Quick answer
What is account-based marketing, and how do you run it?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy where sales and marketing jointly target a defined list of high-value accounts with personalized campaigns. Run it in four steps: co-create a joint ABM playbook with sales, map each account’s buying committee, personalize content by role and account tier, and govern the program with clear ownership, shared metrics, and quarterly reviews.
Account-based marketing (ABM): A B2B go-to-market strategy in which sales and marketing jointly target specific high-value accounts as individual markets, with campaigns personalized to each account’s stakeholders, needs, and buying stage.
10-80-10 rule: A Tier 2 personalization method: tailor the first and last 10% of an asset or message to the account and templatize the middle 80%, to scale relevance across clusters of similar accounts.
Key idea 01
ABM treats each high-value account as a market of one. It only works when sales and marketing co-own the target list, the messaging, and the metrics from day one.
Key idea 02
Deals stall on the people you never reached. Mapping the buying committee and engaging every role with content built for it is what turns a single-threaded deal into a multi-threaded one.
Key idea 03
Personalization has to be tiered to be affordable. One-to-one for a handful of accounts, one-to-few for clusters, one-to-many for the rest, reviewed every quarter.
The playbook in three lines. The full framework follows.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy that targets specific high-value companies as distinct markets, using personalized campaigns built around the needs and characteristics of each account. A successful program hinges on a clear definition of goals and strategy from the outset.
What is account-based marketing?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy in which sales and marketing jointly target a defined list of high-value accounts, treating each one as a market of one. Campaigns are personalized to each account’s stakeholders, needs, and buying stage, and success is measured in account engagement, pipeline, and revenue rather than lead volume.
Common ABM goals
More revenue from high-value accounts
Tighter sales and marketing alignment
Shorter sales cycles
Stronger retention and expansion
Higher marketing efficiency
More relevant, personal experiences
What follows is a structured, step-by-step framework for running an effective ABM program.
Step 1: Co-create a joint ABM playbook with sales
Agree with sales on the target accounts, tiers, messaging, metrics, and ownership before any campaign runs. A shared playbook is what keeps outreach consistent and resources focused.
Start by building a shared ABM playbook with sales to align on target accounts, messaging, and execution. This keeps outreach consistent, resources focused, and goals unified across both teams.
Purpose
Align sales and marketing around high-value target accounts with a shared, data-driven playbook.
Example
Intent-driven targeting, account tiering, and a genuinely collaborative effort.
Impact
Faster pipeline velocity, higher win rates, efficient resource allocation, and account expansion.
Best practices
Unified data, shared metrics, integrated tech stacks, quarterly alignment workshops, and human plus predictive insight.
How to execute
Establish a cross-functional ABM team. Include marketing, sales leadership, sales reps, and customer success to secure buy-in and ongoing accountability.
Define and prioritize target accounts. Enrich your account data with tools such as ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, layer in intent and predictive analytics from platforms like 6sense or Demandbase, and score accounts on ICP fit, intent, technographics, lifetime value, and expansion potential.
Tier the accounts. This is what makes ABM scalable, relevant, and ROI-driven. It matches your investment of budget, time, and personalization to each account’s strategic and revenue potential.
Tier 1
One-to-one
Around 10 high-value accounts with personalized campaigns, dedicated teams, and executive engagement. Built for complex deals with long sales cycles.
Tier 2
One-to-few
Clusters of similar high-value accounts. Use the 10-80-10 rule: tailor the first and last 10% and templatize the middle 80%.
Tier 3
One-to-many
Automated, industry-based content for lower-priority accounts. Scalable, with light personalization and account focus.
Review and refresh the tiers every quarter.
Align on shared goals, metrics, and ownership. Agree on pipeline targets, opportunity creation, win rates, and account engagement benchmarks, and track them on joint dashboards. Define who owns each stage of the account journey, for example marketing for awareness and sales for late-stage engagement. Document handoff points and escalation procedures, and hold regular account huddles to review progress, share insights, and adjust tactics.
Develop playbook tactics and content. Build templates for intent-driven outreach, multi-threaded contact strategies, and account-specific value propositions. Map content assets such as case studies, ROI tools, and demos to each account’s needs and buying stage. Celebrate wins, learn from losses, and form cross-functional pods for high-value accounts so goals and incentives point the same way.
