Account Based Marketing

---
name: account-based-marketing
description: Concentrates marketing and sales effort on a named set of accounts rather than on volume — qualifying whether the model fits your economics at all, building the account list and the buying group inside each, tiering effort against account value, coordinating so the account experiences one campaign rather than several, and measuring account progression instead of leads. Use this to decide whether to run an account-based program, build one, or work out why an existing one produces activity and no pipeline.
---

# Account-based marketing

Account-based marketing inverts the usual model: instead of generating leads and finding out which
accounts they came from, you choose the accounts and work them. It is a good fit for a narrow set
of businesses and an expensive mistake for the rest.

## Qualify the model before adopting it

It works when deal sizes are large enough to justify per-account effort, the addressable market is
small enough to enumerate, buying groups have several people, and sales cycles are long enough for
sustained effort to compound.

**It does not work when the deal size cannot carry the cost**, when the market is too large to name,
or when marketing and sales will not actually coordinate. That last one is the usual failure: the
tooling gets bought, the account list gets built, and the program becomes a more expensive way to
run the same campaigns.

Run the arithmetic first. Total program cost divided by the number of accounts, against expected
deal value and a realistic win rate, tells you the tier structure you can afford — or that you
cannot afford this at all.

## Build the list from fit and evidence, then hold it still

Start from the accounts that already look like your best customers — not by revenue but by why they
bought and whether they stayed. Add observable signals: hiring, technology in use, funding,
regulatory pressure, a change in leadership.

**Then commit.** A list that churns quarterly cannot compound, and compounding is the only reason
this model beats broad demand generation. Agree the list with sales and get their explicit
acceptance, because a list sales does not believe in is a list sales will not work.

## Map the buying group, not the contact

Purchases at this size are made by several people with different concerns: the person with the
problem, the person with the budget, the person who will operate it, and whoever can veto on
security, legal or procurement grounds.

Reaching one champion and mistaking that for account coverage is the most common structural error.
Track how many roles you have reached within each account, and treat single-threading as a status
that needs fixing rather than a warning to note.

## Tier the effort, because one-to-one does not scale

- **One-to-one** for a small number of the highest-value accounts: genuinely bespoke research and
  content, executive engagement.
- **One-to-few** for clusters that share an industry or a problem: shared narrative, light
  customization per account.
- **One-to-many** for the rest of the named list: programmatic personalization at segment level.

Being honest about which tier an account is in prevents the common outcome where everything is
nominally one-to-one and nothing is actually customized.

## Coordinate, or the account experiences three campaigns

The account should see one coherent effort. That requires marketing and sales working the same
plan, with agreed timing, agreed messaging, and an agreed sequence of who reaches out when.

Set up a shared cadence between the two teams for the tiered accounts and hold it. Without that
meeting the program degrades into marketing sending things and sales prospecting separately, which
is the status quo with extra software.

## Measure account progression, not lead volume

Lead counts are the wrong instrument. What matters is how accounts move: coverage of the buying
group, engagement across it rather than by one person, movement into and through pipeline, and
eventually win rate and deal size against non-target accounts.

Expect the timeline to be long. Judging an account-based program on a quarter is judging it before
any of its mechanism has had time to work, and canceling it there is the most common way the
investment is wasted entirely.

## Never

- Adopt the model without checking whether the deal size carries the per-account cost.
- Run a target list sales has not explicitly accepted.
- Treat one engaged champion as account coverage.
- Judge the program on lead volume, or on a single quarter.