Most B2B marketing works like throwing a handful of darts at a wall covered in balloons and hoping you pop the right one.
Most B2B marketing works like throwing a handful of darts at a wall covered in balloons and hoping you pop the right one. You spend money on ads, blast emails to a list of thousands, publish blog posts into the void, and then wait around hoping somebody who can actually sign a check stumbles across your stuff and raises their hand.
Account based marketing says forget the wall entirely. Instead of blindly throwing darts, you walk up to the exact balloon you want, hold the dart six inches away, and pop it on purpose.
That shift in thinking is why roughly 71% of B2B organizations now use some form of ABM, according to the 2025 ABM Benchmark Survey from Demand Gen Report. And it's why companies keep pouring more budget into it every year, with the average business now dedicating about 29% of their marketing spend to account based marketing programs. Those aren't small bets, and businesses don't make them unless the returns justify the investment.
But the buzzword version of ABM that gets tossed around at conferences and in LinkedIn posts doesn't always match what it looks like in practice. So let's break down what account based marketing actually is, how it works when it's done well, what it costs, and whether it makes sense for your business or if you'd be better off spending your budget somewhere else.
Account based marketing is a B2B strategy where your sales and marketing teams pick a specific list of companies they want to win and then build personalized campaigns aimed directly at those companies. Instead of marketing to the masses and filtering down to find qualified leads, you start with the companies you want and work backward from there.
Each account on your list gets treated like its own little market. You research their business, figure out who makes purchasing decisions, understand what challenges they're dealing with, and then create messaging and content that speaks to their specific situation. Not their industry in general. Their situation specifically.
Think about how different that is from the way most marketing works. Normally, you'd write a blog post about "how to improve employee retention," promote it everywhere, and hope that HR leaders at companies you'd actually want to work with happen to find it. With ABM, you'd identify those companies by name, figure out who the VP of People is at each one, learn that three of them just posted about turnover problems on LinkedIn, and then send each of them something that directly addresses what they're going through.
The "market of one" concept is central to how ABM works. You're not marketing to a segment or an audience or a demographic. You're marketing to a specific company and the specific humans inside it who hold the budget and make the decisions.
The philosophical difference between ABM and traditional marketing is bigger than most people realize, and it changes everything about how you plan campaigns, measure success, and structure your team.
Traditional B2B marketing uses a funnel that starts wide at the top. You attract a massive audience through content, ads, and events, capture as many leads as possible, nurture them with email sequences, score them based on engagement, and eventually hand the "qualified" ones to sales. At every stage, you're losing people, which means the whole system depends on cramming as many humans into the top as possible.
ABM inverts the entire thing. You start narrow by selecting the exact companies you want, then expand your reach within those companies by engaging multiple stakeholders and decision makers. You're not trying to cast a wider net. You're going deeper into the accounts that actually matter.
This is why ABM practitioners often talk about "flipping the funnel." Instead of awareness, interest, consideration, and decision flowing top to bottom, ABM flows from identify, to expand, to engage, to convert. You already know who you want before you start spending money to reach them.
Here's the part that makes a lot of marketers uncomfortable. ABM deliberately trades volume for precision, and if you've spent your career being judged on lead counts and form fills, that mental shift feels risky.
You might target 50 accounts instead of chasing 5,000 leads. But those 50 accounts get significantly more attention, research, and personalization than any individual lead would ever receive in a traditional program. And because you selected them based on fit, budget, and buying signals, the conversion rates and deal sizes tend to be dramatically better.
Companies using ABM report a 38% higher sales win rate and deal sizes that are 91% larger on average, which adds up to roughly 24% faster revenue growth. Those numbers come from concentrating your resources on accounts where you have the highest probability of winning, instead of spreading yourself thin across thousands of contacts who may never have the budget, authority, or need to buy what you sell.
Not every ABM program needs to look the same, and this is where a lot of companies get tripped up. They hear "ABM" and immediately picture a sales rep hand-delivering a custom gift box to a CEO's office, which sounds expensive and impossible to scale. But account based marketing actually operates across three distinct tiers, and the right one for your business depends on your deal sizes, your team's bandwidth, and how many accounts you're trying to reach.