Integrate your tech stack. Make sure all account data, engagement, and campaign activity are visible in your CRM and synced with your ABM tools for real-time tracking.
Run quarterly alignment workshops. Review what’s working and where accounts are stuck. Update tiers, adjust plays, and set new quarterly targets. Between workshops, hold weekly or biweekly syncs between sales and marketing leads to share performance, account intelligence, and campaign retrospectives.
Blend human and predictive insight. Encourage reps to surface hidden gems or disqualify low-fit accounts based on what they hear in conversations. Use intent and engagement data to spot new opportunities and expansion signals. Keep testing, and keep refining the playbook as insight grows.
A jointly built ABM playbook aligns sales and marketing around shared goals and prioritized accounts. That alignment is what accelerates pipeline, lifts win rates, and makes the engine repeatable.
Step 2: Map the buying committee
Identify every decision-maker, influencer, gatekeeper, and end user in each account, then engage each one with content built for their role. Multi-threaded deals move faster and stall less.
Next, map the buying committee so you can run personalized, multi-threaded engagement across every stakeholder. It speeds up deal cycles, removes blockers, improves alignment, and uncovers expansion opportunities.
Average revenue lift from personalization, with company-specific gains of 5-25%
Source: McKinsey & Company.
Purpose
Identify every stakeholder in the buying committee and tailor outreach to each, for faster deals and account growth.
Example
Stakeholder mapping, personalized content by role, and coordinated outreach.
Impact
Better deal velocity, higher win rates, stronger relationships, and deeper account penetration.
Best practices
Map committees, create role-specific content, align engagement, track influence, and keep refining your read of committee dynamics.
How to execute
Identify the key roles in each account. Start with known organizational structures by industry and company size.
Decision-makers
CEO, CFO, CMO, CTO, CIO
Influencers
VP and director roles, operations leads, IT architects
Gatekeepers
Procurement, legal, compliance
End users
Functional team leads and managers
Build a contact map. Use tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, Lusha, LeadIQ, or Apollo, alongside CRM data, prior deal intelligence, and your sales team’s knowledge. Capture names and roles, department and location, contact details, and social presence or content activity.
Segment stakeholders by persona. Technical buyers look for feature depth and security and compliance detail. Business leaders prioritize ROI and strategic alignment. Procurement focuses on cost, risk, and vendor reliability. Assign every contact a persona to guide content and messaging.
Research individual priorities. Use social listening across LinkedIn posts, podcasts, and interviews, plus firmographic and technographic signals such as current tech stack and recent hires. Capture each person’s top priorities, their internal challenges, and their influence on the buying process.
Personalize content by role.
| Role | Content that works |
|---|---|
| C-suite | Strategic briefs, case studies, ROI calculators |
| Technical roles | Product demos, architecture diagrams, security overviews |
| Users and operations | How-to guides, integration walkthroughs |
Deliver it through custom landing pages, email nurtures, and retargeting ads tailored by persona.
Visualize the committee. Build a contact hierarchy map for each account showing influence level (high, medium, low), engagement status (cold, engaged, active), and who in sales or marketing owns outreach. Keep it current and accessible to both teams.
Orchestrate the outreach. Run multi-threaded outreach across email, LinkedIn, and events. Coordinate sales sequences with marketing campaigns so each role gets a consistent, relevant story, and track touchpoints by persona to find gaps and blockers.
Step 3: Develop personalized content and messaging
Match the depth of personalization to the account tier: fully custom for Tier 1, semi-personalized for Tier 2, and segmented for Tier 3, organized in messaging matrices by persona, industry, and stage.
Effective ABM goes beyond targeting. It delivers messaging tailored by industry, role, and buying stage that reflects a deep understanding of the account. Personalization such as custom landing pages, role-specific emails, and ROI tools builds trust and differentiation. Focused, multi-channel campaigns aligned with account priorities maximize engagement and accelerate deals.
Purpose
Give every stakeholder in a target account a message built for their role, industry, and stage, so engagement spreads across the whole buying group.
Example
Account-specific business cases and role-based nurture tracks for each Tier 1 and Tier 2 account.
