4 best practices to kick off your account-based marketing plan

Contact-Level ABM Platform

Because account-based marketing is so resource-intensive, most companies don’t roll out massive account-based marketing drives at the start. If you sell to a few select companies, say, Fortune 500 or 5000 or maybe the top XXXX companies in your industry, then you can benefit from account-based marketing. So you need to follow their industry news, market dynamics, growth drivers, competitors, etc.

For this post, I asked Davidson and Wingrove about the benefits of account-based marketing and how to create an ABM strategy. Like traditional marketing, you’ll spend quite a bit of time personalizing your messaging to be as specific as possible. I recently sat down with Tim Davidson and Dylan Wingrove, account-based marketers, to discuss everything relating to this strategy. Account-based marketing allows you to weed out less valuable companies early on and makes sure that Marketing and Sales are in complete alignment. In the world of account-based marketing, you start the sales process by selling directly to your best-fit, highest-value accounts.

What’s left is execution tailored to your ecosystem, your buyer journey, and your revenue goals. This accelerates execution and ensures sales and marketing teams stay perfectly aligned throughout the campaign lifecycle. Include mapped decision-makers, key business priorities, personalized messaging hooks, preferred engagement channels, and trigger events. Stakeholder trust increases when marketers deliver metrics that clearly and consistently quantify success.

The execution gap: Why strategy is the illusion of growth

• A typical sales cycle goes from prospects to connection, to research, to presenting, to closing, and nurturing.
• For brands starting account-based marketing campaigns, it's best to start small and identify patterns within the most successful customers.
• Once you’ve selected your target accounts and created personalized content for them, it’s time to engage them with your ABM strategy.
• Getting started with ABM takes planning and the right tools to execute your strategy effectively.
• This means you start with your target accounts, creating content and campaigns that reach specific people at those companies.

It is to reach the right people at the right moment with something that actually matters to them. Once engagement signals increased, sales teams were notified immediately. This gave sales teams stronger intent signals and warmer conversations. Their pages included company-specific messaging, account-focused CTAs, and references pulled from sales conversations.

Tools like Demandbase, Terminus, or 6sense allow marketers to orchestrate entire campaigns from one central dashboard, automate routine tasks, and surface intent data. Account-based strategies collapse without sales and marketing cohesion. Every campaign that produced results tailored content down to individual stakeholder relevance.

On average, one marketer can typically stay aligned with up to 10 salespeople, and each salesperson can manage up to 10 accounts. Besides marketing and sales, don’t forget to choose other internal key players — such as customer success reps — who should be aware of and aligned with your ABM strategy. To create a custom buying experience, a customer must have a seamless transition from becoming a lead through the final sale.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Be sure to focus on accounts from your top industry segments, and take note of any characteristics shared among the accounts you choose. To make the most of ABM, you need to start with a great list of potential target accounts. It prioritizes the best leads without extra analysis, freeing up time (and energy) for the team to think deeper and more creatively about strategy. For example, AI-powered behavior scoring can review prospects' behavioral patterns and assign scores prioritizing accounts for nurturing and sales engagement. For example, create personas based on what you learned in the pilot program and sort key accounts into those personas.

For many marketers, this method results in the placement of an ad when certain keywords are entered. It is often used to influence consumer awareness and preference for a brand. In this, the marketer initiates contact with the customer through methods such as TV, radio and digital display advertising.

Step 3: Choose the channels and tactics

In fact, aligning sales and promotional teams with ABM methods makes businesses 6% more likely to exceed their revenue goals, highlighting the effectiveness of these integrated approaches. By integrating these diverse tactics into cohesive account-based marketing campaigns, companies can cultivate deeper relationships with their most valuable accounts. Effective targeting is crucial for the success of ABM initiatives, as programs typically focus on account needs, industry, or roles. Furthermore, guest posting on reputable platforms helps build authority and credibility within the industry, attracting the attention of target accounts—vital for successful account-based marketing. Educational content, such as webinars, plays a crucial role in nurturing relationships by providing value and insights tailored to the specific needs of high-value accounts. By utilizing account-based marketing campaign examples to connect with target accounts through engaging audio content, companies can drive meaningful interactions and ultimately achieve their growth objectives.

What is Account Based Marketing (ABM)?

Instead of going broad and blasting folks with content that appeals to a market or industry, with ABM, you go deep. Combine that narrow focus with an amazing customer experience (more on that below) and conversion rates start to climb. This means arguments over lead quantity and lead quality go away, and your sales and marketing teams become unified in their focus on good fits. With ABM, sales and marketing are both working towards converting the same list of target accounts. Meanwhile, sales have been focused on engaging with only those customer accounts that are likely to buy. Below are some of the benefits that ABM brings to your demand generation funnel, and how you’ll stand out from the competition.

Rather than splitting resources between lead gen and ABM, the entire GTM org is structured to win and expand within a focused TAM. They’ve built always-on, cross-functional growth engines that embed account-based thinking across their entire revenue strategy. The best programs track not just clicks and opens, but pipeline influence, sales velocity, and account engagement over time. The key thing that sets high-performing teams apart is their orchestration – using tools that sequence touches across platforms while ensuring every stakeholder sees a story that makes sense.

ABM, on the other hand, targets specific high-value companies that match your ideal customer profile (ICP). By building strong, authentic relationships with prospects, you will have the solid foundation needed to nurture them into loyal, long-term customers. Data should give you a better understanding of the people you are selling to, or it’s not doing the right job.

If you can’t create a complete account-based marketing program right away (because of budget constraints or limited resources), you should still offer your key target accounts with personalized website experiences. Just like O2, even you can start your pilot program by targeting just one strategic account. As Account-based marketing campaigns you can tell, just setting up an infrastructure for account-based marketing is very expensive.

Going beyond the customized t-shirts and phone cases other ABM-led companies have tried, GumGum commissioned a custom comic book with Legere as T-Man, the protagonist dressed in Batman-inspired attire. To make an impact, personalized content must feel unique, catering to the prospect’s specific interests and demonstrating thoughtfulness that creates a lasting impression. Use a combination of internal processes and external software solutions (like Demandbase) to stimulate sales and marketing alignment and drive an integrated ABM campaign. The content marketer would continue to support by designing crucial sales collateral such as pitch desks, working with the AE to refine this content based on prospect interactions.

That made it nearly impossible to prove ROI, prioritize spend, or follow up with high-intent accounts. Within two weeks, StraightIn closed two deals totalling $10K, proving that an ABM motion, when powered by real-time engagement signals and automated outreach, doesn’t need months to start delivering ROI. Leads from Warmly were automatically dropped into Salesloft and Salesflow campaigns, giving reps a warm context for follow-up and significantly increasing email open, click, and reply rates.