This is the white glove version. You pick a small number of extremely high value accounts, usually fewer than 10, and create fully custom campaigns for each one. We're talking dedicated landing pages, tailored content, personalized events, custom business cases, and sometimes even physical mailers designed for a specific person at a specific company.
The marketing and sales team essentially becomes a mini agency for each account. They research the company's annual report, track leadership changes, monitor their tech stack, and build campaign assets that feel like they were made just for that company, because they were.
Strategic ABM makes sense when a single deal could be worth six or seven figures. If closing one of these accounts would meaningfully change your revenue trajectory, the investment in deep personalization pays for itself many times over. Enterprise software companies, consulting firms, and anyone selling high-ticket B2B solutions tend to live in this tier.
This is where most mid-market companies find their sweet spot. ABM Lite groups similar accounts into clusters based on shared characteristics like industry, company size, tech stack, or common business challenges. Instead of creating completely unique campaigns for every single account, you create personalized campaigns for each cluster.
You might have a cluster of 10 fintech companies that are all between 200 and 500 employees and all using Salesforce. They share enough in common that you can build messaging and content tailored to that group's reality without needing to create something entirely unique for each individual company. The personalization is lighter than strategic ABM, but it's still a massive improvement over blasting the same generic content to everyone.
ABM Lite typically targets anywhere from 5 to 15 accounts per cluster, which lets you scale personalization without drowning in custom asset creation.
This tier uses technology to deliver personalized experiences to a much larger set of target accounts, sometimes hundreds or even thousands. The personalization happens through automation, intent data, and dynamic content rather than manual customization.
Programmatic ABM might involve serving personalized ads to everyone at your target accounts, using dynamic website content that changes based on the visitor's company, or sending automated email sequences triggered by intent signals. The individual touch is lighter, but you're reaching far more accounts than the other two tiers allow.
Here's a way to think about the tradeoffs across all three tiers. Strategic ABM is like writing a handwritten letter to 5 people. ABM Lite is like writing a personalized email to 50 people. Programmatic ABM is like sending a smartly segmented campaign to 500 people. Each one is more personalized than blasting the same message to 50,000, and that's the whole point.
The business case for ABM isn't theoretical. Companies that commit to it and execute it well see measurable improvements across the metrics that boards and CFOs actually care about.
This is the stat that tends to get executives' attention. According to multiple industry surveys, somewhere between 76% and 87% of B2B marketers report that their ABM initiatives outperform every other marketing investment in terms of ROI. The exact number varies depending on the study, but the direction is always the same, and it's not close.
The reason is straightforward when you think about it. Traditional marketing spends money reaching thousands of people, most of whom will never be a fit for what you sell. Even if your targeting is decent, a huge chunk of your budget goes toward people who don't have the authority, the budget, or the need. ABM focuses that same spending on companies you've already validated as good fits, which means dramatically less waste.
Companies with mature ABM programs report average ROI in the range of 5 to 9x on their investment. And because you're engaging entire buying committees rather than lone individuals, the pipeline you generate tends to be much more real than the "leads" that come from a gated ebook download.
B2B sales cycles are notoriously long, especially for enterprise deals where you might be looking at six, nine, or twelve months from first touch to signed contract. ABM compresses that timeline because by the time sales gets involved, multiple people at the target account have already been exposed to your messaging and have some understanding of your value proposition.
Companies using ABM report sales cycles that are roughly 28% faster on average. For a company with a typical nine-month sales cycle, that's shaving more than two months off the process. And shorter cycles don't just mean faster revenue, they mean your sales team can work more deals in the same amount of time.
ABM programs consistently produce larger contracts. Research shows a 33% to 91% average increase in deal values for ABM opportunities, depending on how mature the program is and how well it's executed. Companies report that 96% of their ABM campaigns yield average contract values greater than $51,000, with nearly a third producing averages over $100,000.
