Account-Based Selling: sales and marketing on one account

Account-based marketing, or ABM, is the strategy in which a company picks a closed set of target accounts and concentrates message, channels and sales effort on them, instead of waiting for leads to show up in the funnel. In most companies that come to me with an ABM program underway, marketing bought a list, built media audiences with those company names and reports impressions and clicks, while the salespeople prospect other accounts and barely know the list exists. When sales stays out of the plan, ABM shrinks into a targeted media campaign. Account-based selling is the name I use for the version that produces deals: sales and marketing working the same list of accounts with the same plan, one owner on each side for every account and metrics read per account in the CRM. If you lead marketing, sales or Customer Success, the decisions that separate one version from the other are on your desk: which accounts get in, who answers for each one and what leadership asks about in the pipeline meeting.

In the CRM of these operations, the listed companies show up with two or three contacts, almost always people who downloaded some material, and no sales owner. The deals opened in those accounts came, for the most part, from referrals or from prospecting the salesperson would have done anyway. The monthly meeting shows campaign engagement on one slide and pipeline on another, and nobody in the room can say whether the first produced the second.

What is account-based marketing (ABM)?

In the traditional funnel, marketing generates lead volume, qualifies it and passes to sales the leads that meet the agreed criteria. ABM starts from the other end: the company first defines the accounts it wants to win or expand and then decides who, inside each one, needs to hear what. The unit of planning and measurement becomes the account, with the people who take part in the decision. The strategy pays off in B2B sales with high ticket, long cycle and committee decisions, where losing one large account weighs more on the year’s revenue than losing a hundred small leads.

Gartner uses the term account-based strategy and defines it as the coordination of relevant experiences, delivered by every function that affects the customer, to drive engagement at a targeted set of accounts (Gartner, 2021). In the same release, the firm recommends that the sales leader drive this strategy together with marketing and warns that treating it as a marketing-only initiative costs opportunities to win new customers and grow existing ones. Since the definition includes every function that affects the customer, post-sale belongs in the design from the moment accounts are chosen.

Why does ABM turn into a targeted media campaign?

The cause lies in how the program is designed. Budget and tools sit with marketing, which launches the first campaign before sales approves the list, and the salesperson receives a report of engaged accounts without knowing why those companies were chosen. The quarter’s sales target rewards the deal that closes fast, and the target accounts, large and slow, get pushed back. With no owner recorded in the CRM for each account, the program ends up measured by whatever metric the media tool delivers, and the target account receives ads from a company whose salesperson never called.

The same Gartner release reports that 48% of organizations using account-based strategy saw a higher average win rate. In the operations I work with, the program that improves win rate has a salesperson and a marketer answering for the same account, with a plan they write and review together.

How do you choose target accounts from the ICP?

The list starts with the ideal customer profile. If the company already has a written ICP with priority tiers, as I describe in ICP: ideal customer profile, the target accounts come from tier A, and selection adds filters the profile does not cover. The first is the account’s moment: a new site, a new director in the buying area, open roles for the function your solution supports or the end of a contract with the current vendor. The second is access, when someone in your company already knows someone inside, whether a former client who changed jobs, an event attendee or a partner who serves the account. The third is revenue potential over three years, adding the first sale and the likely expansion.

The size of the list comes from the hours sales and marketing dedicate to target accounts. I recommend fixing the list for a quarter, with a sales owner and a marketing owner for each account recorded in the CRM, and writing the exit rule: an account leaves when the pair disqualifies it with a reason or after two quarters without engagement, and the slot goes to the next in line.

What are the ABM tiers: 1:1, 1:few and 1:many?

The tiers vary in the number of accounts and the effort per account, and most companies combine two of them. The numbers in the table are the starting point I use to size the program with leadership, and each company adjusts them to its own capacity.

Tier	Accounts	Effort per account	Personalization	Who works it	When to use
1:1	3 to 5 per pair	High: research, a dedicated plan and meetings with the account’s leadership	Message, offer and event designed for that company	Senior salesperson or KAM, marketing partner, CS if already a client	Revenue potential that pays for dozens of hours of preparation, or a strategic client with large expansion
1:few	Groups of 5 to 15 with the same problem	Medium: one plan per group, adjusted per account	By industry or shared trigger, with cases from the segment	Salesperson or SDR, product and content marketing	An industry where the company already has cases and a common problem
1:many	Dozens to hundreds from tier A or B	Low, supported by automation and media	By segment and role, with account data inserted	Marketing on media and nurturing, SDR on accounts above the engagement threshold	A broad base inside the ICP, with a ticket that does not pay for individual work

The most common mistake is putting three hundred accounts in 1:1, a scale at which no pair can sustain research and a dedicated plan. The 1:few tier is often the best start for teams that have never run the method, because it makes marketing and sales sit down over a small group of similar accounts and produce together material that serves all of them.