Impact
Broader engagement across the buying group, less single-thread risk, higher win rates, and faster consensus.
Best practices
Use CRM, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, and intent data to know each stakeholder, then map content to their priorities and refresh it as relationships evolve.
How to execute
- Assemble a cross-functional teamInclude sales reps, marketers, and optionally customer success for full account knowledge. Assign owners for updating and validating stakeholder maps.
- Gather and map stakeholder dataPull contacts from CRM, marketing automation, and sales notes. Fill gaps with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, and company websites. Build a visual org chart in Lucidchart, Miro, or your ABM platform, annotating each contact’s role (decision-maker, influencer, champion, blocker), function, and stage involvement.
- Align on personas and the buyer journeyDefine key personas for each target account with sales and customer success. Map content needs to each stage (awareness, consideration, decision, post-sale) and document pain points, objections, and success criteria by persona.
- Audit your existing contentCatalog case studies, white papers, videos, one-pagers, and ROI tools. Find the gaps by persona, industry, and stage, and tag everything for easy retrieval.
- Build a personalization framework by tierTier 1 gets fully custom content such as account-specific business cases, custom videos, and personalized microsites. Tier 2 gets semi-personalized assets like industry decks, role-based nurture emails, and tailored case studies. Tier 3 gets segmented content such as use-case eBooks, webinars, and newsletters.
- Craft messaging matricesBuild matrices by persona, industry, and stage. Spell out the value proposition, pain-point fit, and key differentiators for each segment, with templates so sales and marketing stay consistent.
- Equip sales and track engagementGive reps engagement strategies per persona, templates, personalization guides, and dynamic content tools such as Seismic, Highspot, or Vidyard. Assign owners to each committee relationship. Deliver content through the channels each persona prefers, track engagement at the asset and persona level, and flag single-threaded deals for immediate action.
- Improve continuouslyA/B test subject lines, formats, and messaging. Review closed-won and closed-lost deals to refine mapping and tactics. Update personalization playbooks every quarter to reflect new insight and market shifts.
Step 4: Govern and enable the program
Give ABM an operating model: a steering committee, clear ownership and handoffs, a Center of Excellence, standard workflows, integrated data, training, and quarterly health reviews.
Sustained ABM success requires strong governance and consistent enablement. With cross-functional collaboration, clear ownership, and structured processes, teams can scale ABM efficiently, adapt to shifting priorities, and keep performance high across every tier.
Purpose
A unified ABM operating model with clear accountability, aligned resources, consistent processes, and continuous optimization across sales, marketing, and customer success.
Example
An ABM Center of Excellence that oversees strategy, tools, training, metrics, and quarterly reviews.
Impact
Alignment, efficiency, better execution, and a program that scales without losing agility.
Best practices
Clear roles, standardized processes, ABM integrated into existing systems (CRM, MAP, BI), and teams enabled with training, tools, and performance insight.
How to execute
| Governance element | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Steering committee | Leaders from marketing, sales, customer success, and operations guide strategy, execution, and measurement. Senior champions remove roadblocks, and named owners run content, data, tech, and enablement. |
| Roles and ownership | Responsibilities mapped across the ABM lifecycle, documented handoff points between teams, and clear escalation paths, shared with every stakeholder. |
| Center of Excellence | One hub for playbooks, campaign frameworks, training, and process documentation. Approved tools and integration standards. Cross-functional training. Learnings from winning programs replicated across units and regions. |
| Standard processes | Repeatable workflows for account selection, campaign planning, personalization, measurement, and feedback, each documented step by step with templates and checklists built into the CRM or ABM platform. |
| Integrated tech stack | CRM, marketing automation, ABM tools, and BI connected, with aligned data fields and unified dashboards for pipeline, engagement, and ROI, segmented by tier and buying committee and audited regularly. |
| Training and enablement | ABM onboarding for new hires, role-based training on personalization and intent data, toolkits and messaging guides, and an on-demand resource library kept current. |
| Program health | KPIs such as engagement by tier, sales velocity, pipeline influence, and win rates. Quarterly reviews, re-tiering based on engagement and intent, and refreshed goals. |
| Shared ownership culture | Joint wins celebrated, losses reviewed for lessons, shared accountability through joint metrics, and regular peer learning between teams. |
With strong governance and ongoing enablement, ABM becomes a durable, scalable engine for strategic growth. Structured collaboration, clear accountability, and continuous learning keep teams agile, aligned, and effective as they engage and expand high-value accounts.