Larger deals happen for two connected reasons. First, ABM targets accounts with real budget, not companies that are "just browsing" or tire-kicking with no money to spend. Second, ABM engages the full buying committee, which means you're not relying on a single champion who has to go sell internally on your behalf. When the CFO, the VP of Operations, and the IT director have all already seen your content, the deal moves forward with less internal friction and more buy-in around budget.
At Leapyn, we work with B2B companies that know account based marketing could be a game-changer but don't have the internal bandwidth to build and run the programs themselves. We handle the research, the messaging, the campaign execution, and the reporting so you can focus on closing the deals that ABM surfaces. Book a free strategy session and we'll bring real ideas, not a sales pitch.
One of the most underrated benefits of ABM is that it forces sales and marketing into genuine collaboration, which for a lot of B2B companies is a bigger shift than the marketing strategy itself.
When both teams focus on the same list of target accounts, the usual finger-pointing evaporates. Marketing can't blame sales for not following up on leads, because they're working the same accounts. Sales can't complain about lead quality, because they helped pick the targets. That shared accountability changes the dynamic completely, and research shows that ABM-aligned teams achieve 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher win rates.
If you've ever worked at a company where marketing brags about lead volume while sales complains that none of those leads are real, you already understand why ABM's forced alignment is such a big deal.
The actual mechanics of ABM follow a logical sequence, but the execution requires more rigor and coordination than most teams expect going in. Here's what the process looks like when it's done well.
Before you pick specific accounts, you need clarity on what makes a company a genuinely good fit for what you sell. Your ideal customer profile (ICP) describes the characteristics of companies where you deliver the most value, where you have the highest win rates, and where customers tend to stick around and expand over time.
This usually includes factors like industry, company size, annual revenue, technology stack, geographic location, growth stage, and organizational structure. The ICP is not a buyer persona of a person. It's a profile of a company. You'll define personas later when you figure out who within those companies you need to reach.
A common mistake here is making the ICP too broad. "Mid-market B2B companies in North America" isn't specific enough to be useful. "Series B SaaS companies with 100 to 500 employees, $10M to $50M in revenue, using Salesforce and HubSpot, with a dedicated marketing team of at least 3 people" gives you something you can actually work with.
Using your ICP criteria, you build a list of specific companies to pursue. This list typically comes from a combination of your CRM data, purchased contact databases, intent signals from platforms like Bombora or 6sense, and good old-fashioned research.
The list size depends on which ABM tier you're running. Strategic ABM might have 10 accounts. ABM Lite might have 100. Programmatic ABM might have 1,000 or more. But every single account on the list should match your ICP and represent a real opportunity, not a "wouldn't it be nice" wishlist entry.
Something that separates good ABM programs from mediocre ones is how disciplined they are about list curation. It's tempting to keep adding accounts so you "don't miss any opportunities," but the whole point of ABM is focus. Every account you add dilutes the attention and resources available for the others.
This is where ABM gets personal, and it's also where a lot of teams cut corners because the research is time-consuming. For each target account, you need to understand their business situation, recent company news, strategic priorities, competitive landscape, organizational structure, and most importantly, the individuals who influence or make purchasing decisions.
The depth of research scales with the ABM tier. Strategic accounts might get weeks of dedicated analysis. ABM Lite clusters get shared research that applies to the group. Programmatic accounts might be enriched primarily through data platforms and intent tools. But regardless of tier, you need enough context to make your outreach feel relevant rather than generic.
This research phase is also where you map the buying committee at each account. B2B purchases rarely get made by one person. A typical enterprise deal involves somewhere between 6 and 10 decision makers, including the economic buyer who controls budget, the technical evaluator who assesses feasibility, the end users who will live with the product daily, and the executive sponsor who signs off on the investment.
With account intelligence in hand, you build campaigns that speak to each account or account cluster's specific situation. This might mean custom landing pages, tailored whitepapers, personalized LinkedIn ads, direct mail packages, industry-specific webinars, or account-targeted events.
The content should address the actual challenges and opportunities at those accounts, not generic industry talking points that could apply to any company in the space. The more specific you can get, the more your outreach stands apart from everything else cluttering their inbox.
