Account-based marketing
Account-based marketing inverts the usual model: instead of generating leads and finding out which accounts they came from, you choose the accounts and work them. It is a good fit for a narrow set of businesses and an expensive mistake for the rest.
Qualify the model before adopting it
It works when deal sizes are large enough to justify per-account effort, the addressable market is small enough to enumerate, buying groups have several people, and sales cycles are long enough for sustained effort to compound.
It does not work when the deal size cannot carry the cost, when the market is too large to name, or when marketing and sales will not actually coordinate. That last one is the usual failure: the tooling gets bought, the account list gets built, and the program becomes a more expensive way to run the same campaigns.
Run the arithmetic first. Total program cost divided by the number of accounts, against expected deal value and a realistic win rate, tells you the tier structure you can afford — or that you cannot afford this at all.
Build the list from fit and evidence, then hold it still
Start from the accounts that already look like your best customers — not by revenue but by why they bought and whether they stayed. Add observable signals: hiring, technology in use, funding, regulatory pressure, a change in leadership.
Then commit. A list that churns quarterly cannot compound, and compounding is the only reason this model beats broad demand generation. Agree the list with sales and get their explicit acceptance, because a list sales does not believe in is a list sales will not work.
Map the buying group, not the contact
Purchases at this size are made by several people with different concerns: the person with the problem, the person with the budget, the person who will operate it, and whoever can veto on security, legal or procurement grounds.
Reaching one champion and mistaking that for account coverage is the most common structural error. Track how many roles you have reached within each account, and treat single-threading as a status that needs fixing rather than a warning to note.
Tier the effort, because one-to-one does not scale
- One-to-one for a small number of the highest-value accounts: genuinely bespoke research and content, executive engagement.
- One-to-few for clusters that share an industry or a problem: shared narrative, light customization per account.
- One-to-many for the rest of the named list: programmatic personalization at segment level.
Being honest about which tier an account is in prevents the common outcome where everything is nominally one-to-one and nothing is actually customized.
Coordinate, or the account experiences three campaigns
The account should see one coherent effort. That requires marketing and sales working the same plan, with agreed timing, agreed messaging, and an agreed sequence of who reaches out when.
Set up a shared cadence between the two teams for the tiered accounts and hold it. Without that meeting the program degrades into marketing sending things and sales prospecting separately, which is the status quo with extra software.
Measure account progression, not lead volume
Lead counts are the wrong instrument. What matters is how accounts move: coverage of the buying group, engagement across it rather than by one person, movement into and through pipeline, and eventually win rate and deal size against non-target accounts.
Expect the timeline to be long. Judging an account-based program on a quarter is judging it before any of its mechanism has had time to work, and canceling it there is the most common way the investment is wasted entirely.
Sources
references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions
here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before
answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free
to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.
Never
- Adopt the model without checking whether the deal size carries the per-account cost.
- Run a target list sales has not explicitly accepted.
- Treat one engaged champion as account coverage.
- Judge the program on lead volume, or on a single quarter.