How do you build the contact map for each account?

The map I describe in B2B buying committee starts with the opportunity, when a deal and a contact already exist. In account-based selling, the pair needs a map before that, one that answers in which areas your solution solves a problem, who leads each of them and with whom your company already has some contact. The sources are close at hand: the marketing database shows who downloaded material or attended an event, the CRM keeps deals lost with the same company in past years, CS knows which clients have executives who used to work at the target account, and LinkedIn fills in areas and titles.

Each contact goes into the CRM associated with the company, with area, likely role in the decision and relationship level, and the company gets a coverage property: how many of the mapped areas have at least one contact someone has already talked to about the problem. Each gap becomes a task with an owner. Marketing invites the CFO nobody knows to an event, the salesperson asks the operations contact for an introduction to the IT manager, and CS, when the account is already a client, asks the sponsor of the current project for a conversation with the neighboring area.

How do you build the joint account plan?

The plan fits on one page per account in 1:1 and per group in 1:few. It starts with the account thesis, a written hypothesis about the problem the company faces, with the public evidence that supports it and the estimated cost for the client. The thesis drives the message for each role in the buying committee: the same problem told to the CFO as cost and payback period, to the operations manager as rework and to IT as integration risk. If the pair cannot write the thesis, the account goes back to research before any outreach.

The second element is the offer that justifies the first meeting. Gartner calls a high-value offer the interaction that gives the account unique and timely business value, enough to compel the buyer to engage. In B2B, this tends to be a short assessment with industry data, a comparison with companies of the same size or a workshop with the area’s leadership, and a product demo usually fails that test. The plan also sets channels, cadence and events, with marketing warming up the account before the salesperson’s first contact and the multichannel sequence I detail in prospecting cadence.

Phase	Marketing	Sales	CS, if the account is a client	CRM record
Weeks 1 and 2: preparation	Research, thesis and materials per role	Contact map and thesis validation	Current usage and areas without the solution	List, owners and contacts with area and role
Weeks 3 to 5: warm-up	Media for the mapped titles and event invitation	Connection and first personalized messages	Conversation with the sponsor about priorities	Interactions on the company and the contact
Weeks 6 to 9: outreach	Case from the same industry and meeting material	Cadence with the high-value offer	Introduction of the salesperson to neighboring areas	Meetings and opportunity sourced from the list
Weeks 10 to 12: review	Engagement per account	Opportunity progress and committee gaps	Account risk and expansion	Coverage and the decision to keep, change tier or remove

Which ABM metrics should you track?

Lead metrics measure an account program poorly, because a target account can generate a single new contact in the quarter and still move forward, if that contact is the director who decides. Gartner recommends tracking opportunity rate, target account pipeline and account win rate. I add coverage and engagement, which show whether the program is moving before the opportunity appears, and organize everything in the RevOps metrics matrix leadership already reads.

Metric	How to calculate in the CRM	Owning team	What leadership reads
Committee coverage	Areas with a contact at level 2 or higher, over mapped areas	Sales and marketing	Whether enough people are in the conversation to support a proposal
Account engagement	Interactions from different people at the account, above the agreed threshold	Marketing	Which accounts are ready for outreach
Opportunity rate	Accounts with an open opportunity, over the whole list	Sales	Whether the offer produces meetings that turn into deals
Open opportunities per account	Open deals at each account, by product or area	Sales and CS	Whether the account buys on one front or several
Pipeline per target account	Open value at listed accounts, compared to accounts outside the list	Revenue leadership	How much of the quarter depends on the program
Account win rate	Accounts with a won deal, over accounts with an opportunity	Revenue leadership	Whether the program closes deals or only opens conversations

Engagement is the easiest metric to inflate, so the threshold has to consider how many different people interacted and from which areas. The comparison with accounts outside the list shows how much of the result would have happened anyway.

What is the role of CS in expanding target accounts?

Many of the best target accounts are already clients. A company that uses your solution in one unit has other units and areas with the same problem, and CS knows the way to them: who sponsors the current project, which areas have asked for access and which director changed this semester. In account-based selling, CS helps choose the client accounts on the list and builds the whitespace map with the salesperson, crossing the account’s areas and units with the products it does not use yet. For marketing, CS delivers the cases that feed the 1:few groups.