For example, if you're targeting a fintech company that just announced a new product line, your outreach might reference that launch and explain how your solution could help them scale the marketing for it. That's a fundamentally different experience than receiving a generic email about "growing your business."
ABM works best when you reach multiple people at the target account through multiple channels simultaneously. A typical program might combine targeted display advertising, LinkedIn sponsored content, personalized email sequences, direct mail, phone outreach from sales, and even in-person events.
The multi-channel approach matters because you're trying to create the impression that "this company is everywhere" among the people at your target accounts. When the VP of Marketing sees your ad on LinkedIn, the CTO gets a relevant whitepaper in their inbox, and the CEO receives a thoughtful direct mail piece all in the same week, you've created a level of awareness that a single-channel approach simply can't match.
Coordinating ABM efforts across multiple channels can improve engagement by up to 72%, according to recent research. That's the compounding effect of hitting multiple touchpoints with a consistent, relevant message.
ABM measurement requires a fundamentally different dashboard than traditional marketing. If you're still judging success by lead volume and cost per lead, you'll think ABM is failing even when it's working brilliantly.
Instead, you need to track account-level metrics like account engagement scores that measure how many people at a target account are interacting with your content, pipeline generated specifically from target accounts, deal velocity that tracks how fast target accounts move through your sales process, win rates at target accounts compared to non-target accounts, and revenue attributed to your ABM program.
The shift from lead metrics to account metrics takes some adjustment, especially for marketing teams that have been conditioned to celebrate form fills and MQL counts. You might have fewer total leads but those leads represent dramatically higher quality opportunities at companies that have real budget, real need, and real buying intent.
ABM is not a universal strategy, and being honest about fit saves companies from wasting months and budget on an approach that doesn't match their business model.
You sell to a defined market of identifiable companies. If you can actually name the companies that would be ideal customers, ABM gives you a framework to go after them systematically. The more defined your market, the better ABM works.
Your average deal size justifies the investment. ABM requires more resources per account than traditional marketing. If your average contract value is $20,000 or more, the math tends to work. Below that, the cost of personalizing campaigns for individual accounts starts to exceed the return.
You have long, complex sales cycles. ABM excels when deals involve buying committees, extended evaluation periods, and multiple stakeholders who all need to get comfortable before a purchase moves forward. If your typical deal takes three to twelve months and involves four or more decision makers, ABM was basically built for you.
Your sales and marketing teams can actually work together. This one trips up more companies than you'd expect. ABM requires genuine, sustained collaboration between sales and marketing. If your teams operate in separate silos, report to different leaders, and have a history of blaming each other for missed targets, you need to fix the alignment problem before you layer ABM on top of it.
You're willing to play a longer game. ABM isn't something you try for 30 days and evaluate. Building the capability, selecting accounts, running personalized campaigns, and measuring results takes months before you see the full picture. Companies that commit to at least 6 to 12 months give ABM the runway it needs to actually work.
Your market is massive and undifferentiated. If you sell a $29 per month tool to anyone with an internet connection, ABM's focus-driven approach doesn't match your go-to-market motion. You need volume, and ABM is the opposite of a volume play.
Your average deal size is under a few thousand dollars. The cost of researching and personalizing campaigns for individual accounts doesn't pencil out when each deal is worth $500. The unit economics need to support the per-account investment.
You need pipeline tomorrow. ABM builds momentum over months, not days. If your CEO is breathing down your neck for leads this week, you need demand generation tactics that can produce results quickly. ABM is a great complement to those efforts, but it's not a short-term fix.
Your sales team isn't bought in. This is non-negotiable. ABM without active sales participation is just marketing to a list. The sales follow-through, the personalized outreach, the relationship building, all of it requires sales to be engaged and committed. If your sales team thinks ABM is "a marketing thing," it will fail.
Companies that struggle with ABM tend to make the same handful of errors, and most of them happen before a single campaign goes live.
