What Is Account-Based Marketing? (+Why Most Teams Get It Wrong)

A lot of go-to-market teams say they’re doing account-based marketing, but evidence suggests many are struggling to make it work.

According to our recent survey with Forrester of enterprise ABM leaders, 58% said they have, at best, a moderate ability to drive engagement with their key accounts.

But ABM itself isn’t the issue. The problem is how it’s been defined and implemented over the years.

Before investing in new tools or doubling down on tactics, it’s worth clarifying:

• What ABM really is
• Where most teams go wrong
• What it takes to make it work in practice, not just theory

This article is grounded in conversations with our CEO, head of ABM, and sales leaders who’ve watched hundreds of GTM strategies take shape across our client base.

Account-based Marketing (ABM) is a go-to-market strategy where Sales and Marketing work together to deliver relevant, coordinated experiences to specific people within defined accounts throughout the buying journey.

ABM isn’t:

• A channel
• A tool or platform
• Simply running ads to fewer accounts

Those can all support your ABM strategy, but they aren’t ABM on their own.

This sounds straightforward, but it’s a common sticking point. As Gabe Larsen, Chief Revenue Officer at Atonom put it:

Gabe’s definition of ABM is even simpler: "Look, ABM is just the most overcomplicated way to say 'we’re focusing on the right accounts with the right tactics, TOGETHER'."

Account-based marketing isn’t the right fit for every company that just wants to “go up market”. It’s mostly an economic decision.

ABM makes sense when:

• Deal sizes are large (high ACV)
• You run an outbound/sales-led motion with marketing’s support
• Sales cycles are long
• Multiple stakeholders are involved in the buying process

When you have all the above, focus and precision matter more than volume because you don’t need to acquire hundreds or thousands of new customers every year to grow.

On the flip side, ABM doesn’t make sense when:

• Deal sizes are small (e.g., you primarily sell to solopreneurs and SMBs)
• Growth is driven primarily by self-serve or product-led motions
• Deals are highly transactional with short sales cycles
• You’re competing mostly on price, not on what makes you unique

In those cases, the cost of ABM usually outweighs the benefit. Imagine trying to justify allocating 12+ months of sales and marketing resources to close a $200/month deal. Not likely.

However, when done effectively, the benefits of ABM are worth it. For instance, a survey from the ABM Leadership Alliance found that 76% of respondents reported ABM delivered a higher ROI than traditional marketing initiatives. 

We’ve seen this play out in practice. Bonterra saw a 2.5x increase in deal value and a 2x higher win rate with the help of Influ2. And Quantexa boosted pipeline by 5.2x. 

So if ABM can work this well, why do teams still struggle to get meaningful engagement from the accounts they care about most?

Here’s a quick story that’ll help explain what’s going on with ABM today.

For centuries, scurvy was the leading cause of death among sailors. But in the mid-1700s, Dr. James Lind discovered that the vitamin C in citrus fruits (specifically lemons) could prevent it. 

However, sailors kept dying from scurvy long after the discovery, and people started to dismiss Lind’s theory altogether.

But Lind wasn’t wrong; the sailors’ execution was. 

To cut costs and extend shelf life, crews swapped lemons for limes (which contain less vitamin C), boiled the juice, and ran it through copper pipes—stripping out the nutrients that prevented the disease.

Now let’s bring it back to ABM.

The whole purpose of ABM is to be more intentional and precise. Instead of targeting everyone, you focus on specific accounts that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). But just like the sailors swapped lemons with limes, we’ve conflated accounts with people, which makes ABM less effective.

In other words, the concept of ABM is right, but the way it’s being implemented is wrong.

Here’s a real-life example. On the Let’s Talk ABM podcast, Marketing Director Fabiana Carpio Brunetti described joining Pure Storage and making a bold decision: killing their ABM program.

Not because ABM didn’t make sense for the company, but because it had become a buzzword without a clear “how” behind it. Rebuilding it with clear ownership, alignment, and revenue-linked goals is what ultimately made it work.

It’s a useful reminder that when ABM fails, the issue is usually how it's being defined and executed.

However, the source of this issue isn’t marketers or salespeople.

