and revenue. Understanding these fundamentals helps B2B teams improve their sales and marketing effectiveness.

Thankfully, ABM doesn’t just require collaboration between sales and marketing, it helps to encourage and build it. The relationship between sales and marketing creates the framework from which all ABM efforts will hang. Once this is buy-in is secured, the key objective is to define and enable sales account based marketing examples and marketing alignment. For example, third-party intent data and landing page traffic tracking can provide insight for personalised engagement and prioritisation of sales follow-up.

However, advances in martech are making a hybrid approach of one-to-few and one-to-many an effective tactic for targeting specific small businesses with commonalities. It’s a programme that needs to be tailored to how your business goes to market, its organisational structure and offerings” One-to-few ABM can be a more cost-effective approach for businesses targeting larger numbers of smaller value accounts where clear commonalities exist. That said, as a general rule, one-to-one ABM is resource heavy and is often a best fit for businesses targeting very high value accounts that justify the intensive one-to-one resource investment. This approach uses martech, intent data and adtech such as programmatic ABM, to apply ABM at scale by delivering personalisation en masse to a wide pool of target accounts and prospects.

Align sales and marketing efforts

Most B2B teams targeting accounts can run an effective ABM campaign for $2,000-5,000 in total spend, including tools and materials — with pipeline returns that typically justify the cost 10x or more. For more on the strategic foundations, see our complete ABM strategy guide and our article on B2B demand generation to understand how ABM fits into your broader pipeline strategy. An enterprise SaaS team had 60 accounts that had gone cold — prospects who had engaged with content or attended a webinar but never responded to follow-up outreach. You can personalize the outreach email and the video message, but if the prospect clicks through to a generic product page, you've broken the personalization thread at the most critical moment — when they are actively considering whether to take action. LinkedIn InMail alone rarely converts for high-value accounts because decision-makers receive dozens of connection requests and messages per week.

This sounds like a lot of work, and it is if you’re doing this manually across all your target accounts. An account-based landing page is one that targets high-value accounts. These are specific, high-value leads that your team has highlighted and grouped together based on criteria like company size, location and industry. ABM is all about aligning your sales and marketing efforts with a list of target accounts in mind. The ABM programs producing meaningful pipeline aren't the ones with the largest budgets, they're the ones that operate fastest from signal to engagement. Coverflex generated $1.3M in supported pipeline with a 2-person marketing team.

Greenwashing examples: recent stand-out cases

• Rather, they were picked up by the ASA’s active ad monitoring systems – as part of a fashion-focused investigation.
• Specifically, it filled a gap for long-form student dating content, as no other UK reality dating show had focused on university students.
• Instead of trying to engage every potential customer, ABM focuses on the accounts most likely to benefit from a tailored approach.
• You'll discover how to identify and prioritize target accounts, develop personalized content, and align your sales and marketing teams for maximum impact.
• The gap was widest in enterprise pipelines, where one averaged 4.6 stakeholders per interactive demo-influenced deal vs 2.7 without, and another 5.2 vs 3.8.

Once initial interest was established, the sales team took over, conducting follow-ups to secure commitments and build relationships. Auth0 launched a pilot program where account executives targeted dormant accounts and identified key buying signals to influence the sales pipeline. This realization led them to explore outbound ABM to engage targeted enterprise-level prospects. However, they relied heavily on traditional, broad-based marketing tactics—mass email campaigns, generic display ads, and standard outbound sales calls. LiveRamp is a data connectivity platform that helps businesses integrate and activate their customer data across various marketing channels. DocuSign chose six key industries to focus on and created tailored content for each, including customer testimonials, peer logos, and industry-specific resources.

The combination of timing (reaching prospects at peak research interest) and relevance (directly addressing what they were searching for) produced a 41% email open rate and a 19% reply rate — well above industry averages. The physical package stood out precisely because it arrived after digital contact had already been made. A B2B SaaS company targeting mid-market HR platforms ran a personalized video campaign for 40 target accounts. This article breaks down 7 real ABM campaign examples from B2B sales and marketing teams, covering what they did, which channels they used, and the results they measured.

You need to understand account based engagement far more deeply than who clicked what and who downloaded what. Don’t rush into making decisions for a tech stack when you’re trying to learn and implement ABM. There are many different tactics you can deploy when ABM targeting, from live events to online advertising, blog posts, to direct mails!