Targeting too many accounts out of the gate. The temptation is always to start with a massive list because you're afraid of missing opportunities. But spreading resources across 500 accounts when you have the bandwidth to properly serve 50 defeats the entire purpose of focus-driven marketing. Start smaller than you think you should, prove the model works, then expand.
Treating ABM like lead gen with a target list stapled on. This is probably the most common mistake. Companies take their existing lead generation campaigns, filter the results for target accounts after the fact, and call it ABM. That's not ABM. The personalization and account-level coordination are what make the approach work. If you're just adding an account filter to your existing programs, you're not going to see ABM-level results.
Skipping the research because it feels slow. Yes, account research takes time. But personalization without intelligence produces outreach that says "Hi [First Name], I noticed your company is in [Industry]" and thinks that counts as personal. If you don't invest in genuinely understanding your target accounts, your "personalized" campaigns will feel just as generic as everything else in their inbox.
Launching ABM without sales alignment. We keep coming back to this because it's that important. Marketing can't do ABM alone. Account selection, engagement strategies, and coordinated outreach all require sales to be involved and bought in from the beginning, not brought in after the campaign is already running.
Pulling the plug too early. ABM compounds over time as you build relationships and awareness at target accounts. Most teams see early engagement signals within three to six months and meaningful pipeline impact within six to twelve months. Shutting down after one quarter because you haven't closed a deal yet is like planting a garden, watering it for two weeks, and then ripping everything out because there aren't any tomatoes yet.
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Let's talk money, because this is where a lot of the confusion lives.
ABM costs vary wildly depending on your program's scope, the tier you're running, and the tools you invest in. But here are some real benchmarks to work with.
Budget allocation. High performing B2B teams typically dedicate around 18% to 29% of their total marketing budget to ABM, according to multiple industry surveys. That's a meaningful commitment, but it also reflects the higher returns these programs tend to deliver.
Software costs. You can start ABM with tools you already have, including your CRM, LinkedIn, and basic email. As you scale, dedicated ABM platforms range from a few hundred dollars per month for lightweight intent data and list building tools up to a few thousand monthly for platforms like Demandbase or 6sense that add orchestration, advertising, and measurement capabilities. You don't need the enterprise tier to get started, and plenty of companies run effective ABM programs on modest tech budgets.
People costs. This is the part that often gets underestimated. ABM requires coordination across marketing and sales, content creation for personalized campaigns, account research, and ongoing measurement. Whether you handle this internally or work with an agency, the people and time investment is typically the largest line item, not the software.
The real cost question. The total investment depends entirely on your tier and scope. A small team running strategic ABM against 10 accounts can get started for far less than most people think, especially if they already have a CRM and decent content. The important thing to remember is that ABM isn't supposed to be cheaper than traditional marketing. It's supposed to be more effective per dollar spent, and by that measure, the numbers consistently support the investment.
Account based marketing is a B2B strategy where sales and marketing teams focus their efforts on a specific set of target accounts rather than trying to attract leads from a broad market. Each target account gets treated like its own market, with personalized messaging and campaigns built around that company's specific challenges and buying committee. The approach flips traditional lead generation on its head by starting with the companies you want to win and then building everything backward from there.
The three types are strategic ABM, ABM Lite, and programmatic ABM. Strategic ABM targets fewer than 10 accounts with fully custom campaigns tailored to each individual company. ABM Lite groups 5 to 15 similar accounts into clusters based on shared characteristics and creates personalized campaigns for each cluster. Programmatic ABM uses technology and automation to deliver personalized experiences to hundreds or thousands of target accounts at scale, trading depth of personalization for breadth of reach.
Traditional B2B marketing starts broad by attracting a large audience and then narrows down through qualification stages. Account based marketing starts narrow by selecting specific target accounts first and then builds personalized campaigns around those companies. The success metrics are also fundamentally different. Traditional marketing measures lead volume and cost per lead, while ABM measures account engagement, pipeline velocity, and win rates at target accounts.
Costs vary significantly based on program scope and maturity. High performing B2B teams typically dedicate 18% to 29% of their marketing budget to ABM programs. Software costs range from a few hundred dollars monthly for basic tools to a few thousand monthly for more robust platforms. You can absolutely start ABM with your existing CRM, LinkedIn, and email, then layer in dedicated tools as your program matures and the ROI justifies the investment.