How can a small team run ABM with limited resources?
Focus on 3 to 5 Tier 1 accounts, use the tools you already have, and personalize modular templates instead of building custom campaigns. Frequent, informal sales and marketing check-ins replace heavy governance.
The approach above is built for enterprise scale. Smaller organizations can still adopt the same principles in a leaner form.
- Focus on a few high-value accountsPick 3 to 5 Tier 1 accounts where personalization pays off most, rather than covering many accounts with less precision.
- Keep the playbook lightUse a simple, flexible framework. Don’t over-engineer governance or workflows. Keep collaboration informal but frequent, such as a weekly sales and marketing check-in.
- Use the tools you already haveLean on built-in CRM features and low-cost tiers of LinkedIn Sales Navigator instead of expensive ABM platforms. Put the effort into manual research, customer conversations, and social listening.
- Personalize by repurposingBuild modular content templates and personalize them efficiently instead of creating fully custom campaigns for every account. Use one-to-few tactics to scale.
- Expect overlapping rolesPeople will wear several hats. Focus on tight collaboration rather than large, separate teams.
- Measure leanTrack a few metrics such as engagement, pipeline influence, and closed deals in a simple dashboard or spreadsheet, and use them to iterate fast.
- Lead with relationshipsWith fewer accounts and less automation, direct personal outreach does more of the work in building trust and insight.
The bottom line
Account-based marketing is more than a campaign. It’s a growth engine that unites sales, marketing, and customer success around high-value accounts. Align the teams, map the stakeholders, tailor the content, and build governance into every layer. With the right structure, tools, and mindset, strategic accounts become sustained sources of revenue and advocacy.
Key statistics
- 10-15%Average revenue lift from personalization, with company-specific gains ranging from 5-25%. McKinsey (2021)
- 3 tiersOne-to-one (around 10 accounts), one-to-few (clusters of similar accounts), and one-to-many (automated, industry-based). ABM tiering model
- 3-5Tier 1 accounts recommended for small teams, where personalization effort has the highest return. Optivus guidance
Frequently asked questions
What is account-based marketing (ABM)?
Account-based marketing is a B2B strategy that treats specific high-value companies as individual markets, with campaigns personalized to each account’s needs, stakeholders and buying stage. Sales and marketing work from a shared target list and shared metrics instead of chasing lead volume.
What are the three tiers of ABM?
Tier 1 (one-to-one) gives a small number of top accounts fully personalized campaigns and dedicated teams. Tier 2 (one-to-few) personalizes for clusters of similar accounts, often using the 10-80-10 rule: tailor the first and last 10% and templatize the middle 80%. Tier 3 (one-to-many) uses automated, industry-based content with light personalization.
How do you map a B2B buying committee?
Identify decision-makers, influencers, gatekeepers and end users in each account using CRM data, sales intelligence tools and your team’s knowledge. Segment them by persona, research each person’s priorities, then build a contact map showing influence level, engagement status and who owns outreach. Keep it updated and visible to both sales and marketing.
Can a small company run ABM without an expensive platform?
Yes. Focus on 3 to 5 Tier 1 accounts, use built-in CRM features and low-cost tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, personalize modular templates instead of building custom campaigns, and track a few metrics in a simple dashboard. Relationship building and frequent sales-marketing check-ins do much of the work a platform would.
What is the 10-80-10 rule in ABM?
It’s a Tier 2 personalization method. Tailor the first and last 10% of a message or asset to the specific account and templatize the middle 80%. It scales relevance across clusters of similar accounts without the cost of fully custom work.
What metrics should an ABM program track?
Track account engagement by tier, pipeline created and influenced, opportunity creation, win rates, sales velocity, and expansion revenue. Report them on joint sales and marketing dashboards, segmented by tier and buying committee.
Sources
- McKinsey & Company. Research on personalization: revenue lift of 10-15% on average, with company-specific gains ranging from 5-25%. mckinsey.com
Statistics on this page link to their original sources and were checked against those sources on the last-updated date shown above.