An account in poor health stays out of expansion plays until CS resolves the risk, because a new proposal to an unhappy client tends to bring the cancellation forward. The rule on who leads each type of expansion and how commission is split, which I describe in B2B post-sale, needs to be written before the first joint plan.

A roadmap for leadership

1. Take a baseline. Pull from the CRM, for tier A accounts, how many have a sales owner, how many areas and contacts each one has and how much pipeline sits in them.
2. Choose the list with the three leaders. Marketing, sales and CS define the quarter’s accounts, each one’s tier and the responsible pair.
3. Write the rules into the agreement between teams. Engagement threshold, the deadline for the salesperson to act on an engaged account and the exit rule go into the SLA between marketing, sales and post-sale.
4. Build each account’s map and thesis. The pair fills in the map and writes the thesis and the offer before the first media action.
5. Configure the CRM after the rules are approved. List, tier, owners and coverage become company properties, and the dashboard shows per-account metrics and the comparison group.
6. Set the rituals. The pair reviews the accounts every two weeks, and the leaders read the dashboard once a month.
7. Review the list at the end of the quarter. Apply the exit rule, move accounts between tiers and compare against the baseline and the group outside the program.

Why does ABM depend on marketing and sales learning together?

Account-based selling asks for behaviors neither team practices in the lead model. The marketing analyst needs to read an account’s CRM record and write a thesis a director recognizes as his own problem. The salesperson needs to plan before prospecting, use marketing’s material and log every interaction on the company record, and CS needs to bring into the plan the expansion signal it heard in an operational meeting. An ABM platform does not teach these habits, and a pair that has never worked together goes back, by the third week, to its own targets.

These habits form in a mixed group, with marketing, sales and CS practicing on the company’s real accounts. In an in-company training, I set up the pairs in the room, each one writes the thesis and map of two accounts from the list, and the others challenge the offer the way the account’s director would. Managers take part because they will run the biweekly ritual, which keeps the habit alive after the group returns to the routine.

ABM and L&D: what HR needs to assess

The signs of need show up in the results meeting: marketing presents engaged accounts that sales does not recognize, salespeople say the list was made without them and the large tier A accounts appear in the CRM with no owner and one or two contacts. When the two leaders describe the same program in different ways, the gap is in the method of working together, and a new tool repeats the problem.

Participants are the pairs who will work the accounts, with salespeople, KAMs, marketing analysts and the CS people for client accounts, plus the managers who run the rituals and the operations or CRM person. To measure, record the baseline for tier A accounts beforehand, with the share of accounts with an owner, average coverage, opportunity rate and pipeline, and compare after one quarter and, for win rate, after one average sales cycle, always against the group outside the program.

If your marketing runs campaigns for a list of accounts sales does not work, or if the large accounts in your base still have no expansion plan, that is the work of the in-company Revenue Operations training. I run the training with marketing, sales and CS in the same group, on your company’s target accounts and CRM, and the operation leaves with the SLA between marketing, sales and CS, which includes the list, the tiers and the engagement rules, and with the RevOps metrics matrix that tracks coverage, opportunities and pipeline per account.

Frequently asked questions

What is account-based marketing (ABM)?

ABM is the B2B strategy in which a company picks a closed set of target accounts and concentrates message, channels and sales effort on them. The unit of planning and measurement becomes the account, with the people who take part in the decision.

What is the difference between ABM and account-based selling?

Many companies call ABM the campaigns marketing runs on its own for a list of companies. In account-based selling, sales and marketing, with CS on client accounts, work the same list with the same plan, one owner on each side and per-account metrics in the CRM.

How many target accounts should you choose?

The number comes from the hours the team dedicates to the program. As a starting point, three to five accounts per pair in 1:1, groups of five to fifteen in 1:few and a larger base in 1:many, with the list fixed for a quarter.

Does ABM work for a company with a small sales team?

It does, with fewer accounts. A small team can start with ten accounts in 1:few, one salesperson, one marketing person and a biweekly ritual. What makes the method fail at any size is running the list with nobody in sales responsible for it.

How do you measure the results of an ABM program?

Measure per account: committee coverage, engagement above a threshold, opportunity rate, pipeline at target accounts and account win rate. Compare with similar accounts outside the program to separate its effect from what would have happened anyway.

How do you train marketing and sales to work with ABM?

Train marketing, sales and CS in the same group, on the company’s real target accounts. Each pair writes the thesis, map and plan for two accounts, the others challenge them the way the buyer would, and managers leave with the biweekly ritual designed.