Most teams see early engagement and pipeline signals within 3 to 6 months of launching their programs. Fully scaled programs with repeatable, measurable ROI typically take 6 to 12 months to mature. Companies with mature ABM programs report substantially higher satisfaction rates than those who recently launched, which underscores why patience and commitment matter. Pulling the plug after one quarter almost always means quitting before the compounding effects kick in.
ABM is sometimes called key account marketing or named account marketing. All three terms refer to the same fundamental approach of focusing marketing and sales resources on specific high value accounts rather than spreading efforts across broad lead generation campaigns. You might also hear it called "account based everything" or "account based revenue" in organizations that extend the philosophy beyond marketing into customer success and product teams.
Absolutely. Small companies often practice ABM naturally by focusing their energy on a handful of dream accounts, even if they don't call it that. You don't need enterprise budgets or expensive platforms to research your target accounts, understand their challenges, and create outreach that speaks to their specific situation. The principles scale down beautifully, and a focused effort against 5 to 10 ideal accounts can produce outsized results compared to generic outbound campaigns.
Track account engagement scores that measure depth of interaction across your target accounts, pipeline generated specifically from ABM targets, deal velocity that shows how fast target accounts progress through your sales process, win rates at target accounts versus non-target accounts, and total revenue attributed to your ABM program. The key mental shift is focusing on how accounts are progressing through your pipeline rather than counting individual leads. A traditional marketing dashboard won't tell you the ABM story.
Demand generation creates awareness and interest across a broad market. ABM concentrates resources on specific target accounts. They're not mutually exclusive, and most successful B2B companies run both simultaneously. Demand gen builds general market awareness and catches inbound interest from companies you may not have targeted. ABM focuses outbound effort on the specific accounts you've identified as your highest value opportunities. The best programs use demand gen to feed the top of the funnel while ABM drives the deals that matter most.
You can start ABM with basic tools you probably already have, including your CRM, LinkedIn, email, and spreadsheets for tracking target accounts. As programs mature, dedicated ABM platforms like Demandbase, 6sense, or Terminus add valuable capabilities around account identification, intent data, targeted advertising, and cross-channel measurement. The software makes scaling easier, but it's not required to get started. What matters more than any tool is having clear ICP criteria, a curated target account list, and genuine sales and marketing alignment.
If you've made it this far, you probably already have a sense of whether ABM could work for your business. And if you're a B2B company selling to other businesses, with deal sizes that justify personalized attention and sales cycles that involve multiple decision makers, the honest answer is that it probably should be part of your strategy in some form.
The companies seeing the best results aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest ABM platforms. They're the ones that committed to the fundamentals, which means deeply understanding their target accounts, creating genuinely relevant outreach, and getting sales and marketing to operate as one team instead of two departments that happen to share a Slack workspace.
What holds most companies back isn't a lack of understanding about what ABM is. It's a lack of capacity to actually do it well. The research takes time. The personalized content creation takes talent. The cross-functional coordination takes leadership. And doing all of that while also keeping your existing marketing programs running is where most internal teams hit a wall.
That's where having the right partner changes the equation entirely.
Leapyn is the agency we couldn't find, so we built it. Full-service marketing for B2B companies that refuse to settle for work that just exists without actually performing. We keep a small client roster on purpose so nobody gets forgotten about or pushed to the back of the line. Our senior team handles everything from strategy to content creation to campaign execution, with no handoffs to junior staff and no bait and switch after you sign. We bring ideas to the table, challenge assumptions when something isn't going to work, and take full ownership of the outcome because that's the whole point of hiring an agency in the first place.
Whether you're evaluating whether ABM makes sense for your business, building your first program from scratch, or trying to figure out why your current efforts aren't producing the results you expected, we'd love to dig into it with you.
Book a free strategy session and we'll bring real ideas, not a sales pitch. No contracts to start. Just a conversation about what you need and whether we're the right fit.
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