Most teams follow a model they’ve been pushed into by legacy ABM platforms. It looks like this:

• Assume accounts move through linear buying stages like awareness, consideration, and decision
• Intent signals are aggregated at the account level
• When an account shows “buying intent”, it’s marked as “ready” for outreach
• Marketing gives those “high-intent” accounts to Sales

Sounds good in theory, but here’s how it plays out:

• Marketing pushes the same broad, “safe” messaging to an entire account because they don’t know exactly who’s seeing which ads
• Your ABM tool says an account is showing intent, but Sales doesn’t know who actually engaged
• By the time your ABM tool surfaces an “in-market” account, the actual buyer is 90% through their buying journey, so it’s too late
• Sales outreach feels generic because you don’t have enough context to make it relevant

When you limit ABM to the account level, you end up with a list of accounts that might be interested, and signals that are less actionable because they’re not attached to a specific person. Kind of like when the sailors stripped their limes of all the nutritional value.

To fix that, ABM needs to be executed differently, and signals need to play a different role.

Accounts are useful containers, but buying decisions are made by groups of people.

And those people move at their own pace, change their minds, don’t follow a linear buying journey, and aren’t constantly thinking about your product.

This is the foundation of contact-level ABM: an approach that focuses on the individual people inside an account, not just the account itself. (You can see our entire framework here.)

Prioritizing people rather than accounts fundamentally changes how ABM works, including where you focus, how you use signals, and how marketing supports revenue.

When ABM is anchored to accounts, it’s easy to lose sight of the people inside it who are actually researching, engaging, and influencing the deal. So you end up treating an account with 1,000 people as if it were a single person.

Anchoring ABM to people puts the focus back on what actually matters:

• Engaging the buying group that influences the decision
• Understanding what topics each of those people cares about
• Recognizing that multiple buyer journeys can exist within the same account and adjusting your messaging accordingly

The reality is that account-focused ABM doesn’t reflect how B2B buying decisions actually happen, and the data shows that marketing leaders realize they need to adapt. 

In our survey of ABM leaders, 72% said the ability to operate at the individual buyer level is an important, if not core, differentiator.

In many ABM programs, signals are used almost exclusively to answer one question: Which accounts should we prioritize?

Not only is that limiting, but it can also result in wasted budget.

Marketing leader Nick Bennett shared a story about spending $60,000 on ABM campaigns that never had a real chance of converting. 

On paper, everything looked fine: the right accounts, the right titles, strong messaging, and plenty of account-level intent signals.

But most of those campaigns went nowhere because there was no clear signal that the actual buyers inside those accounts cared.

So they changed course.

Nick’s team started looking at signals from individuals and used those to trigger contact-level ads that matched what each person cared about and where they were in their journey.

As he explained, they went from playing Battleship to playing laser tag.

The takeaway is that signals can (and should) play a much bigger role when they’re at the contact level.

When signals are tied to specific people, they become an orchestration layer across the entire buying journey that you can use to:

• Spot early signs of interest from each buying group member and take action before they make a decision
• Decide the next best action based on each buyer’s signals, interests, and sales activity
• Keep the entire GTM aligned around the same people throughout the buying journey

Instead of asking, “Which account should we focus on?”, use signals to answer a more valuable question: “What should happen next, and who should be involved?”

Pro tip: Influ2 lets you see which specific people are searching for relevant topics, posting about them, engaging with your ads, or reading related content online. See how it works. 

Making contact-level ABM work also requires rethinking marketing’s responsibility.

Marketing’s job in ABM isn’t just to create demand and throw leads over the fence to Sales. It’s to support the entire sales process.

One of the most common reasons Marketing disappears once Sales gets involved is misaligned goals. When Marketing is evaluated primarily on leads or sourced pipeline, they’re incentivized to focus on net-new demand, even if supporting open opportunities would drive more revenue impact.

As Liam Collins, Head of Performance Marketing at Instantly, points out, you might need to redefine how you measure success.

Here’s what marketing’s role in ABM might look like:

• Warming up prospects with ads before Sales reaches out
• Providing air cover for open opportunities
• Reinforcing value during long deal cycles
• Supporting expansion and retention post-sale
• Sharing signals with Sales to give them context for outreach

Think of ABM more as a tandem bike than a relay race. The moment Marketing or Sales stops doing their part, you lose momentum.

Account-based marketing works when it reflects people’s actual buying behavior.

But when you reduce people to aggregated account scores and stage labels, you lose the whole point of ABM. 

It’s the same mistake the sailors made with scurvy prevention: the idea was right, but the execution stripped out what makes it effective.

If you’re rethinking your ABM program or launching one for the first time, we’d love to show you what makes Influ2’s contact-level approach different. Let's talk.